What will Dell EMC’s unified mid-range storage box look like? Let’s not find out…

Blocks & Files tested out some ideas about Dell EMC’s upcoming unified mid-range storage box, the PowerTobe-decided, with Dell EMC and got precisely nowhere.

I thought I would be clever and suggest a set of features that Dell EMC could easily sign up to. I was wrong. A Dell EMC spokesperson firmly put me in my place, saying “it’s just too soon to give further details.”

Expect one more product release each for Unity, XtremIO, SC and ScaleIO, to prepare the way for and migration to PowerToBeDecided, followed by PowerToBeDecided sometime in the second half of 2019.

For what it’s worth, my suggested feature set is this:

  • Controllers based on Dell servers
  • A new file system to cope with burgeoning file data growth
  • A new software stack to cope with new storage media
  • SSDs for fast access data
  • Disk drives for bulk capacity data
  • NVMe drive support
  • NVMe-oF support (Ethernet, Fibre Channel and TCP versions)
  • Architecture supporting storage-class (persistent) memory
  • Support for persistent memory NVDIMMs and SSDs
  • AI-driven admin like PowerMax
  • AI-driven migration from Unity + XtremIO + SC + ScaleIO to PowerToBeDecided.