The News: Dell Technologies announced major updates to its core mid-level offering, PowerStore, with hardware and software updates that make it a strong player for everything but the highest level of data storage functionality and availability. You can read more here.
Dell Tech World: Key Updates to PowerStore to Address the $13B Market
Analyst Take: Dell Technologies announced PowerStore 4.0 with software performance improvements and new functionality. The software change, which is a free upgrade for Gen 1 and Gen 2, lowers latency by up to 20% and increases IOPS by up to 30% based on Dell’s internal testing. The company has increased the number of available snapshots and replication volumes by 3X and 8X, respectively. This improvement is important as operations have increased the number of protection mechanisms partly due to cyberthreats. Compression got a boost as well with a new variable block algorithm and space optimization for up to 20% more data reduction. Along with this improvement, Dell is backing up its claims with a 5:1 data reduction guarantee, requiring no assessment covering the 5-year life of the system under maintenance.
The second big announcement is the new 3200Q model, a QLC-based system that can start with 169 TB raw and grow by adding single drives to 5.9 PB.
Dell PowerStore was announced as the all flash follow-on to the highly popular Unity and Clariion, dominant players in the midmarket. In its 4 years of existence, it has racked up an impressive 5EB of shipments and tens of thousands of units. But as the company has stated, there is still more opportunity in this $13 billion addressable market. PowerStore, and those in a similar class of offerings, have often been categorized as midsize, but as data storage progressed, the mid-range is no long middle—rather these class of systems stretch into the top of the performance and capacity curve leaving offerings such as PowerMax to the very, very high-end storage category. However, what has been missing in PowerStore are replication technologies that allow it to play with the big players. With this roll out, Dell offers synchronous replication for both block and file and has expanded its metro-cluster replication, called Metro Volume synchronous, to support Windows, Linux, and VMware environments. With these editions, PowerStore is certainly a powerhouse offering.
Complementing Dell PowerStore non-disruptive upgrades, Dell has announced Lifecycle Extension, the ability to upgrade the controller at any time provided PowerStore is under a 6-year ProSupport contract. One of the best benefits of ProSupport (or the Plus) is the 24/7 access to live experts, always.
At Dell Tech World in 2023, Dell gave us a view into the company’s plans for delivering AIOps with generative AI. This year, Dell rolled out the new AIOps Assistant; while it covers all of Dell infrastructure, the focus in the pre-announcement was on PowerStore. Using natural language the AIOps, Assistant is trained on Dell’s 133,000 knowledge base article archive. As staff continues to be challenged with growth and staff, I expect this to be a significant value for managing and scaling data storage. All in all a solid announcement and roll out from Dell.
Disclosure: The Futurum Group is a research and advisory firm that engages or has engaged in research, analysis, and advisory services with many technology companies, including those mentioned in this article. The author does not hold any equity positions with any company mentioned in this article.
Analysis and opinions expressed herein are specific to the analyst individually and data and other information that might have been provided for validation, not those of The Futurum Group as a whole.
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Author Information
Now retired, Camberley brought over 25 years of executive experience leading sales and marketing teams at Fortune 500 firms. Before joining The Futurum Group, she led the Evaluator Group, an information technology analyst firm as Managing Director.
Her career spanned all elements of sales and marketing including a 360-degree view of addressing challenges and delivering solutions was achieved from crossing the boundary of sales and channel engagement with large enterprise vendors and her own 100-person IT services firm.
Camberley provided Global 250 startups with go-to-market strategies, creating a new market category “MAID” as Vice President of Marketing at COPAN and led a worldwide marketing team including channels as a VP at VERITAS. At GE Access, a $2B distribution company, she served as VP of a new division and succeeded in growing the company from $14 to $500 million and built a successful 100-person IT services firm. Camberley began her career at IBM in sales and management.
She holds a Bachelor of Science in International Business from California State University – Long Beach and executive certificates from Wellesley and Wharton School of Business.
