ApplyIT

Next Generation PowerMax

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.

PowerMax and Malware Protection

PowerMax arrays have great security and data safety features. That does not prevent malware within a server from writing encrypted/garbled data on top of good data. Enhanced processes, procedures, and tools for malware recovery are critical to business operations. PowerMax snapshots can help with rapid recovery after such a malware attack, providing many point-in-time options for business restoration.

PowerMax IDC Lab Validation

The IDC team has done an updated lab validation of the PowerMax platform. You can find the full document here. The report highlights the simplicity, efficiency, and resilience of the PowerMax family of arrays. The slide layout makes it easy to rapidly digest.

PowerMax plans for Storage Class Memory and NVMeoF

In a recent article for The Register, Chris Mellor discussed PowerMax and some of our plans for 2019. In summary, we designed PowerMax specifically because we could see Storage Class Memory (SCM) as the coming media for the most important (and I/O intensive) data. We designed PowerMax to use all NVMe media, so that SCM would be just another type of capacity we could exploit. We designed the encryption so that SCM would be protected just like our other media. The Machine Intelligence classifies workloads, so that the most important data can get the benefit of this new (and expensive) media without any additional effort from customers using PowerMax arrays – it will just work. As we noted at Dell Technologies World last year, we plan to deliver SCM for all PowerMax systems this year. And to complete the NVMe picture, we plan to ship NVMe over Fibre Channel fabrics this year as well, giving us NVMe from the host to cache to the drives, providing customers with even lower latency I/O.