Save Energy, Accelerate Cyber Resiliency with Dell PowerMax Innovation

By Ben Jastrab, product marketing team responsible, storage and software-defined infrastructure portfolio, Dell, Inc.

We are announcing the latest enhancements to PowerMax, our continuously modern high-density storage for mission-critical workloads.

Powermax 2500

The PowerMaxOS 10.1 release advances Dell Inc.’s software-driven innovation just 6 short months after the most recent PowerMax 2500/8500 update. We are making it easier 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 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 are 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 de-dupe and compression technology with a new 5:1 data reduction guarantee for open systems. ⁽¹⁾
• Delivering up to 2.8x more performance per watt ⁽²⁾, which can provide up to $207,000 in electricity cost savings ⁽³⁾ and up to an 82% reduction in greenhouse gases.⁽⁴⁾

TechTarget recently highlighted PowerMax’s capabilities in a feature story about TD Securities.

“Thanks to PowerMax, we’ve managed to streamline our rack space, reducing it by around 60% and consequently slashed our heating and cooling expenses and carbon footprint,” said Feisal Anooar, global head, data storage for wholesale banking, TD Securities, Inc.

Cyber resiliency enhancements accelerate zero trust adoption
Traditional IT infrastructure security models built on ‘inherent trust’ no longer work. Zero Trust (which assumes no inherent trust in users, devices or networks and therefore requires continuous authentication and verification) is now mandatory. Data centers are rapidly adopting a Zero Trust approach and are pivoting to storage that secures critical data and minimizes the risks of cyberattacks.

Dell provides a combination of cyber intrusion detection, snapshot immutability and cyber vaults for air-gapped isolation and faster recovery.

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 first ⁽⁵⁾ mainframe storage-based intrusion detection. It monitors z/OS workloads to identify normal variations and build user-customizable rules that issue 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 vs. physical theft of the array.

• Data sanitizer, which uses a NIST-compliant process that erases all data prior to decommissioning an array.

“Dell Cyber Intrusion Detection for mainframe (zCID) enables U.S. Bank to gain insight into PowerMax’s mainframe data access patterns, enabling U.S. Bank to further leverage the PowerMax Zero Trust architecture in protecting our customer’s data,” said Chad K Bisek, VP, group product manager, US Bank.

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 ML 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 (most importantly) corrective actions to PowerMax users regarding predictive capacity, performance, configuration and (of course) 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 time and effort. And 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⁾

Start benefitting from smarter, more efficient and secure enterprise storage
This announcement of efficiency and cyber resiliency improvements once again advances the world’s most secure mission-critical storage ⁽⁷⁾ and help make it more economical to securely grow new opportunities.

Click here to learn more about how PowerMax can help you stay ahead of the digital transformation game by providing enhanced data reduction, a real-time power consumption dashboard and industry-leading AI-driven cyber security for your enterprise.

⁽¹⁾ Based on Dell‘s Future-Proof program that offers 5:1 data reduction guarantee based on PowerMax data reduction tools (de-dupe and data compression) for open systems storage, August 2023.
(²⁾ Based on Dell’s internal testing comparing IO/s 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 8PB (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.
⁽⁷⁾ Based on Dell’s internal analysis of cybersecurity capabilities of PowerMax vs. cybersecurity capabilities of competitive mainstream arrays supporting open systems and mainframe storage, April 2023.