Dell EMC Isilon PowerScalisation — new models, ransomware protection and faster backup

DEll EMC racing towards multi-cloud IT

Dell EMC has added new hybrid and archive nodes to its PowerScale filer range, provided ransomware protection services and accelerated PowerScale backup and restores. There are four new hardware products: H700 and H7000 hybrid nodes, and A300 and A3000 nearline/archive nodes.

We have here steady incremental improvements following on from the F900 addition to the all-flash PowerScale/Isilon range in May.

David Noy, Dell’s VP Product Management for Unstructured Data Solutions, wrote in a blog post: “These … enhancements provide more flexible consumption, management, protection and security capabilities to eliminate data silos and help you effectively use unstructured data to innovate with confidence.” 

We’ve tabulated the new and existing systems to show the differences. First, the hybrid series:

It appears the H700 is positioned to supersede the H400 and H500, with the H7000 set to do the same to the H5600. We have not seen throughput numbers for these two new hybrid PowerScale boxes yet, and IOPS have only been revealed for the H600.

Next, the nearline/archive products:

A look at the table indicates that the A300 is positioned to supersede the A200 and the A3000 to replace the A2000. It all seems straightforward enough. We have no performance numbers for these products though.

The four new systems require v9.2.1 of the OneFS operating system or a later version. Dell says this delivers writeable snapshots, faster upgrades, secure boot, HDFS ACL support, and improved data reduction and small file efficiency. 

A new version of the DataIQ management software provides an improved user experience for large scale clusters, UI enhancements for ease of navigation​ and the ability to run reports to analyse volumes by time stamps.

Data protection

Dell has turned to Superna services and Faction, the US-based MSP, again — this time to add ransomware protection to PowerScale. A Cyber Protection and Recovery solution from Superna for PowerScale now includes hosting the Superna Ransomware Defender solution for multi-cloud deployments within Multi-Cloud Data Services enabled by Faction.

Customers can recover their data from a malware event by using the public cloud. A Superna AirGap Enterprise feature provides automation to the air gap feature.

A Dynamic NAS Protection function is available with PowerProtect Data Manager v19.9. This, we are told, intelligently and automatically scales to optimise performance, enabling protection and recovery for any NAS that supports NFS or CIFS, including PowerScale, PowerStore and Unity systems.

It provides up to 3x faster backups compared to NDMP backups with Avamar, and up to 2x faster NDMP restore performance with Avamar.

Drew Hills, Infrastructure Analyst, IT Systems, Information Technology, USC Australia, provided a quote about this: “With PowerProtect Data Manager, Dynamic NAS Protection automatically slices shares, filesystems and volumes into multiple streams that run in parallel within the same policy. It also automatically balances and scales across resources, simplifying management while accelerating backups faster than ever before.”

A Dell webinar on BrightTALK discusses these announcements.