Save Energy, Accelerate Cyber Resiliency with PowerMax Innovation

PowerMax delivers enhanced data reduction, a real-time power consumption dashboard, and industry-leading AI-driven cybersecurity.

Dell Technologies is announcing the latest enhancements to PowerMax, it’s continuously modern high-density storage for mission-critical workloads. The PowerMaxOS 10.1 release advances Dell’s software-driven innovation six months after the latest Dell PowerMax 2500/8500 update. This makes it easier for organizations to improve storage efficiency and strengthen cybersecurity while providing the flexibility to scale capacity and performance seamlessly to keep pace with new business demands. 

Delivering Breakthrough 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 is the 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, and maximizing 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 an 82% reduction in greenhouse gases.4

Cyber Resiliency Enhancements Accelerate Zero Trust Adoption

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. This release adds:

• Federal Approved Products List certified/STIG-hardening that meets stringent U.S. Department of Defense guidelines to reduce the attack surface.
  • Transport Layer Security (TLS) version 1.3, the latest and most secure version offers 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-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 against physical theft of the array.

• Data Sanitizer uses a NIST-compliant process that erases all data before 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. 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 predictive analytics’ power to proactively pinpoint potential optimization. By scrutinizing 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 pinpoint potential storage optimization proactively.  

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. PowerMaxOS 10.1 plus CloudIQ improves 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%.