Strengthen Cyber Resiliency and Data Efficiency with Dell PowerMax

Blog by Ben Jastrab, product marketing team responsible, storage and software-defined infrastructure portfolio, Dell Technologies, Inc.

On the heels of last summer’s Dell PowerMax 2500/8500 release, Dell is announcing the lPowerMaxOS 10.

PowerMax 2500

PowerMaxOS 10 helps customers strengthen cybersecurity, economically grow capacity in a compact footprint and increase upgrade flexibility with modern enterprise storage. The release is another example of Dell’s software-driven innovation, introducing a modern platform with the ability to take advantage of continuously modern high-density storage.

PowerMax 8500

Enhancing cyber resiliency for zero trust world
Cybersecurity is a top concern for organizations around the globe. Cybercriminals are constantly looking for ways to breach systems, steal data and disrupt operations. What’s become clear in recent years: traditional security models built on inherent trust no longer work. 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. ⁽¹⁾ As a result, customers are facing several challenges related to cybersecurity, including data breaches, ransomware attacks and other malicious activities.

PowerMax is designed to help bring far more granular control of the IT environment and accelerate Zero Trust adoption in order to prevent, detect and quickly recover from cyberattacks.

”For Salesforce, trust is our number one value, and PowerMax has been a key part of that in terms of availability, reliability and performance,” said Pete Robinson, director, infrastructure engineering, Salesforce.

The latest PowerMaxOS 10 release takes cyber resiliency to the next level to further shrink an organization’s attack surface and improve its ability to recover from an attack with:

• • PowerMax cyber vault, which enhances cyber resiliency through an SRDF airgap that secures data from the production network. It simplifies and orchestrates by replicating production data to an isolated cyber vault, enabling expedited, snapshot-based recovery of compromised production data. This solution is fully implemented using native PowerMax software and can help organizations prevent ransomware from spreading to their vault.
  • Deeper cybersecurity through ransomware and malware anomaly monitoring, detection and alerting, which helps customers minimize the impact of unpredictable cyberattacks. PowerMax anomaly detection uses ML and pattern recognition to monitor data reduction rates and usable capacity to identify possible cyberattacks. And with CloudIQ, customers can easily monitor their storage and detect anomalies anytime, anywhere.

By implementing PowerMax Zero Trust storage using a cyber vault with an air gap and using ransomware anomaly detection, organizations from all industries can improve their cybersecurity posture and protect themselves from a range of threats.

Accelerating sustainability with breakthrough storage efficiency
In addition to cybersecurity, organizations continue to prioritize sustainability to reduce the environmental impact and lower the energy costs associated with their storage infrastructure. With this release, we’re further enhancing PowerMax’s storage efficiency by improving overall data density. Breakthrough storage density enables customers to configure up to 4.5PB of capacity per node pair – 3x more compared to previous configurations. This enhancement reduces product acquisition costs while optimizing data center footprint. Extreme data efficiency delivers 80% power savings per terabyte ⁽²⁾ plus 14x more capacity per rack unit ⁽³⁾, helping customers achieve their sustainability goals while managing rapid data growth.

The PowerMax 8500 delivers performance at scale for demanding mixed workloads that require predictable performance and always-on availability while delivering massive density with 18PB capacity in a single cabinet.

”PowerMax is the cornerstone of the data center. The PowerMax 2500/8500 cyber resiliency capabilities and intrinsic value of data safety give us peace of mind for trusting enterprise applications on PowerMax,” said John Lochausen, technology solutions architect, WorldWide Technology

Staying continuously modern
As the pace of technology continues to accelerate, organizations are looking for solutions that stay continuously modern over time through streamlined upgrades that cause no impact on data center operations. The latest PowerMax enhancements deliver on this promise through streamlined non-disruptive hardware expansion for node pairs, node cache memory and dynamic media enclosures (DMEs), enabling customers to scale PowerMax while keeping their existing infrastructure in place. They also offer flexible field upgrades that mix open systems and mainframe storage within a single array to help customers manage changing workload requirements throughout the lifecycle.

Extending mainframe capabilities
Businesses around the globe rely on mission-critical, enterprise storage arrays to provide high availability and predictable ultra-fast transaction performance for their mainframe infrastructure. PowerMaxOS 10’s mainframe updates deliver fast performance, higher data density and additional host connectivity, including:

• • New zHyperLink connectivity delivers fast reads for highly transactional environments (like DB2) that demand response times that are up to 10x lower than FICON.

  • zTPF OS support expands the customer opportunity for PowerMax 2500 and 8500 to zTPF installations as well as refreshing older PowerMax or VMAX zTPF footprints.

  • Mainframe storage density increases to 1.9PB/node pair delivering 3.8PB maximum capacity for the model 2500 and 10PB for the model 8500.

Summary
The company’s PowerMax arrays are based on a decades-long tradition of experience and design innovation delivering mission-critical high availability storage with predictable high performance and industry-leading data security.

Today’s cybersecurity, data efficiency and mainframe enhancements continue the tradition of evolving the world’s most secure mission-critical storage ⁽⁴⁾ to help customers effectively manage the challenges of today and tomorrow, for whatever comes next.

Resources:
More about how PowerMax can help you stay ahead of the digital transformation game and build secure data-centric decision-making for enterprise needs.
Blog: Unleashing New PowerMax Innovations
Dell Technologies World (DTW) is just around the corner. At this year’s show, Dell is displaying PowerMax solutions that bring leading enterprise storage capabilities to mission-critical operations. Related DTW PowerMax sessions focus on cybersecurity and intelligent operations.

⁽¹⁾ Based on Global Data Protection Index 2021 Key Findings.
(²⁾ Based on Dell’s internal analysis comparing power (kVA) per effective terabyte of the PowerMax 2500 compared with the PowerMax 2000, March 2022.
(³⁾ Based on Dell’s internal analysis comparing the effective srage capacity per rack unit (1 ¾”) of the PowerMax 2500 compared with the PowerMax 2000, March 2022. Actual storage capacities will vary.
(⁴⁾ Based on Dell’s internal analysis of cybersecurity capabilities of Dell PowerMax vs. cybersecurity capabilities of competitive mainstream arrays supporting open systems and mainframe storage, March 2022.