The Power of Software-Defined Storage

This week Dell EMC announced new models and capabilities for the VxRail family and the latest "Powered Up" offering in the portfolio, PowerFlex. What do these launches have in common? The power of Software-Defined Storage.

VxRail announcement

On Monday 6/22, Dell Technologies announced new VxRail capabilities:

• VxRail D-series nodes: built on ruggedized PowerEdge servers, taking the solution to the extreme edge;
• VxRail E-series nodes: powered by AMD EPYC processors on 1U PowerEdge servers, enabling an entry-level footprint for massive consolidation;
• Support for Intel Optane Persistent Memory (Pmem): extending in-memory database and more use cases of low-latency/high performance workloads;
• Support for NVIDIA Quadro RTX GPUs: enabling heavier graphics workloads on VxRail;
• VxRail 7.0 with VMware Cloud Foundation 4.0 and vSAN 7.0: bringing Kubernetes management to vSphere deployments with the integration of VCF;

PowerFlex announcement

On Thursday 6/25, Dell Technologies announced PowerFlex, the new "Powered Up" brand for the software-defined storage solution previously known as VxFlex. The VxFlex family of SDS, Ready Nodes and Integrated Rack systems came from the ScaleIO acquisition on 2013.

PowerFlex provides a flexible and scalable software-defined storage infrastructure. Both Hyper-converged and two-tier deployments are supported and can be mixed across the Data Center.

PowerFlex now supports:

• Replication and Disaster Recovery: Native asynchronous replication and fully operational disaster recovery with RPO as low as 30 seconds;
• Secure Snapshots: For industries with specific corporate governance and compliance requirements, including healthcare and finance;

Why Software-Defined matters?

Historically, Enterprise Storage solutions employed highly specialized hardware capabilities to support I/O intensive and low-latency operating systems. But as Moore's Law brought more power to general purpose processors, many Storage vendors could move from ASICs and other processor architectures to generic x86 platforms.

Moving to x86 allowed engineers to decouple the Storage operating system from the physical infrastructure. This has helped speed up internal development, but over the years more virtual editions of Storage solutions came to market.

Some of these solutions are now even available on different Public Cloud Marketplaces. helping extend Enterprise Data Center capabilities in a Hybrid Cloud deployment like PowerProtect DD/VE, for instance.

Another interesting take on decoupling hardware and Storage software is the new PowerStore AppsON feature. This feature is a deployment model that inverts the hardware and software relationship, turning the Storage appliance model into a vSphere cluster with a Virtual Storage Appliance that supports a fully functional PowerStore instance.

But as Cloud transformed the Data Center with distributed Cloud Native application architectures, Storage also needed to scale and transform. Read intensive workloads that could tolerate eventual or delayed consistency were easier problems to address, and Object stores and distributed file systems like Ceph and HDFS (Hadoop File System) were first to go mainstream. The new Software-Defined Storage architectures could scale out to 100s and 1000s of nodes instead of few controllers, providing liner capacity and control growth.

Solving the transactional storage performance needs in a distributed environment was a harder problem to solve and it took a few more years until viable solutions came to market. This movement gave birth to the Hyper-converged Infrastructure market, one of the fastest growing segments in technology today.

A Powered Up Portfolio

With VxRail powered by vSAN and PowerFlex Software-Defined Storage solutions, Dell EMC provides choice and flexibility for organizations that want to leverage Software-Defined Storage for Hyper-converged Infrastructure deployments. According to a recent IDC study, Dell Technologies and VMware lead the market in hardware and software for HCI. In addition to that, Dell EMC PowerEdge is the leading server solution in the market, also according to IDC. This is a strong foundation for the Dell EMC SDS portfolio.

Also on the portfolio and covering different use cases, the Dell EMC Elastic Cloud Storage (ECS) solution provides large capacity Object Storage with a Software-Defined approach. ECS runs on PowerEdge servers (entry-level nodes) but offers specialized nodes for the higher density models, taking $/GB optimization to the extreme.

The same applies to the recent Dell EMC PowerScale announcement that I recently wrote about. The new F200 and F600 nodes are built on PowerEdge servers, while the more dense nodes are specialized and built for optimal capacity and performance configurations.

The ECS and PowerScale family of nodes prove that server based nodes are great for flexibility and accelerated innovation. However, as the workloads become more demanding toward performance and/or capacity, there still is value with specialized hardware designed for the particular use cases.

Continue the conversation

Is Software-Defined Storage the future of Storage? Which architecture is best for my Data Center? What solution integrates better with a Multi- and Hybrid Cloud world?

Talk to your Dell Technologies Representative or Partner and book a briefing with us!