Dell is launching an all-flash deduping PowerProtect backup target appliance, providing competition for all-flash systems from Pure Storage (FlashBlade), Quantum, and Infinidat.
The company is also announcing PowerStore enhancements at its Las Vegas-based Dell Technologies World event, plus Dell Private Cloud and NativEdge capabilities.
Arthur Lewis, Dell’s president, Infrastructure Solutions Group, stated: “Our disaggregated infrastructure approach helps customers build secure, efficient modern datacenters that turn data into intelligence and complexity into clarity.”
There are currently four PowerProtect systems plus a software-only virtual edition, offering a range of capacities and speeds.
The All-Flash Ready node is basically a Dell PowerEdge R760 server with 24 x 2.5-inch SAS-4 SSD drives and 8 TB HDDs for cache and metadata, a hybrid flash and disk server. The capacity is up to 220 TB/node and a node supports up to 8 x DS600 disk array enclosures, providing 480 TB raw each, for expanded storage.
The PowerProtect Data Domain All-Flash DD9910F appliance restores data up to four times faster than an equivalent capacity PowerProtect disk-based system, based on testing the DD9910F and an HDD-using DD9910. We don’t get given actual restore speed numbers for any PowerProtect appliance, and Dell isn’t providing the all-flash DD9910F ingest speed either.
All-flash PowerProtect systems have up to twice as fast replication performance and up to 2.8x faster analytics. This is based on internal testing of CyberSense analytics performance to validate data integrity in a PowerProtect Cyber Recovery vault comparing a disk-based DD9910 appliance to the all-flash DD9910F at similar capacity.
They occupy up to 40 percent less rack space and save up to 80 percent on power compared to disk drive-based systems. With Dell having more than 15,000 PowerProtect/Data Domain customers, it has a terrific upsell opportunity here.
PowerStore, the unified file and block storage array, is being given Advanced Ransomware Detection. This validates data integrity and minimizes downtime from ransomware attacks using Index Engines’ CyberSense AI analytics. This indexes data using more than 200 content-based analytic routines. The AI system used has been trained on over 7,000 variants of ransomware and their activity signals. According to Dell, it detects ransomware corruption with a 99.99 percent confidence level.
Dell says it’s PowerStore’s fifth anniversary and there are more than 17,000 PowerStore customers worldwide.
The company now has a Private Cloud to provide a cloud-like environment on premises, built using its disaggregated infrastructure – servers, storage, networking, and software. There is a catalog of validated blueprints. This gives Dell an answer to HPE’s Morpheus private cloud offering.
A Dell Automation Platform provides centralized management and zero-touch onboarding for this private cloud. By using it, customers can provision a private cloud stack cluster in 150 minutes, with up to 90 percent fewer steps than a manual process.
Dell has new NativeEdge products for virtualized workloads at the edge and in remote branch offices. These protect and secure data with policy-based load balancing, VM snapshots and backup and migration capabilities. Customers can manage diverse edge environments consistently with support for non-Dell and legacy infrastructure.
Comment
We expect that Dell announcing its first all-flash PowerProtect appliance will be the trigger ExaGrid needs to bring out its own all-flash product.
