Today, we’re announcing significant enhancements to Dell PowerMax that improve AI-driven efficiency, increase cyber resiliency, and deliver seamless multicloud mobility. These new capabilities for PowerMax, our continuously modern, highly secure storage solution optimized for mission-critical workloads, make it easier than ever for customers to keep pace with changing business demands.
AI-Driven Efficiency for Mission-Critical Workloads
In today’s fast-paced digital world, businesses need storage solutions that keep pace with their demands and anticipate future needs. That’s where the power of artificial intelligence comes in. This release offers customers a range of AI-powered benefits that can help optimize performance, reduce management overhead, and prevent incidents before they occur through:
- Performance optimization: We are using AI to accelerate performance with dynamic cache optimization through pattern recognition and predictive analytics, reducing latency and increasing speed with no management overhead.
- Predictive and proactive management: Autonomous health checks with intelligent threshold settings provide corrective actions and self-healing capabilities, addressing issues before they arise (e.g. storage capacity levels, loose cabling).
- Automated network fabric performance optimization (FPIN): PowerMax quickly identifies Fibre Channel network congestion (slow drain) and isolates root cause resulting in up to 8x faster incident resolution¹.
- Infrastructure optimization: Dell’s AIOps Assistant, equipped with Gen AI natural language queries, enables fast and easy infrastructure optimization.
Improved Efficiency
The latest release also introduces 92% RAID efficiency (RAID 6 24+2) to improve overall storage efficiency and industry-leading power and environmental monitoring capabilities².
Customers can now track power usage at three levels: the array, the rack and the data center to improve power efficiency, manage energy costs, and effectively reduce energy consumption.
Enhancing Cyber Resiliency
In an era where cyber threats are increasingly sophisticated, cyber resiliency is critical for all customers. PowerMax adds new cybersecurity features to increase the protection of customer data, reduce attack surfaces, and recover quickly from cyber-attacks with:
- Cyber Recovery Services for PowerMax: Dell’s new Professional Service offers robust protection against cyberattacks. Using a secure PowerMax vault and granular data protection, this tailored solution ensures quick and efficient recovery while helping customers achieve stringent compliance goals.
- YubiKey multifactor authentication: Provides a strong and convenient security solution, offering enhanced protection against unauthorized access and simplifying the user authentication process.
Superior Performance at Scale
PowerMax continues to set the standard for high performance at scale, providing the headroom necessary for both current and future needs. Today’s announcement adds:
- Up to 30% IOPS performance boost with PowerMax 8500³
- Up to 3x faster GbE connectivity with new 100Gb Ethernet I/O modules4
- Up to 2x faster FC connectivity with new 64Gb Fibre Channel I/O modules5.
In addition to these significant enhancements, Storage Direct Protection for PowerMax’s integration with PowerProtect enables efficient, secure, and ultra-fast data protection, delivering up to 1PB per day backups6 and 500TB per day restores7.
Achieve Multicloud Agility
In the evolving digital landscape, multicloud agility is essential for maximizing resource utilization, reducing costs, and adapting swiftly to change. This release helps customers achieve:
- Seamless multicloud data mobility: Dell now offers simple options to move live PowerMax workloads to and from APEX Block Storage, the industry’s most resilient and flexible cloud storage8—while simultaneously performing multi-hop OS conversions to modernize those workloads in one smooth process.
- Scalable cloud backups and restores: Storage Direct Protection for PowerMax delivers simple, secure, and efficient data protection that empowers customers to choose the best backup destinations. By seamlessly integrating with major cloud providers like AWS, Azure, GCP, and Alibaba, APEX Protection Storage enables customers to avoid vendor lock-in and select the cloud vendor that aligns with their unique requirements.
- Simplified consumption model: With Dell APEX Subscriptions, customers pay for what they use and streamline invoicing, billing, and capacity usage monitoring for better forecasting and scaling. This model eliminates the need for large upfront capital investment, providing a modern consumption experience while simplifying lifecycle management.
Mainframe Innovation
PowerMaxOS 10.2 improves IOPS performance and reduces latency for unbalanced mainframe workloads, enhances cyber intrusion detection for mainframe (zCID) with auto-learning access pattern detection, and leverages IBM’s System Recovery Boost for faster recovery during planned or unplanned outages.
Start Benefitting from Smarter, More Flexible, and Secure Enterprise Storage
Click here to learn more about how PowerMax can help you stay ahead of digital transformation by providing AI-powered efficiency, new cyber recovery services, and multicloud data mobility for your enterprise.
1 Based on Dell’s internal analysis comparing time to resolve SAN network congestion for PowerMaxOS 10.2 compared with PowerMaxOS 10, August 2024. Actual time savings may vary.
2 Based on Dell’s internal analysis of the power monitoring capabilities of Dell PowerMax versus the power monitoring capabilities of competitive mainstream arrays supporting open systems and mainframe storage, August 2024.
3 Based on Dell’s internal testing for the Random Write Miss (8K) I/Os per second benchmark comparing PowerMax 8500 running PowerMaxOS 10.2 to PowerMax 8500 with PowerMaxOS 10.1, August 2024. Actual performance may vary.
4 Based on Dell’s internal testing for the Random Read Hit (128K) GB per second benchmark comparing PowerMax 2500 running 100Gb Ethernet connectivity to PowerMax 2500 with 25Gb Ethernet connectivity, August 2024. Actual performance may vary.
5 Based on Dell’s internal testing for the Random Write Hit (128K) GB per second benchmark comparing PowerMax 2500 running 64Gb Fibre Channel connectivity to PowerMax 2500 with 32Gb Fibre Channel connectivity, August 2024. Actual performance may vary.
6 Based on Dell internal testing for PowerMax 2500 and PowerProtect DD9900 using the Epic GeneratorIO for a single storage group backup, March 2024. Actual performance may vary.
7 Based on Dell internal testing for PowerMax 2500 and PowerProtect DD9900 using the Epic GeneratorIO for a single storage group restore, March 2024. Actual performance may vary.
8 Based on Dell analysis of storage software deployable on AWS, Azure, and Google Cloud, May 2023.
