Dell EMC PowerMax the first storage system to ship Storage Class Memory

Dell Technologies has announced significant updates to Dell EMC PowerMax, incorporating next-generation technologies to ensure best-in-class performance for today and tomorrow’s most critical applications.

Since launching in 2018, Dell EMC PowerMax has helped high-end storage customers across all industries, including top-tier banks, cloud service providers and healthcare companies, support their most demanding applications where low latency is key and the highest resiliency is paramount. Dell EMC is the undisputed leader of the high-end storage market according to IDC with a 43.9% share; nearly triple that of the next highest competitor.

An Industry-First: Dell EMC PowerMax Introduces Dual Port SCM SSDs as Persistent Storage

Dell Technologies is also announcing that NVMe-oF is now available for all PowerMax arrays, enabling true end-to-end NVMe to deliver the performance and lower latency required by today’s modern enterprise.

End-to-end NVMe on PowerMax is made possible by newly qualified PowerMax 32Gb FC I/O modules, 32Gb Connectrix switches, directors and 32Gb NVMe host adapters with Dell EMC PowerPath multipathing software. Dell EMC PowerPath, known for its resiliency and migration capabilities, is the first enterprise-class SAN multipathing software with full support for NVMe-oF.[ii]

PowerMax’s built-in machine learning engine leverages predictive analytics and pattern recognition to automatically place data on the correct media type (SCM or Flash) based on its IO profile. PowerMax analyzes and forecasts 40 million data sets in real-time, driving 6 billion decisions per day [vii], resulting in significant time savings and maximum performance at minimum cost.

Streamline Operations and Speed Application Development

Dell EMC PowerMax now allows customers to easily automate infrastructure operations and DevOps workflows. Customers can now serve PowerMax storage for configuration management and application deployment, including containerized workloads. And PowerMax’s automated infrastructure provisioning and management tasks enable customers’ agile and efficient IT operations with:

· VMware vRealize Orchestrator (vRO) plug-in, available now on the VMware Solutions Exchange, allows customers to develop end-to-end automation routines including provisioning, data protection and host operations. Customers can also offer these automated routines as self-service catalog items on the VMware vRealize Automation platform.

· Pre-built Ansible modules allow customers to create Playbooks for storage provisioning, snapshots and data management workflows for consistent and automated operations. These modules are available on GitHub now.

· The new Container Storage Interface (CSI) plug-in for PowerMax provisions and manages storage for workloads running on Kubernetes. The CSI plugin, available now on GitHub, extends PowerMax’s uncompromising performance and world class data services to a growing number of applications built on a micro-services-based architecture.