The PowerMax family has gained two new members today: the 2500 and the 8500. Our Dell team has been hard at work on this new platform that has many updates. And since we have announced the new systems today, I wanted to share some highlights.
The new platform hardware has several big changes:
- Physical size reduced by 50% for major components
- Cache space for metadata uses Intel Optane persistent memory
- Fabric connectivity from all nodes (formerly directors) to all drives
- Self-encrypting NVMe drives
- Simplified I/O modules (one for FC/FICON, one for Ethernet)
The software running on the new systems has also had major improvements:
- Flexible RAID for data storage
- Compression for CKD data devices
- NVMe/TCP host connection support
- FICON support on the smaller 2500
And many security updates:
- Hardware root of trust security
- Software and firmware digital signatures & security enhancements
- Two-factor authentication for array management
- Data at rest encryption (D@RE) key rotation
Combining these together produces a host of customer benefits, including:
- Up to 4+PBe capacity per node pair
- Always balanced drive/node workload performance
- Single drive upgrades
- Arrays as small as 5 rack units (that also support mainframe)
And of course, the arrays still provide the great core features (64k host devices, LUN data security, support for open systems/IBM iSeries/mainframe, 6 second code loads), snap tools (64m snaps, secure snaps, snap policy automation), remote replication (SRDF/S, A, Metro, SmartDR), and more that PowerMax is known for. Now delivering even more amazing performance: more IOPS, more bandwidth, and at lower latency. We look forward to delivering these new systems to customers to help drive more value to their businesses. Stay tuned for more details around this great new platform.
