Today’s competitive environment requires you to be more responsive by leveraging technology that helps your organization become agile and efficient. When it comes to data storage, that means building more intelligent and scalable systems that are immediately adaptable to enterprise requirements and growth.
One system that meets these requirements is Dell’s PowerStore, a midrange storage appliance designed specifically for both current and future storage requirements. PowerStore provides the operational versatility needed for today’s cloud-mobile IT infrastructure and mature workloads. Our customers can attest to its ability to increase flexibility and decrease costs related to footprint, energy, and administration. Here are five key benefits of this intelligent storage appliance.
- Reduced Footprint Means Reduced Costs
Most of the PowerStore appliances are only two rack units (2U) and will never grow beyond that, not only because 24 drives can be packed into the Data Processing Enclosure (DPE) of the unit but also because of a guaranteed 4:1 data-reduction ratio that the drives deliver. We recently replaced three older storage systems for a customer — an XtremIO Gen1 and Gen2 and an older Pure all-flash array – with a single PowerStore 7000T. This upgrade resulted in significant savings of space and cost-reducing by half a standard rack in the data center, as well as more than 30 cables/ports and an estimated $12,000 annually in power and cooling savings. PowerStore’s integration features are so robust that the customer will only need to use vCenter to provision storage, cutting back from four admin consoles to a single pane of glass. - Data Deduplication Means More Performance
As mentioned above, PowerStore delivers a guaranteed 4:1 data reduction ratio with no data assessment required through what Dell calls its Future Proof program. You can reduce your initial investment in a shared storage expenditure and increase performance and manageability at scale. With deduplication, a single instance of data is stored on the drives. Duplicates are replaced with a reference, or pointer, that refers to the original instance. Deduplication is always “on” and can’t be disabled. - Ability to Perform an Anytime Upgrade Means Less Headaches
PowerStore provides an “Anytime upgrade” capability that is not tied to the level of support on the system. The anytime upgrade can occur 90 days after purchase and does not require renewal. Optionally, you can elect to put the value of an existing system toward credit for a second array. - Multiple Scale-Up and Scale-Out Abilities Means More Expansion Options
PowerStore can be upgraded by adding drives to an existing enclosure or by federating an additional array with the existing system, creating a single, intelligent tiering system. When the hosts are configured, the cluster can move workloads between physical arrays with zero disruption to host or client access. - Integrated Virtualization Enables Simplified Edge Computing
One challenge for edge computing is the requirement of duplicating all your infrastructure at the edge just to run a single application. PowerStore leverages its AppsON technology to eliminate this requirement. The appliance comes with two virtualized ESXi hosts embedded in the unit and half of the resources of the array can be dedicated for compute and storage for any workloads you need to run directly on the system – with no external hosts required. The other half of the system resources can be provisioned to external hosts for their use. In small sites, that’s a very cost-effective way to provide a converged virtual environment with the added benefit of shared storage for external resources.
PowerStore’s all-flash data storage appliances are highly adaptable, offering you the flexibility to host workloads right on the appliance so your IT infrastructure can be modernized with little disruption. With the elimination of latency and overhead of the network layer, users get better application performance—and that’s useful to everyone and makes it worth your consideration for the data center and edge of your network.
If you’re interested in hearing more about Dell PowerStore and how it can help you modernize your data center – contact us.
