Dell’s Latest Storage And Servers Are Built For Demands Of ‘Disaggregated Infrastructure’

‘In all of these places, our channel ecosystem is playing a critical role to help customers through value-added services that can help organizations rethink their infrastructure strategy,’ says Varun Chhabra, senior vice president of Infrastructure Solutions Group product marketing at Dell Technologies.

Dell Technologies’ new lineup of servers and storage is banking on the idea that customers are rethinking their IT estates, not just bringing more workloads on-premises, but also seeking new ways to manage virtualized environments, said Varun Chhabra, senior vice president of Infrastructure Solutions Group product marketing at Dell.

He said the future of IT infrastructure is “disaggregated,” which combines the flexibility of three-tier architecture with the simplicity of hyperconverged infrastructure, he said.

“It is no longer just about supporting virtual-machine-based workloads. It's about virtual machines, containers and bare metal,” Chhabra said in a media call earlier this month. “This is requiring businesses to balance, not just traditional workloads such as virtual machines, databases, their systems of record, like ERPs and CRMs, but also increasingly modern workloads, such as artificial intelligence and modernizing applications through containers as well as edge workloads.”

As customers seek to meet the demand for technology that can optimize existing applications and still have horsepower left to churn through AI workloads, Chhabra said partners are critical.

“In all of these places, our channel ecosystem is playing a critical role to help customers through value-added services that can help organizations rethink their infrastructure strategy, or if they’ve already done that, actually get in and figure out how to do a deployment at an enterprise scale. Or if they’re well through their deployment, how do they think about a support model for these solutions, to support their workloads better for the business?” he said. “Lots of opportunity for our channel ecosystem here, just because of the massive transformation opportunity that all of our customers are working through right now.”

Round Rock, Texas-based Dell this month introduced updates to a number of products in its storage and server lineup, including Dell Powerstore and ObjectScale, PowerScale and PowerProtect, as well as introducing PowerEdge R470, R570, R670 and R770 servers running Intel Xeon 6 processors, with P-cores that come in 1U and 2U form factors.

Here are the most recent updates Dell made to its storage and server products to get partners ready to catch IT’s disaggregated infrastructure wave.

PowerEdge Servers

Dell’s new R470 and R570 single-socket servers and the R670 and R770 dual-socket servers have all been updated and refreshed for this generation with Intel’s latest Xeon 6 processors.

The new systems provide 2.5 times the power and more cores compared with the models that preceded these. The newer Intel processors are also capable of scaling AI workloads as well as traditional workloads, Chhabra said on the call.

The new devices have the industry’s No. 1 performance-to-power ratio among Intel-based servers, which drives high throughput while optimizing energy consumption, Chhabra said of the devices.

PowerProtect Data Domain

During a prebriefing, Dell’s David Noy, vice president of product management, unstructured data solutions and data protection, said the midsize Data Domain DD6410 storage product is a “vast improvement” over the prior generations with a device that is built for speed, with a 91 percent improvement in restore performance.

“In the event of a cyberattack, you want to be able to do a couple things. One is scan your data to know what was impacted and do that as quickly as possible—and that’s directly related to the restore speed—and you want to get back online as quickly as possible.”

Data Domain DD6410 can be configured from 2 TB to 256 TB. The DD6410 offers up to 91 percent faster restores than the DD6400, while delivering the security, efficiency and capabilities of the larger-capacity appliances: the DD9410 and DD9910, which were introduced last year.

Dell is also introducing the Data Domain All-Flash Ready Node with up to 220 TB of flash storage that offers greater density inside a 5X smaller footprint, while using 30 percent less power consumption, Dell said. It has a 61 percent performance improvement over the non-flash DD6410.

PowerProtect Data Manager

In addition to using a single screen to monitor all of the backup systems, what the capacity utilization is and the day-to-day operations of backup environments, PowerProtect Data Manager scans the data as it is coming in so it can find deviations that may indicate an attack is underway, Noy said during the prebriefing.

“This includes things like looking at the duplication rates of data to determine whether data is being encrypted. It includes things like looking at configuration drift, for example, if someone disabled key security features in virtual machines that are being backed up, or any other changes to metadata that signals something strange is going on,” Noy said.

Noy also said that within PowerProtect Data Manager, Dell has one of the most sophisticated approaches to backing up VMware virtual machines, but it can also work with Open Shift virtualization and more virtualization technologies will come later this year.

PowerScale F910, F710

The updates to PowerScale make Dell the first to offer an enterprise storage system with 122-TB QLC SSDs. These 122-TB Solidigm QLC SSDs for all-flash PowerScale F910 and F710 nodes effectively allow customers access to almost 6 PB of storage per node.

With less hardware to buy, maintain and power, PowerScale can significantly reduce operational costs and energy consumption, Dell said.

PowerScale is also introducing an Accelerator Node, which is a performance enhancer similar to the P100 and B100. The latest is a single-form-factor node that reduces the cost- to-performance ratio of storage while enhancing connectivity and high cluster bandwidth.

PowerStore 4.1 Software

In the age of AI, Dell is betting that 75 percent of data will remain on-premises, meaning all of those IT estates will need new devices to help their hardware keep up with the demands of digital progress.

In the new, disaggregated systems, data storage becomes the critical component of that modern, agile stack and Dell said its latest PowerStore raises the bar for customers. It offers smart support, detecting potential issues before they cause a problem, as well as storage headroom analysis so IT managers can optimize storage and performance.

PowerStore 4.1 also has stronger security with automated certificate renewal, CAC/PIV smart badge support to meet the toughest security standards, and enhanced power and backup protect with Dell PowerProtect Data Domain providing 4X faster recovery speeds.

ObjectScale 4.0 Software

ObjectScale 4.0 is an upgrade to an AI-ready operating system with smart rebalancing and space reclamation capabilities that includes the ability to link with cloud storage provider Wasabi, Dell said.

ObjectScale 4.0 optimizes the support experience with system health metrics, alerting and new security enhancements that give customers 76 percent lower total cost of ownership over the public cloud, according to Dell’s calculations.

ObjectScale now offers object storage-as-a-service from Wasabi. Dell said organizations can use Wasabi to seamlessly integrate Dell unstructured storage products to allow customers to move data efficiently with familiar tools like CloudPools, Superna and CloudSoda, while supporting space optimization and retention use cases.

ObjectScale XF960

While the product itself is not expected to be here until later this year, Dell said ObjectScale XF960 is the “next leap in object storage” performance for enterprises looking to gain AI insight and innovation from their data.

The newest ObjectScale is an all-flash appliance that incorporates extensive hardware advances it derived from Dell PowerEdge’s lineup. The new version of the storage is designed specifically for AI workloads, with as much as 50 percent greater throughput per node compared with rivals, Dell said.

It also comes with industry-leading density, featuring up to 8X better performance over its predecessor. For solution providers that are attempting to squeeze every dollar from energy and space inside data centers and physical IT estates, the new ObjectScale device ensures that organizations can benefit from fast, efficient and reliable access to their object data.