Dell announces major updates to PowerStore & APEX portfolios

Dell Technologies has announced substantial advancements in their Dell PowerStore product line, aimed at significantly improving performance, efficiency, resiliency, and multicloud data mobility. In tandem, the company has also expanded its Dell APEX portfolio, integrating new AIOps innovations and enhanced multicloud and Kubernetes storage management capabilities.

PowerStore Prime, a new integrated offering, stands out in these announcements. It combines advanced system capabilities, Dell APEX AI developments, and a range of programmatic benefits tailored for customers and partners. Key improvements include a software-driven performance boost of up to 30% and up to 66% better hardware performance. Furthermore, PowerStore now boasts the industry's most flexible quad-level cell (QLC) storage, offering a new 5:1 data reduction guarantee.

QLC-based storage aims to deliver enterprise-class performance at a reduced cost per terabyte compared to triple-level cell (TLC) models. Customers have the ability to start with as few as 11 QLC drives and scale up to 5.9 petabytes of effective capacity per appliance. Intelligent load balancing across mixed TLC and QLC clusters enhances cost savings and workload placement.

Additional PowerStore software enhancements promise up to a 30% performance boost for mixed workloads, up to 20% lower latency, and enhanced data protection capabilities. Notable features include native synchronous replication for block and file workloads and native metro replication for Windows, Linux, and VMware environments. These updates also enable up to 20% better data reduction and 28% more effective terabytes per watt.

PowerStore Prime seeks to ensure greater IT investment protection by offering customers enhanced flexibility and reducing costs. This includes lifecycle extension services through Dell ProSupport or ProSupport Plus, providing 24/7 access to live support, technology upgrades, capacity trade-ins, and expert advisory services. Furthermore, the flexible consumption model under the Dell APEX subscription allows customers to pay monthly, based on their actual usage.

Dell's advancements in the Dell APEX portfolio supplement these PowerStore enhancements by leveraging AI-powered tools to simplify and automate IT management. These innovations are focused on boosting infrastructure and application reliability, improving IT agility, and delivering greater control over applications and infrastructure.

The APEX AIOps suite, delivered as a Software-as-a-Service (SaaS), encompasses infrastructure observability, application observability, and incident management. AI-driven full stack observability and incident detection tools aim to resolve infrastructure issues up to ten times faster than traditional approaches and optimise digital infrastructure availability by reducing multivendor and multicloud issues by up to 93%.

In addition, the Dell APEX Navigator SaaS expands to include Kubernetes storage management and additional support for Dell APEX File Storage for Public Cloud. The Navigator for Kubernetes now supports advanced data services, like data replication and application mobility, for PowerFlex, with future support for PowerScale and the Dell APEX Cloud Platform for Red Hat OpenShift.