Dell Technologies has announced the latest enhancements to PowerMax, its 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 organisations 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

Organisations 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 centre 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 organisations to make highly informed decisions to optimise energy usage.

•Introducing dynamic data mobility, enabling relocation of workloads to different arrays, maximising resources. 

•Improving data deduplication and compression technology with a new 5:1 data reduction guarantee for open systems. 

•Delivering up to 2.8 times more performance per watt, which can provide up to $207K in electricity cost savings, and up to an 82% reduction in greenhouse gases.

 

Cyber resiliency enhancements

The latest version of PowerMax takes cyber resiliency to the next level, reducing organisations’ 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 US Department of Defence 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 first mainframe storage-based intrusion detection. It monitors z/OS workloads to identify normal variations and build user-customisable 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 Sanitiser, 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 optimisation. By scrutinising 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 optimisation.  

 

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%.--TradeArabia News Service