Toilet paper. Who knew that would be the something we would worry about in 2020? The unexpected shortage caused people to panic and buy far more than they needed, which left many others without. This buy-ahead mentality carried over into other areas, like IT infrastructure. At Mainline, we’re seeing many IT organizations, particularly in the financial sector, getting ahead of potential supply chain issues to ensure they will be able to provide uninterrupted service to their customers. Client, server, and storage sales became red hot in mid-March through May and we anticipate this trend will continue.
Pandemic or not, storage purchases have always required a crystal ball. Storage decisions are shrouded in conjecture, for example: How much capacity is needed in year one? Year three? What is the organic growth rate? What new workloads are coming online? What workloads are we consolidating? Then came all-flash storage arrays with their data efficient algorithms, introducing new questions, like how much raw vs. usable vs. effective capacity do you need? To make it easier, manufacturers developed rule-of-thumb averages (2:1, 4:1, etc.) but only a few actually backed that up with a guarantee.
Enter, in May, the new Dell Technologies PowerStore with a 4:1 data reduction guarantee that they achieve through a combination of data deduplication and data compression. 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. Contact your Mainline Account Executive to have a discussion about Dell EMC’s PowerStore and the new guaranteed programs available so you won’t need to worry about your storage supply. Pressing PRINT is the only way we can help with your toilet paper supply.
For further information, please contact to marketing@globalsk.com
