PowerStore: “The Last Knight” of Unified Storage

The new Dell EMC PowerStore range is poised to bring about a lasting transformation of storage infrastructures by using a combination of strengths. Roll-out!

“Optimus, take my parts, and you will have a power you've never known.” There is strength in numbers. This strategy is as old as the hills. By combining all the various qualities within one entity, it is possible not just to add up the strengths, but also to multiply them and overcome any challenge. Talk to Megatron and the Fallen about that!

However, while the Transformers have clearly understood this, in IT this is far from being applied everywhere. Look at storage. While exploiting data is fundamental for a successful business, ever-more numerous and heterogeneous needs are emerging and creating a multitude of silos that are increasingly complex to manage, especially now when administrators have a crucial need for simplicity to meet the continued demands of the business.

As Optimus would say, “there’s only one way to deal with this, and that’s to stomp it flat.” The timing is perfect because the PowerStore has just put everything in order.

Age of simplification

Current storage technologies are made up of traditional 3-tier infrastructures (server, storage, network), hyperconverged platforms, multicloud environments or a mix of all these models. Each of these technologies can be used for different workloads, be they traditional or next-gen, physical or virtual, in VMs or in containers. And each of these workloads can be hosted peripherally, in the datacentre or in the cloud.

This makes it difficult for companies to find the one single infrastructure capable of covering the entire spectrum. “Data rise. Agility falls.” But that is now changing. When the best of infrastructure joins forces with the best of software intelligence, the result is PowerStore.

• Any workload

PowerStore's revolutionary architecture enables it to consolidate both block mode and file-based storage as well as VMware vVols, and to support a wide variety of workloads, from relational databases, to ERP and EMR apps, to cloud native applications, and file-based workloads such as content repositories and home directories. Whether your application environments are physical, virtual or containerized, PowerStore will provide them with maximum performance.

• Any need …

The PowerStore range has been designed to meet all current requirements. With its end-to-end NVMe design and management of the new SCM (Storage Class Memory) media, it delivers up to 7x more IOPS and 3x less latency compared to the previous array generations, combined with replication, backup and deduplication.

The PowerStore OS environment is based on containerized microservices which can be deployed in an extremely flexible way. “Performance is the right of all digital beings”.

• … at any scale

The PowerStore range has been designed to meet all future requirements. It's simple and scalable in a way never seen before in a midrange platform. In order to meet business needs as closely as possible, storage space and processing capacity can be increased independently. Users can associate up to four appliances in a cluster and administer the cluster as a single system. The integrated Machine Learning engine will also automate data placement to ensure optimum load balance between the appliances.

• Any modernization

Organizations must be able to collect, process and store data no matter where they are. With PowerStore they can modernize all the layers of their infrastructure. The Apps On function for example is an unprecedented innovation enabling an application to be executed directly on the storage platform. This is perfect for increasing the density of the Edge Computing or ROBO environments as much as possible.

The integration with VMware allows administrators to deploy and migrate the applications in a totally transparent manner in the datacentre, between PowerStore, the servers or the HCI systems or between different public cloud services without leaving vSphere. Maximum agility!

• Any consumption

Of course PowerStore is one of the Dell Technologies On Demand family and offers consumption as you grow, as you use, or as a service. But it also introduces a new option called Anytime Upgrade within the Future Proof Program. This option lets you migrate to a new generation, switch to a higher model or add another node. No additional purchases or licensing required, and all three options are completely non-disruptive.

“In any data centre, there are calms between storms”.

With PowerStore, the horizon is clear. And for a long time to come …