Dell Unveils New PowerScale Data Storage Systems Line

Dell EMC’s data storage systems are getting new 1U NVMe and all-flash nodes under a rebranded PowerScale product banner. The new Dell EMC PowerScale family will also include the company’s existing Isilon storage systems.

Dell EMC built the new PowerScale nodes to help companies with their unstructured data needs using smaller 1U form factors. The new models are the 1U all-flash F200, for edge use cases, and the 1U NVMe model F600.

The devices are the first under the product line rebranding, Brian Henderson, director of unstructured data solutions product marketing for Dell Technologies, told Channel Futures.

Dell EMC’s Brian Henderson

“They’ve never been around before,” said Henderson. “And we’re moving the Isilon product family under the name PowerScale.”

For channel partners, the two new products help customers who want smaller systems and lower prices, said Henderson.

“Some users needed the smaller 1U form factor,” said Henderson of the data storage systems. “It’s the gap we needed to fill first.”

In addition, the new nodes will run on the latest OneFS 9.0 operating system, which the company also unveiled. A major new feature in OneFS 9.0 is the addition of Amazon S3 protocol support to PowerScale and Isilon environments. That allows PowerScale and Isilon to suppor more applications while speeding up app development initiatives.

The nodes run on PowerEdge servers and on Isilon all-flash, hybrid and archive nodes running on PowerScale OneFS. PowerScale is compatible with existing Isilon nodes.

This is the first time OneFS has support for S3 access to file repositories for developers, said Henderson. There are also more efficiency capabilities and inline deduplication by default.

Introducing DataIQ

Also new is Dell EMC DataIQ software, which helps customers extract business value from valuable unstructured data. DataIQ provides a single view of file and object data across Dell EMC, third-party and public cloud storage. That gives users more control over their data and provides access to teams that can use it.

In addition, Dell EMC provides proactive health monitoring through CloudIQ infrastructure monitoring and analytics software. Included with PowerScale, the software combines machine learning and human intelligence to provide real-time performance and capacity analysis. It also provides historical tracking for a single view of Dell EMC data storage systems infrastructure.

“You will see the PowerScale line expand upwards and then to the hybrid and archive nodes over time,” said Henderson.

Scott Sinclair, an analyst with Enterprise Strategy Group, said the new data storage systems are promising for customers and partners.

ESG’s Scott Sinclair

“Unstructured storage continues to be a massive investment area across a wide variety of workloads and industries,” said Sinclair. “With this release, PowerScale extends the OneFS technology road map and can seamlessly integrate with and expand existing Isilon environments.”

This is helpful as more organizations embrace hybrid clouds and multiclouds, he said.

“Managing massive unstructured storage across those different locations can be incredibly complex and costly. PowerScale offers the ability to deploy a single storage solution that can serve multiple cloud application environments simultaneously.”

That allows multiple applications on different clouds to access the same data without having to move data across providers.

“As a result, multicloud organizations can significantly simply and optimize the cloud storage ecosystem reducing costs,” said Sinclair.