Dell Injects 500 New Storage Software Features Across Portfolio
‘We are bringing multi-cloud and enterprise data storage services together to really bring the ability to pool storage resources, to allow our partners to be able to participate in that ecosystem,’ Dell vice chairman and co-chief operating officer Jeff Clarke says.
Dell Technologies introduced a whopping 500 new software enhancements to its market leading storage products today, including its red-hot PowerStore midrange solution, which will now include cyber resiliency and multi-cloud flexibility.
The software updates across Dell’s PowerStore, PowerMax and PowerFlex aim to boost storage automation, data mobility, business intelligence and security across clouds, on-premises and edge environments with no additional cost to existing customers.
Jeff Clarke, vice chairman and co-chief operating officer of Dell, said channel partners have a massive opportunity to compete for net new storage wins with the software enhancements built into leading storage products.
“We are bringing multi-cloud and enterprise data storage services together to really bring the ability to pool storage resources, to allow our partners to be able to participate in that ecosystem,” Clarke said in response to CRN during a session at Dell Technologies World 2022. “If you really want to address the real opportunity, we have roughly a 30 percent market share. That means 70 percent is not on Dell storage. So our partner network can help us access the other 70 percent of the storage market with differentiated products and the most comprehensive portfolio in the industry.”
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With the changes, Dell said businesses will be able to better support and secure workloads with file-level retention, the ability to replicate files natively in the environment, as well as support for third-party file monitoring and ransomware protection.
Rick Gouin, chief technology officer at Dell partner Winslow Technology Group, said he is excited about the enhancements to PowerStore, in particular, which is his company’s number one selling storage solution.
“A growing number of our customers are expecting solutions nowadays with multiple active data centers,” Gouin said. “So the replication and MetroSync improvements that they’ve announced for PowerStore in particular are going to allow us to deliver those super resilient, high redundancy, high availability, type solutions for our customers.”
Dell’s New Storage Software Enhancements
With the new improvements, Dell’s midrange PowerStore product will deliver up to a 50 percent mixed workload performance boost and up to 66 percent greater capacity. In as few as “five clicks” customers can plan business continuity strategies with software-only high availability metro replication configured, Dell said.
“We have quite a few customers today that are operating in an active data center type environment, and we had sort of been perceiving the lack of good, native MetroSync capabilities in PowerStore as a gap,” Gouin said. “We’re really excited to see the replication of MetroSync capabilities get fleshed out.”
Dell’s PowerMax line which offers secure, mission-critical storage for businesses, is adding cyber vaults for mainframe deployments, CloudIQ for early detection of cyberattacks including ransomware, as well as a new 4-to-1 data reduction guarantee.
Dell software-defined PowerFlex storage infrastructure can now take older and modern workloads and consolidate them using a new file service that allows for unified block and file capabilities on one platform. PowerFlex streamlines multi-cloud as well as DevOps by supporting file and block support for all container orchestration platforms from Amazon, Google, Microsoft, Red Hat, SUSE, and VMware.
“We’re delivering major software innovation across our portfolio to help customers make the most of their data and resources,” said Clarke.
Dell Technologies World runs from May 1 to May 4.