TL;DR
- Harnesses the performance of NVMe, with fast, low-latency access to unified block, file and vVol storage
- Native deduplication and compression included as standard, with a 5:1 data reduction guarantee
- All PowerStore appliances can be expanded or clustered together for an effective capacity of more than 23PB (at 5:1 reduction)
- PowerStoreOS platform supports non-disruptive upgrades with no downtime, while self-optimizing features reduce management interactions by up to 99%
- Enables zero-downtime SLAs, with secure snapshots, integrated backup and native metro replication with auto-failover for quick, reliable disaster recovery
Businesses run on data, but as trends like AI and data-driven decision making become widespread, legacy storage platforms struggle to keep up. To help your organisation grow and achieve its potential, you need capacity and the performance to drive demanding applications, as well as the resilience to ensure you can keep working day in day out, with no worries about downtime caused by attacks, hardware failures or everyday maintenance.
Dell PowerStore is a family of high-performance storage appliances that are tailor-made for modern data requirements from SMB to enterprise-scale. All of them feature an all-NVMe architecture and standard PowerStoreOS firmware with automatic data protection features, native deduplication and compression, easy scaling and simplified management. This article will detail five key ways PowerStore can benefit your business.
1. How does Dell PowerStore turbo-charge your applications and productivity?
Unlike traditional storage appliances, PowerStore is built from the ground up for NVMe storage media. It’s not something that was originally designed for mechanical drives: the whole platform is internally architected to support the exceptional performance and low latency of an all-NVMe array, with support for NVMe over both TCP and Fibre Channel to enable the fastest possible external access.
That can be transformational for a huge range of applications, from databases to media-processing jobs, virtualised application and desktop environments. What makes PowerStore especially powerful is that it can simultaneously support block-level storage, file storage, virtual machines, and containers, ensuring the right standard is offered for all your different access requirements.
This isn’t just about shaving milliseconds of a benchmark. When workers have responsive, high-performance tools at their fingertips, they’re empowered to fully embrace business applications and resources – and the result is real productivity gains.
2. How does Dell PowerStore cut storage costs?
Dell PowerStore features smart technologies designed for maximum cost-efficiency. Automatic duplication and compression are built in at the hardware level, slashing capacity requirements with no performance trade-off and no need for manual configuration and management. For eligible PowerStore configurations, Dell offers a huge 5:1 data reduction guarantee, meaning high-end models can offer an effective capacity of more than 5.9PBe per appliance. For storage scenarios with high levels of data duplication, such as virtual machines or system backups, even higher ratios can be achieved.
This allows you to pack more effective capacity into a smaller amount of rack space, reducing energy consumption and cooling requirements – and many models are ENERGY STAR certified. Because PowerStore integrates block-level and file-level access, it can even replace multiple legacy devices.
3. How does PowerStore adapt as your business grows?
PowerStore architecture is natively designed for scale-up and scale-out – meaning each unit can accept internal capacity upgrades, and can also connect to other systems to form high-performance, high-capacity clusters, with support for more than 23PB of effective capacity at 5:1 data reduction. You can expand your capacity at any time, or increase parallelism to boost performance while cutting latency – or you can do both at once.
This means you can start with a basic configuration, such as the compact PowerStore 500T appliance, and grow organically in whatever direction your future business needs may dictate – perhaps expanding into larger models which not only support more drives, but offer more powerful CPUs and additional RAM for increased performance headroom.
4. How does Dell PowerStore simplify storage management?
PowerStore’s self-optimizing software continually monitors demand, and can automatically redistribute workloads across different controllers or nodes to avoid bottlenecks or overloads – helping to ensure consistent performance with zero administrative burden.
You also benefit from automated workload placement, where frequently accessed data is moved onto the fastest available media and supported with a RAM cache for the fastest, most efficient access. Taken all together, Dell’s internal analysis indicates that PowerStore’s automated features can slash management interaction by as much as 99% compared to traditional storage systems, freeing your IT resources to focus on making the business more productive.
5. How does PowerStore protect critical business data?
Data safety is non-negotiable in a business setting, and every PowerStore appliance features Dell’s Dynamic Resiliency Engine – an architecture that distributes data protection and recovery information across all available media, not just within specific arrays or volumes. This minimizes the risk of data loss – and if it ever does become necessary to rebuild the contents of an individual drive, it can be done quickly and with minimal impact on overall performance, as the data can be collected from many sources at once.
PowerStore also supports native, policy-based snapshotting, so you can easily roll back any volume to a previous state, and automated replication to keep a complete replica of your data in a separate location. The remote appliance can instantly take over should the primary unit fail, offering zero RPO and zero RTO recovery – that is, instant failover with no data loss – over “metro” distances of up to 60 miles.
This multi-layer protection ensures that if you’re hit by ransomware or accidental data loss, PowerStore can get you running again in the shortest possible time. It’s also highly tolerant of hardware failure, designed for up to “six nines” availability – equivalent to being offline for around 32 seconds per year. With maximum availability and strong data safety as at the heart of the product, Dell PowerStore provides the reliability you need for business-critical data – and it can be integrated into a Dell PowerProtect Data Manager deployment, for easy management within a company-wide backup and recovery service.
If you think Dell PowerStore is the right call for your business, find out more on the Dell website.
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