Dell Technologies Previews Major Software Refresh, Showcases Project Alpine

DELL TECHNOLOGIES WORLD — Dell Technologies is priming its customers and partners for Project Alpine, the next generation of its broad enterprise storage portfolio. Revealed earlier this year, the company is previewing Project Alpine for the first time on Tuesday.

Project Alpine is Dell’s initiative to provide unified management across its flagship PowerStore, PowerMax and PowerFlex storage portfolios. Jeff Clarke (pictured above), the company’s co-COO, previewed the new storage capabilities on the second day of Dell Technologies World in Las Vegas.

Clarke says Dell is taking storage from public clouds, on-premises infrastructure and edge, and combining it into a distributed platform.

“We [are combining] it into a distributed platform and get the underlying tools [with] the ability to move applications, data, containers, with a fabric that connects us and orchestrates it,” Clarke explained during a briefing on Monday.

“Being able to take our enterprise-class storage services, file, block object and data protection, are examples of … making them available across these multiple destination points in this distributed platform,” he added, noting that this is something software developers seek. “Developers ultimately want agility and elasticity; they need a dynamic nature of being able to spin up the resources. They need to be software defined and easily accessible,” he said.

500+ New Features

Dell claims it will deliver more than 500 improvements to its storage family. Overall, the new features include improved intelligence, automation, data mobility and shared security across on-premises and multiple clouds.

The PowerStore upgrades will bring a 50% boost in performance and 66% more capacity, according to Dell. They will also include new integrations with VMware’s various offerings. Dell is adding a new NVMe architecture to its PowerMax line, with improved cyber protection and improved storage operations management. And for PowerFlex, Dell is adding support for file services designed to ease consolidation of workloads. The file support will cover all major container orchestration platforms.

PowerStore

System-wide NVMe support, which will allow faster networking speed, will enable the 50% workload performance boost Dell is claiming. Along with the 66% increase in capacity, Dell is positioning PowerStore to enable broader business continuity strategies.

The company also claims through software only, PowerStore will offer the ability to configure metro area replication with just several clicks. The software will also enable secure file workloads with file-level retention and native file replication.

Dell’s new PowerStore upgrade will also support third-party file monitoring and ransomware protection. The upgraded VMware support will allow enhanced vSphere Virtual Volumes ( vVols) latency and performance. The company said this will offer improved disaster recovery when using vVols replication. It will also enable VM-level snapshots and fast clones.

PowerMax

Dell is adding improved cybersecurity protection to PowerMax, which provides business-critical primary storage for server and mainframe environments. Delivered via Dell’s Cloud IQ ransomware protection software, PowerMax will provide up to 65 million secure snapshots. That’s up exponentially, Dell officials say.

This will accelerate recovery from attacks, which Dell said it is backing with a 4:1 data reduction guarantee. The new software will also add automated storage operations including intelligent provisioning of multiple arrays, monitoring and remediation.

Dell’s PowerMax upgrade also aims to provide fast movement of data to public clouds with accelerated snapshot shipping and recovery. The company also claims it will be easier to restore cloud-based object storage data. Furthermore, Dell will roll out two new NVMe-based PowerMax appliances that it claims will provide double the boost in performance and 50% faster response times.

PowerFlex

Upgrades to Dell’s PowerFlex software-defined infrastructure offering aim to ease consolidation of traditional and cloud native workloads. The software will provide new file services that it designed to provide unified block-and-file features.

Dell says the PowerFlex enhancements aim to simplify storage management in multicloud and DevOps environments. The company is emphasizing broad file-and-block support from all major Kubernetes and container orchestration platforms including AWS, Microsoft, Google Cloud Red Hat, VMware and SUSE.

The PowerStore updates aim to improve cost of ownership by consolidating legacy and modern container-based workloads by using unified block-and-file storage services via bare metal and virtual machine environments.

New NVMe-over-TCP support promises to provide support for standard-based storage networking services. The PowerFlex Management software update, according to the company, will provide unified compute, storage and systems management capabilities.

Dell plans to start releasing all of the upgrades next quarter.