Against a background of disaggregated IT and rising AI trends, Dell has announced refreshes of its PowerEdge, PowerStore, ObjectScale, PowerScale, and PowerProtect storage systems.
Dell is announcing both server and storage advances. It says its customers need to support existing and traditional workloads as well as provide IT for generative AI tasks. A disaggregated server, storage, and networking architecture is best suited for this and builds on three-tier and hyperconverged infrastructure designs, with separate scaling for the three components collected together in shared resource pools.
Dell Infrastructure Solutions Group president Arthur Lewis stated: “From storage to servers to networking to data protection, only Dell Technologies provides an end-to-end disaggregated infrastructure portfolio that helps customers reduce complexity, increase IT agility, and accelerate datacenter modernization.”
Dell’s PowerEdge R470, R570, R670, and R770 servers are equipped with Intel Xeon 6 processors with performance cores. These are single and double-socket servers in 1U and 2U form factors designed for traditional and emerging workloads like HPC, virtualization, analytics, and AI inference.
Our focus here is on the storage product announcements, which cover the unified file and block PowerStore arrays, cloud-native ObjectScale, scale-out clustered PowerScale filer system, and Dell’s deduplicating backup target PowerProtect systems developed from prior Data Domain arrays.
PowerStore
A PowerStore v4.1 software release provides AI-based analytics to detect potential issues before they occur, auto support ticket opening, carbon footprint forecasting, DoD CAC/PIV smart card support, automated certificate renewal and improved PowerProtect integration through Storage Direct Protection. This enables up to 4x faster backup restores and support for the latest PowerProtect systems; the DD6410 appliance and All-Flash Ready Nodes (see below).
The software provides better storage efficiency tracking, now covering both file and block data, and ransomware-resistant snapshots, supplementing the existing File Level Retention (FLR) and other local, remote, and cloud-based protection methods.
It offers file system QoS with more granular performance controls. Dell Unity customers migrating to PowerStore can preserve their existing Cloud Tiering Appliance (CTA) functionality. Archived files remain fully accessible, and customers can create new archiving policies for migrated file systems on PowerStore.
Read a PowerStore 4.1 blog for more details.
ObjectScale
ObjectScale is scale-out, containerized object storage software running on ECS hardware nodes. Up until now there were three ECS hardware boxes: EX500 (12-24 HDDs, to 7.68 PB/rack), EX5000 (to 100 HDDs, to 14 PB/rack) and all-flash EXF900 (12-24 NVMe SSDs, to 24.6 PB/rack).
New ObjectScale v4.0 software boasts smart rebalancing, better space reclamation, and capacity utilization. It also has expanded system health metrics, alerting, and security enhancements. Dell claims it offers “the world’s most cyber-secure object storage.”
There are two new ObjectScale systems. The all-flash XF960 is said to be designed for AI workloads and is an evolution of the EXF900. It has extensive hardware advances based on PowerEdge servers and delivers up to 2x greater throughput per node than the closest but unnamed competitor, and up to 8x more density than the EXF900.
The HDD-based X560 accelerates media, backup, and AI model training ingest workloads with 83 percent higher small object read throughput than the EX500 running v3.8 software.
Dell is partnering with S3-compatible cloud storage supplier Wasabi to introduce Wasabi with Dell ObjectScale, a hybrid cloud object storage service with tiers starting from 25 TB of reserved storage per month. Wasabi has a global infrastructure, with more than 100,000 customers in 15 commercial and two government cloud regions worldwide.
More ObjectScale news is expected at the upcoming Dell Technologies World conference.
PowerScale
PowerScale all-flash F710 and F910 nodes get 122 TB Solidigm SSD support, doubling storage density. This, with 24 bays in their 2RU chassis and 2:1 data reduction, provides almost up to 6 PB of effective capacity per node. Dell says it’s the first supplier to offer an enterprise storage system with such SSDs.
The PowerScale archive A and hybrid H series nodes – H710, H7100, A310, A3100 – have lower latencies and faster performance with a refreshed compute module for HDD-based products. Dell says the A-Series is optimized for TCO, while the H-series provides a balanced cost/performance mix. The updated nodes feature:
- Fourth-generation Intel Xeon Sapphire Rapids CPUs
- DDR5 DRAM with up to 75 percent greater speed and bandwidth
- NVMe M.2 persistent flash vault drives providing faster cache destage and recovery
- Improved thermal operation reducing heat and stress on components
- Updated drive carrier with 100 percent greater speed for SAS drives
Dell will introduce support for 32 TB HAMR disk drive technology later this year with “extended useful life.”
A PowerScale 1RU A110 Accelerator Node is a successor to the previous generation P100 and B100 performance and backup accelerators. It’s designed to solve CPU bottlenecks and boost overall cluster performance with higher cluster bandwidth. The A110 can be independently scaled in single node increments.
PowerProtect
There are three main developments here. First, the PowerProtect DD6410 is a new entry-level system with a capacity of 12 TB to 256 TB. It’s aimed at commercial, small business, and remote site environments, with up to 91 percent faster restores than the DD6400, up to 65x deduplication, and scalability for traditional and modern workloads.
Secondly, the PowerProtect All-Flash Ready Node has 220 TB capacity with over 61 percent faster restore speeds, up to 36 percent less power, and a 5x smaller footprint than the PowerProtect DD6410 appliance. It does not support the 122 TB SSDs, built with QLC 3D NAND, because their write speed is not fast enough.
Both the DD6410 and All-Flash Ready Node support the Storage Direct Protection integration with PowerStore and PowerMax, providing faster, efficient, and secure backup and recovery.
Thirdly, a PowerProtect DataManager software update reduces cyber-security risks with anomaly detection. This has “machine learning capabilities to identify vulnerabilities within the backup environment, enabling quarantine of compromised assets. It provides early insights in detecting threats in the backup environment while complementing the CyberSense deep forensics analysis of isolated recovery data in the Cyber Recovery vault, providing end-to-end cyber resilience of protected resources.”
As well as VMware, DataManager now manages Microsoft Hyper-V and Red Hat OpenShift Virtualization virtual machine backups. A suggestion of future Nutanix AHV support to Dell received a positive acknowledgement as a possibility.
DataManager archives data to ObjectScale for long-term retention. This is not tiering with a stub left behind. The archived data can be restored directly without first being rehydrated to a PowerProtect system. The archiving is to S3-compatible object stores.
DataManager also has Multi-System Reporting which offers centralized visibility and control across up to 150 PowerProtect Data Manager instances.
Availability
- PowerProtect Data Manager updates are available now.
- PowerEdge R470, R570, R670, and R770 servers are available now.
- PowerStore software updates are available now.
- ObjectScale is available now as a software update for current Dell ECS environments.
- HDD-based ObjectScale X560 will be available April 9, 2025.
- All-Flash ObjectScale XF960 appliances will be available beginning in Q3 2025.
- The Wasabi with Dell ObjectScale service is available in the United States. UK availability begins this month, with expansion into other regions planned in the coming months.
- PowerScale HDD-based nodes will be available in June 2025.
- PowerScale with 122 TB drives will be available in May 2025.
- PowerProtect DD6410 and All-Flash Ready Node will be available in April 2025.
