Dell EMC, Pure Storage upgrade storage offerings

While many functions have migrated to the cloud, data storage remains very firmly on premises due to the cost of cloud storage, regulations or simply the desire to retain control over a firm’s data. That’s reflected in two new announcements.

Dell EMC launched PowerStore, a storage-array line that unifies its overlapping midrange products that Dell owned, along with products from EMC. PowerStore hardware and software has been redesigned from the ground up and comes with new consumption business models, a reflection of the growing popularity of pay-per-use hardware.

Much as HPE unified its multiple storage acquisitions under the Primera brand, PowerStore unifies multiple storage-hardware products over the years, including Dell’s EqualLogic and EMC’s Compellent and XtremIO, not to mention Dell’s own acquisition of EMC. And PowerStore comes with migration tools to help move the contents of old Dell EMC hardware to PowerStore.

In consolidating the best of breed, Dell claims PowerStore is up to seven times faster and three times more responsive than previous Dell EMC midrange storage arrays and is designed for six-nines (99.9999%) of availability. It can house up to 96 SSDs in a 2U chassis and uses both NVMe flash storage and Intel Optane SSDs. Dell promises a 4:1 compression and deduplication ratio.

“Customers tell us a main obstacle keeping them from achieving their digital transformation initiatives is the constant tug-of-war between supporting the ever-increasing number of workloads – from traditional IT applications to data analytics – and the reality of cost constraints, limitations and complexity of their existing IT infrastructure,” says Dan Inbar, president and general manager, storage, Dell Technologies in a statement. “Dell EMC PowerStore blends automation, next generation technology, and a novel software architecture to deliver infrastructure that helps organizations address these needs.”

PowerStore uses machine learning and intelligent automation for faster delivery of applications and services, claiming up to 99% less staff time by automating many features, like load and volume balancing or migrations.

PowerStore is available through Dell’s Flex On Demand consumption model.

Pure Storage Upgrades its Software

Also reflecting the importance of software in storage systems, Pure Storage Inc. has introduced a new version of Purity, the software that powers its FlashBlade systems designed specifically for holding unstructured data.

FlashBlade has always been an all-flash storage system focused on storing unstructured information formatted as objects or files and aimed at performance-intensive use cases such as business intelligence, machine learning, and analytics.

Purity is the operating system for the file and object FlashBlade arrays. The updates to Purity 3.0 are focused on data management and protection as well as data replication and recovery of file systems.

The file replication aspect of Purity 3.0 allows scalable snapshot-based protection between two FlashBlade arrays, to protect against failure or ransomeware. Object replication allows data objects to be replicated between two FlashBlades or a FlashBlade and Amazon Web Services S3 storage.

Purity 3.0 also introduces file-system rollback, which takes file-system snapshots, so if files are accidentally deleted or lost, administrators can select the version they want to roll back to.

More analytics products are supporting cloud-based architectures, and Pure claims internal tests show that FlashBlade delivers 80x faster query performance than traditional object storage platforms that disaggregate storage and compute.

Purity 3.0 is available now to FlashBlade customers.