Today Dell Technologies is announcing the latest enhancements to PowerMax, it’s continuously modern high-density storage for mission-critical workloads. The PowerMaxOS 10.1 release advances Dell’s software-driven innovation just six short months after the most recent Dell PowerMax 2500/8500 update. This makes it easier than ever for organizations to improve storage efficiency and strengthen cybersecurity, while providing the flexibility to seamlessly scale capacity and performance to keep pace with new business demands.
Delivering Breakthrough Storage Efficiency
Organizations continue to focus on reducing their carbon footprint, improving energy efficiency to cut operating costs and lowering the overall environmental impact of their storage infrastructure. This release helps customers build a more energy-efficient, sustainable data center by:
- Delivering real-time power, environmental monitoring and alerting based on usage. Power for all components in a rack is monitored for voltage, current and frequency as is temperature and humidity of the rack, enabling organizations to make highly informed decisions to optimize energy usage.
- Introducing dynamic data mobility, enabling relocation of workloads to different arrays, maximizing resources.
- Improving data deduplication and compression technology with a new 5:1 data reduction guarantee for open systems.1
- Delivering up to 2.8 times more performance per watt2, which can provide up to $207K in electricity cost savings3, and up to an 82% reduction in greenhouse gases.4
Cyber Resiliency Enhancements Accelerate Zero Trust Adoption
The latest version of PowerMax takes cyber resiliency to the next level, reducing organizations’ attack surfaces, detecting potential intrusions and expediting the ability to recover from an attack. This release adds:
- Federal Approved Products List certified/STIG-hardening that meets stringent U.S. Department of Defense guidelines to reducing the attack surface.
- Transport Layer Security (TLS) version 1.3, the latest and most secure version offering stronger encryption algorithms to reduce the risk of eavesdropping and data breaches.
- Cyber Intrusion Detection for z Systems (zCID), the industry’s first5 mainframe storage-based intrusion detection. It monitors z/OS workloads to identify normal variations and build user-customizable rules that issues alerts if an intrusion is detected.
- Advanced anomaly detection of I/O patterns for improved ransomware and malware monitoring, detection and alerting to identify possible cyberattacks.
- Ignition Key Support, a new data-at-rest capability leveraging external key managers to protect against physical theft of the array.
- Data Sanitizer, which uses a NIST-compliant process that erases all data prior to decommissioning an array.
More Automation to Keep Pace with Innovation
Technology continues to evolve rapidly, and to keep pace, IT administrators must automate provisioning and administrative tasks. That’s why PowerMax systems are designed with intelligent automation, advanced AIOps, DevOps and containers to streamline operations and eliminate redundancy.
New AI-driven autonomous health checks in PowerMax harness the power of predictive analytics to proactively pinpoint potential optimization. By scrutinizing intricate data patterns with an integrated machine-learning engine, the tool identifies opportunities to enhance efficiency and suggests actions to elevate performance while eliminating cumbersome management intervention. AI-driven autonomous health checks harness the power of predictive analytics to proactively pinpoint potential storage optimization.
Dell’s CloudIQ AIOps leverages these new operational, energy and security enhancements to provide forecasting, notification, recommendations and corrective actions to PowerMax users regarding predictive capacity, performance, configuration and security. Together, PowerMaxOS 10.1 plus CloudIQ improve productivity and storage efficiency while reducing risk.
Additionally, automated storage provisioning is accomplished with REST APIs, saving considerable time and effort. A software-defined NVMe/TCP utility for storage resource automation can reduce the time to set up NVMe/TCP resources by up to 44%6.
1 Based on Dell‘s Future-Proof program that offers 5:1 data reduction guarantee based on PowerMax data reduction tools (dedupe and data compression) for open systems storage, August 2023.
2 Based on Dell’s internal testing comparing IOPS per watt for PowerMax 2500 compared with PowerMax 2000 using the 8K random writes workload, August 2023. Performance per watt will vary.
3 Based on Dell’s internal analysis of total electricity cost savings over 5 years operating PowerMax 2500 at 8PBe (5kW) versus 6 PowerMax 2000s at 8PBe (27.5kW) using $.21 per kWh (U.S. EIA April 2023 report, California Commercial rate). July 2023.
4 Based on Dell’s internal analysis of total CO2 emissions over 5 years for PowerMax 2500 at 8PBe (5kW) versus 6 PowerMax 2000s at 8PBe (27.5kW). July 2023.
5 Based on Dell’s internal analysis comparing PowerMax 2500/8500 cyber detection for mainframe storage to mainstream mainframe competitors. August 2023.
6 Based on analysis comparing NVMe/TCP resource configuration with SFSS software compared to iSCSI configuration, April 2023. actual performance will vary.