Dell EMC PowerStore: 7 Stats That Set It Apart

Right around this time in an average year, I’d be fresh off a trip to Las Vegas for Dell Technologies World. My head and notebook would be packed with thoughts of new products, key updates and strategies on helping Arraya’s customers benefit from everything I’d just seen. To put it mildly, so far this year has been anything but average. The threat of COVID-19 has pushed the Dell Technologies World start date to October and, instead of in Nevada, the event will be virtual. However, that delay hasn’t stopped Dell and its subsidiaries from participating in the data center news cycle this spring.

Earlier this month, Dell EMC unveiled PowerStore, a midrange storage solution “designed for the data era.” PowerStore is also being called a “clean sheet” solution because it’s the first storage product jointly engineered in-house, from the ground up by Dell Technologies since its formation in 2016.    

There’s a lot to unpack here beyond the marketing buzz, so let’s get into some of the numbers that inspired it:  

• 6 9s: Everything starts with availability. A solution can compile all of the eye-catching data points it wants, but none of them will matter very much if it’s always down. PowerStore was designed for 6 9s of availability meaning it should be there when an organization needs it most.
• 1: Data centers are complex and they’re getting more so every day. Simplicity is a primary goal that drove the creation of PowerStore. It’s a one-stop shop, accommodating both traditional and modern workloads. Admins will be able to run legacy relational databases as well as cloud-native or container-based apps and more all from one place, making the data centers they oversee easier to manage and secure.
• 7x and 3x: Next generation workloads call for performance to match. PowerStore leverages end-to-end NVMe architecture, SSDs, storage class memory and other innovations to boost IOPs by 7x and slash latency by 3x (as compared to earlier generations of Dell EMC midrange storage technologies).
• 2.8: It’s not always possible to predict requirements concerning capacity or processing power beforehand. Each of these items can be scaled in PowerStore independently of the other, with active-active appliances specifically increasing by more than 2.8PB in terms of their effective capacity. Furthermore, greater performance can be achieved by clustering together multiple PowerStore appliances.  
• 4:1: While it’s easy enough to scale up PowerStore to fit a need, it still keeps storage efficiency as a top priority. The solution can execute data reduction at a guaranteed rate of 4:1, doing so through always-on, inline deduplication and compression accomplished via Intel’s QuickAssist acceleration technology.
• 99%: We’ve already established that reversing course and introducing a level of simplicity back into the workdays of data center admins was one of the drivers behind PowerStore. Another way the solution seeks to do just that is by promising 99% less management interaction. This is possible through a combination of: programmable infrastructure that allows for storage workflow automation, built-in intelligence to eliminate manual tasks like load balancing and issue resolution, and integration with CloudIQ to support analytics-driven maintenance decision-making.       
• 7: Migrating workloads into a new solution can be its own kind of hassle for data center admins. PowerStore promises to get the job done in just seven clicks, reducing time to value while also fitting in, again, with that ongoing theme of simplicity.

Does PowerStore make sense for your data center storage requirements?

PowerStore promises to be the destination of choice for organizations in need of a modern, midrange storage solution. That “clean sheet” designation from earlier means it was built fresh, from the ground-up, utilizing the knowledge and technologies developed over the years by Dell Technologies’ team as well as through partnerships with other industry-leaders such as Intel.

If you want to learn more about PowerStore or need a hand mapping out the future of your organization’s data center, reach out to Arraya today. You can do so by visiting: https://www.arrayasolutions.com//contact-us/.