Dell Unleashing PowerMax Innovations

By Ben Jastrab, product marketing team responsible for Dell EMC’s primary storage portfolio

Dell Technologies, Inc. has a rich history of industry-first, mission-critical storage innovation.

For over 30 years, global organizations have relied on PowerMax and its predecessors to be the backbone of their IT infrastructure. Flight reservation systems, trading applications and telco billing systems are vital applications to an organization’s performance and reputation. They require storage which is always on and constantly delivers peak performance. That’s why 95% of Fortune 100 companies, top 10 US banks, and top 10 healthcare companies worldwide ⁽¹⁾ use PowerMax for their critical applications.

That’s why we introduce the next gen PowerMax – designed to be secure, intelligent and always modern with absolutely no compromises. Our PowerMaxOS 10 software includes over 200 new features, pushing storage intelligence and automation to a new level while also delivering cybersecurity and resiliency capabilities for customers. The combination of software-driven innovation, hardware architecture and simplified licensing will help customers keep their storage infrastructure continuously modern with greater flexibility, performance and massive scale.

The intelligent, multi-node scale-out design supports the most demanding open systems and mainframe environments, offering massive scale and efficiency without compromise. It delivers up to 2x more performance, up to 14x more storage density ⁽²⁾ and data reduction. This includes 4:1 data reduction guarantee for open systems ⁽³⁾ and the industry’s first 3:1 data reduction guarantee for mainframe data ⁽⁴⁾ over the previous generation of PowerMax. Furthermore, PowerMax 64-bit NAS increases even greater data consolidation and data access flexibility.

PowerMax offers storage solutions based on 3 simple tenants:

• Safeguarding high-value data

• Automating storage operations

• Staying continuously modern

Safeguard high-value data
Cybersecurity threats and ransomware attacks are an everyday phenomenon resulting in data loss and business disruption. Customer research has shown that 60% of organizations have experienced data loss due to an exploited vulnerability and 67% of IT decision-makers are not confident their data/systems can be fully recovered.⁽⁵⁾

PowerMax has always delivered levels of data security, isolation, immutability and availability. With this release, we’re adding more advanced cyber resiliency capabilities while enhancing BC and DR to help customers identify, prevent, detect and recover from these threats.

It is designed for ‘Zero Trust Security Architectures’ covering 7 distinct pillars of a robust security framework – device, user, transport, applications, data, visibility/analytics and automation/orchestration. Using intrinsic security capabilities, it delivers swift ransomware and malware activity detection. Additionally, PowerMax offers 65 million secure snapshots to protect data from intentional/unintentional tempering, which helps to achieve better RPO and RTO in the case of a cyberattack.

After testing the PowerMax security capabilities, John Lochausen, technology solutions architect, World Wide Technology (WWT) commented: “The PowerMax support for 65 million secure immutable snapshots helps achieve tighter compliance, the quickest data recovery, fluid data mobility and superior business continuity.”

Furthermore, PowerMax offers secure and dynamic cloud-based data mobility between public and on-prem data centers to realize true multi-cloud flexibility.

Automate storage operations
Unisphere 10, an intelligent PowerMax management software interface, fuels storage automation, enhances reporting, simplifies multi-array provisioning and enhances multi-factor authentication security. Additionally, an introduction of SmartFabric Storage Software for NVMe/TCP lowers the IP-based storage deployment time up to 44% compared to the iSCSI-based storage deployment ⁽⁶⁾ and opens a door for consolidating more workloads on PowerMax.

PowerMax also extends tight integration to the VM and container-based workloads through VMware virtual volumes (vVols) and container storage modules (CSM) for applications scalability, BC and DR protection in virtual environments.

After testing the PowerMax product, Lochausen explains: “Unisphere 10 management software of PowerMax greatly simplifies the overall user experience especially when it comes to achieving the SLO by placing workload on the right PowerMax array in a multi-array configuration.”

Stay continuously modern
PowerMax is scale-out storage designed for mission-critical applications of today and tomorrow – including databases, mission-critical applications as well as real-time analytics that demand uptime and low latency.

Along with delivering product value to customers, it adds future-proof and simplified services and maintenance offers to safeguard the investment throughout the product lifecycle.

Business outcomes
Businesses can realize several business outcomes from PowerMax investments. They can innovate with data, safeguard data from cyberattacks, lower operating costs, achieve sustainability goals and thrive in a multi-cloud digital world. For example, Salesforce, Inc. delivers unprecedented efficiency using PowerMax for its WW mission-critical CRM solutions.

“Salesforce has seen 25-50% improvements in database latency with PowerMax, depending on the workloads,” said Pete Robinson, director, infrastructure engineering, Salesforce. “We were able to deploy this new platform using our existing tooling with minimal changes as part of the deployment.”

On the PowerMax platform, Salesforce has seen a substantial improvement in our storage efficiency ratios through data reduction. Umbra, a home accessories design and manufacturing company in North America, saw over 500% faster response on SAP BW updates on PowerMax according to Tariq Jamal, VP, analytics and CIO, Umbra.

⁽¹⁾ Based on the latest Dell internal customer data and Fortune companies 2021 ranking comparison.
⁽²⁾ Based on Dell internal analysis of random read and write hits (8K) latency for PowerMax, March 2022.
⁽³⁾ Based on Dell internal analysis comparing PowerMax 2500/8500 hardware compression for all-flash mainframe storage to mainstream mainframe competitors. April 2022.
⁽⁴⁾ Based on Dell‘s Future-Proof program that offers 3:1 data reduction guarantee based on PowerMax data reduction tools (de-dupe and data compression) for mainframe storage, April 2022. Actual data reduction rates will vary.
⁽⁵⁾ Based on Global Data Protection Index 2021 Key Findings.
⁽⁶⁾ Based on Dell internal analysis comparing iSCSI and NVMe TCP/IP configuration, May 2022.

Resources:
Information about how PowerMax can help you stay ahead of the digital transformation game and build secure data-centric decision-making for enterprise needs.
PowerMax Infographic
PowerMax DS   
PowerMax Spec Sheet   
Top Reasons Why PowerMax for Cloud    
VMware Virtual Volumes (vVOLs) blog: It’s Time to take the VMware vSphere Virtual Volumes (vVols) on a Mission-Critical ride with PowerMax and SRDF/A