Dell Technologies has unveiled Dell EMC PowerScale, a new family of storage appliances designed to deal with the “onslaught of data” being faced by organisations today.
The product range is designed for object storage and is underpinned by the company’s OneFS operating system, which is best known from its Isilon range.
The family forms part of Dell Technologies’ “edge-to-core” strategy, where it seeks to have hardware that can be deployed across an organisation’s estate, whether that’s at remote locations such as commercial or industrial sites or branch offices, as well as primary the data centre.
As such, PowerScale currently features two appliances, the all-flash f200 and the f600, which is an NVMe appliance.
As well as allowing customers to have high-performance storage appliances available at the edge, this diversity allows Dell Technologies to access a new type of client that it couldn’t with the previous Dell EMC Isilon range, the company claims.
Speaking to IT Pro, Stephen Gilderdale, senior director of EMEA presales, said: “In the past, the way in which Isilon started it simply couldn’t start small enough for some of our small-to-medium customers, so therefore they may have needed to take advantage of the services that Isilon would offer, however the starting point was a little bit too high.
“That’s why we’ve got the introduction of the f200, which really helps that smaller starting point. The f600 we expect the media houses, for example, to be using to create the blockbuster movies that we all hope to be able to get to the cinema and watch one day, and the large Isilon all-flash nodes have been used for that in the past.”
PowerScale also features CloudIQ, which can help organisations connect multiple cloud environments to their on-premise systems, be that in the data centre or at the edge, and DataIQ, which offers intelligent data management.
The launch follows on from another big storage announcement from the company in May, PowerStore.
Indeed, this is normally the time of year when CEO Michael Dell would be making all sorts of product announcements live from a stage in Las Vegas during the company’s annual Dell Technologies World conference.
As with so many other organisations, however, the company has turned this into a virtual conference and rescheduled it for this autumn.
