Introducing Dell Technologies PowerScale

Storage challenges at petabyte scale:

Despite our best efforts to corral the unstructured beast, this kind of data continues to grow larger and presents a real problem for organizations that want to automate and simplify their operations.

Let’s look at three key factors to consider when storing this kind of data.

First, it’s massive. Did you know that 80% of the world’s data is unstructured? Everything that doesn’t fit neatly into databases pretty much falls here.

And it’s prolific – it’s growing at a fast pace and expected to triple in the next 5 years.

These unstructured datasets continue to expand well beyond “NAS” use cases including critical Hadoop, machine/deep learning, computational workloads and many more.

And it’s diverse in type and location – it is no longer constrained to the four walls of the data center and is growing quickly at the edge and in the cloud.

All these challenges are happening while budgets are remaining flat!

File System Limitations
- How much capacity and how many files can a file system accommodate?
Disaster recovery
- How do you duplicate the data off site and then how do you retrieve it?
Scalability of Tools
- How do you take snapshots of massive data sets?
Software Upgrades and Hardware refresh
- How do you upgrade software and replace outdated hardware with new?
Performance Issues
- How long will searches and tree-walks take with large, complex datasets?
Backup and Restore
- How do you back up a large dataset and how long will it take to restore?

Unstructured data holds huge potential to help business leaders understand business results, anticipate what’s coming, and act quickly on risk and opportunity.

A company’s data is their superpower – it gives them the ability to understand their business, anticipate what’s coming and act quickly on risk and opportunity.

Unstructured data creates a unique challenge for organizations wishing to use their information for analysis. It can’t easily be stored in a database, and it has attributes that make it a challenge to search for, edit and analyze on the fly.

But a massive amount of potential sits latent within this unstructured data. Once connected and shared and distributed properly, it gives an organization the real super-power to:

drive innovation
get to market faster
And to create differentiation

When talking to our customers, They told us the right unstructured data storage solution for them would do three things well:

First – A solution that can bring structure to their unstructured data – from edge, to core, to cloud – without complexity, and can scale from small to very large.

Second – It should handle diverse and unpredictable workloads running in diverse locations. They need to handle any (unstructured) data, any workload, and any user. The solution should be available from the edge, core and cloud.

Third – The solution should make it easy to find & analyze data. Organizations need to find data wherever it lives. Business users need data at their fingertips. Developers need to code with it. IT organizations need to handle it and process it. The tools should be intelligent and empowering.

Here to Help with Innovative Technology

IT organizations in a wide range of industries are already meeting these challenges with our leading Isilon technology. From media to hospitals to autonomous vehicles to life sciences – in fact, anyone using data as a business differentiator – people have recognized us as having the most powerful and proven platform in the industry. As a result, we’ve seen great success (e.g., #1 scale-out NAS platform, Gartner MQ leader for 4 years in a row) Now, building on our well-recognized history of innovation, we are ready to help you with a solution that will set a new standard for unstructured data storage .

Evolution of OneFS software

For more than a decade and across eight generations of hardware, organizations have run eight generations of our OneFS operating system to drive all of their workloads. Capabilities such as AutoBalance and SmartPools enable lights-out storage management. You can seamlessly add new nodes into the cluster and transparently remove the old nodes with no disruption to the user.

Bringing it all Together

OneFS software has been setting the bar for unstructured data storage for over a decade. With this launch, Dell Technologies brings together the number #1 scale-out NAS solution and the #1 server technology in the world to set a new standard in Unstructured Data Storage. We take the power of OneFS and combine it with PowerEdge to bring new levels of flexibility and simplicity. OneFS delivers all the features of a software-defined architecture to take advantage of any and all hardware capabilities. Storage management features like push-button failover, load balancing, scaling performance and capacity independently delivers Software-defined agility with the strength of Dell Technologies.

Introducing PowerScale

Building on a proven history of innovation, we are introducing a new standard in unstructured data storage. Today, we are unlocking the power of OneFS and putting the weight of Dell technologies behind it. We’ve now unlocked these software capabilities even further to be able to extend it from edge, to core, to cloud. We are now decoupling OneFS from a dependency on hardware. With innovative engineering we can deliver the core value of OneFS while allowing our customers to have the flexibility and choice to deploy in the cloud. PowerScale – Any data, Anywhere and with Intelligent Insights. For admins, PowerScale delivers simplicity at scale; for end users, PowerScale allows them to store any data anywhere while enabling intelligent insights across all data sources.

Simplicity at Scale

With a scale-out architecture, capacity and performance are provisioned only as needed without having to over-provision storage or resort to fork-lift upgrades. With a single namespace, single file system environment and Enterprise-class data services customers get simplicity, flexibility and performance with increased efficiency and new automation capabilities.

Any scale: from 7TB to multi-PB scale and millions of file operations

No Fork-Lift Upgrades: Non-disruptive tech refresh, add nodes in 60 seconds

Auto-balance: Smart scale-out cluster ensures no hot spots as nodes are added

Resilient: Sustain multi-node failures with no impact with a flexible policy

Efficient: Increased efficiency for over 80% storage utilization across cluster

Programmable Infrastructure: Ansible Kubernetes and OpenShift integration

Benefits: Lower Costs, One admin can manage PBs of storage

We’ve expanded the family as you can see!

PowerScale is a new unstructured data storage family based on new PowerScale OneFS 9.0. The new OneFS is optimized to run on PowerEdge-based x86 servers and will accelerate our time to innovation, and your agility to keep up with your customers ever-changing needs. It can offer simplicity at any scale, handle any data, any where, and search within your data to help you unlock it’s potential.

Benefits from our accelerated innovation include these new features and models:

Simplicity at Any Scale: OneFS increased efficiency and automation capabilities – from 7TB to petabytes scale.
Any data. Anywhere: We now support S3 object access, and offer new PowerEdge-based all flash and NVMe nodes & more cloud options.
Intelligent Insights: CloudIQ for datacenter insights. DataIQ for data insights.

It’s a complete solution for unlocking the potential within your data.

New PowerEdge-based all flash and NVMe nodes bring OneFS to more locations including edge, multi-cloud and native cloud options. Over 50% the data is created outside the data center . Now you can store the right data at right location to meet your business objectives. Whether it’s in the data center, the edge, the core or the cloud – it’s the same OneFS, managed the same way.

Any Data, Anywhere

Enterprise class unstructured data services with simultaneous multi-protocol support – with introduction of S3 access to our data platform you can handle even more. Run at new locations including the edge and in the cloud, with native Google Cloud Platform support.

Any data: Handle a wide variety of data types with support for eight protocols including NFS, SMB, HDFS, S3, REST, HTTP, NDMP and FTP. OneFS provides access to any client and supports the needs of any user. The introduction of S3 support enables you to run modern applications that rely on object storage. Multi-protocol access enables limitless flexibility to run workloads that can store data with one protocol and access data with a different protocol.

Director of Product Management, Kaushik Ghosh discusses how #PowerScale provides simplicity at any scale.

Support S3 as a protocol for reads and writes
Stored as a file – accessible as an object
All OneFS data services, ease-of-use and scalability
Access zone aware for multi-tenancy
Exploit data capital without migration. Applications can share the same data set across protocols.
Concurrent file and object data access in a single namespace.
Ideal for backup and archive, cloud native apps

The OneFS file system is based on the UNIX file system (UFS).
Each cluster creates a single namespace and file system, without partitions.
File system is distributed across all nodes in the cluster and is accessible by clients connecting to any node in the cluster.
OneFS controls access to free space and to non-authorized files via share and file permissions, and SmartQuotas, which provides directory-level quota management.
Because all information is shared among nodes across the internal network, data can be written to or read from any node, thus optimizing concurrent performance.
OneFS 9.0 natively supports concurrent access to data via traditional file protocols plus the S3 object API.

Kshitij Tambe, a Product Management Senior Advisor at Dell Technologies, reviews the multi-protocol access that #PowerScale provides, specifically focusing on S3 support.

For the edge we are optimized for data-intensive applications and workloads in the field. For example, you can use a PowerScale F200 at the Edge, let it process that data locally and if needed, replicate back to a F600 at the Core.

PowerScale F200

PowerScale F600

In the core, the auto-balancing architecture keeps your systems running without downtime.

We support all the major clouds. Our native choice cloud offering is with the Google Cloud. It’s a native service based on Isilon OneFS technology and empowered by Dell Technologies services and enterprise SLAs.

Senior Consultant and Product Management Lead, Barak Epstein outlines how #PowerScale simplifies the user experience in the cloud.

Intelligent Insights

Get insights about your infrastructure and your data with CloudIQ and DataIQ. CloudIQ makes it easy to determine the health of your systems across their datacenter.

DataIQ makes it easy for anyone to find and understand data within file and object stores.

Benefits: Enables Business Outcomes, Maximize value from data, turn data to insights

Tom Wilson, Product Management Senior Advisor provides an overview of how #PowerScale and DataIQ deliver intelligent insights for customers.

You’ve needed an end-to-end solution, and this is how it comes together.

John Shirley, the Vice President of Product Management at Dell Technologies, outlines the full range of products and capabilities included in the #PowerScale family.

You can watch theCUBE Conversation with Keith Bradley who is the Vice President of IT at Nature Fresh Farms talks about how one company is delivering the future of fresh produce with a modern, data-driven approach that employs image scanning, video inspection, robotics and analytics to fuel rapid growth.