Dell live blog from Storage Field Day

Here’s my my first live blog from Storage Field Day 24 – the Dell Live blog.

Delivering a continuously modern storage experience

Scott Delandy kicked off Storage Field Day with the presentation “Delivering a continuously modern storage experience”.

He kicked it off with some revenue numbers. One third of Dell’s revenue ($34B) comes from ISG (the infrastructure business unit), and $16.5B of that comes from storage products.

Dell has taken a portfolio approach since the EMC merger, so that’s one reason they have servers and storage together. That teams spends $7.6 B in R&D, they have 26K storage IP related patents and over 85% Dell software engineers ISG team members. They spending so much on R&D so customers have a way of extending their investment into the future.

Everything is consumable as a service via APEX console.

There were lots of tech details, you can get the latest on the Dell website. Here are some I captured:

• Next gen PowerMax improvements
• More density, backend storage is disaggregated from front end compute.
• DRR = data reduction rate – also introduced it in the mainframe
• Available in 2500 (2 nodes) or 8500 (16 nodes)
• RDMA running NVMe connection to scale  between nodes via InfiniBand).
• Dynamic RAID was introduced

PowerStore – Intelligent storage adaptable to any future

Jodey Hogeland helped bring Powerstore brought to market 4 years ago, and now its the fastest growing storage product from Dell. Jodey has lots of technical articles on his LinkedIn profile.

One really cool thing about PowerStore is the storage software is containerized. You’ll never see this as a customer, but it helps the Dell developers update the product much more efficiently.

I listened more than I took notes, but this is one place to watch Dell storage turn the corner from old-fashioned on-premises products to what is required to support storage for modern apps

Powerflex

Brian Dean from tech marking spoke about PowerFlex. This is the other place to watch for what Dell is doing to modernize things. Powerflex is built on the ScaleIO technology.

One cool thing he talked about was Powerflex on AWS. Since it’s just software it is available on EC2. There is a wizard to help you, and you can choose EBS or EC2. Federating w the Dell tech can make the cluster stronger. The performance is the same performance as Powerplex on premises.