Dell Technology’s PowerStore has seen a doubling of orders from the May 2020 launch through October 2020 (Dell’s Q3). And in its first three quarters, PowerStore is ahead of XtremIO and VxRail in their equivalent ramp-ups, paraphrasing Dell COO Jeff Clarke in his interview. The interview article further states that according to IDC, Dell is the leader in market share for external enterprise storage, storage software, all-flash arrays, purpose-built backup appliances, converged systems, as well as server units. The demand and acceptance of PowerStore in the marketplace is great news for IT organizations who are eager to deploy the solution but may have felt they were too early in the product lifecycle. The demand for the product is real and we will continue to see growth in 2021.With Dell experiencing a shrink in midrange market share, this news couldn’t have come at a better time for the 2021 outlook.
As a review, in May 2020, the new Dell Technologies PowerStore midrange storage subsystem became generally available. PowerStore, with a 4:1 data reduction guarantee that they achieve through a combination of data deduplication and data compression, has fast become a major competitor in the market. It uses machine learning to streamline storage operations and delivers faster performance than Dell Technologies’ previous midrange storage arrays with NVMe design and storage-class memory (SCM) powered by Intel Optane SSDs.
Dell Technologies PowerStore: A Flexible, Modern Storage Architecture
This is Dell Technologies’ biggest announcement in a long time and their first completely home-grown storage product since acquiring EMC in 2017. Dell EMC PowerStore is a radically different user-flexible architecture that allows customers to scale-up or scale-out AND choose a traditional unified subsystem (PowerStore T) versus a fully virtualized storage solution (PowerStore X) for data-intensive workloads. Dell calls this feature AppsON, a containerized model that allows customers to run microservices (anti-virus, monitoring, etc.) within PowerStore’s compute space hypervisor. This closes a gap in Dell EMC’s mid-range storage array portfolio, providing a choice and perhaps an upgrade path for those customers that are on traditional storage wanting to move to a flexible and modern datacenter architecture.
With PowerStore, Dell Technologies minimizes the amount of raw capacity you need to buy with the guaranteed average data reduction. This provides peace of mind to CIOs, allowing them to buy storage with the confidence that Dell will right-size it with its deduplication and data reduction technologies. Of course, there are some customer requirements, like having remote support turned on and allowing Dell to analyze and tune the system. But, in the end, if it isn’t performing as promised, they will ship additional hardware to make it right.
PowerStore X: Ideal for VMWare Environments
PowerStore X integrates into the VMWare management and orchestration frameworks including Kubernetes, Ansible, and VMware vRealize Orchestrator. It is optimized for NVMe and SCM, providing a host of benefits:
- Increased efficiency in administration
- Reduced latency due to the ability to run virtual apps co-resident with data
- Increased storage capacity and performance for VMWare environments due to scale-out and scale-up capabilities
- Lower total cost of ownership (TCO)
- Allows enterprise storage to scale independently from the compute infrastructure
PowerStore can be deployed standalone or as an addition to Dell’s infrastructure cloud platform, Power One. Dell EMC Cloud Storage Services directly connects PowerStore to VMware Cloud, Amazon Web Services, Google Cloud. Essentially whatever cloud service you choose, providing an excellent disaster recovery as a service (DRaaS) solution.
Dell EMC PowerStore Anytime Upgrade Program
Not only is Dell EMC providing a written guarantee for 4:1 data reduction, they are also providing an Anytime Upgrade program for either:
- a next-generation controller
- a higher-level model, or
- scale-out capacity with a second system available anytime while under maintenance, after the first 6 months.
All three options can be performed non-disruptively and allow data to remain in place. With Anytime Upgrades, Dell EMC is again offering more peace of mind and creating an “easy button” to refresh without time-consuming forklift upgrades.
Buying with Confidence: The Dell EMC PowerStore Guarantee
Buying with confidence is what we all want with large purchase decisions, and Dell EMC delivers just that. These programs are in writing, not just clever marketing schemes. Dell continues to add features to the PowerStore to make it the clear choice for customers confused as to which Dell midrange product was best for them.
Mainline is an award-winning, Titanium Dell Technologies partner, the highest level in Dell’s partner program. Contact your Mainline Account Executive to learn more about Dell EMC’s PowerStore and the new guaranteed programs available, or click here to contact us.
Related articles:
BLOG: Dell EMC PowerStore Metro Node Automates Business Continuity
BLOG: Dell EMC PowerScale Review: Enterprise Storage Solution for Object, Block, and File
Enterprise Data Solutions and Data Management Services from Mainline