‘These are the most mission-critical applications with the highest performance requirements,’ Josh Lee, chief technology officer at Dell platinum partner VirtuIT, tells CRN. ‘With these boxes, any efficiencies to make the cost-per-terabyte and cost of input output lower is great news for customers.’

Dell Technologies’ newest upgrades to its PowerMax storage arrays give partners faster, more efficient input and output rates, three times faster connectivity through ethernet and the ability to back up a petabyte worth of data per day.

The latest release also introduces 92 percent RAID efficiency to optimize overall storage and industry-leading power and environmental monitoring capabilities, Dell said.

“These are the most mission-critical applications with the highest performance requirements,” Josh Lee, chief technology officer at Nanuet, New York-based Dell platinum partner VirtuIT, told CRN. “With these boxes, any efficiencies to make the cost-per-terabyte and cost of input output lower is great news for customers.”

The PowerMax upgrades are available on select models such as the high end 8500 via a software upgrade to PowerMax 10.2, which Dell said is backwards compatible. The enhancements give partners a way to offer more storage and greater data throughput to customers for storing their most important data and workloads.

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Varun Chhabra, senior vice president of product marketing at Dell Technologies, said the company has embedded AI into the product to make alerting easier, learn the customer’s workload, and then adjust its health checks and thresholds accordingly.

“There’s no other vendor in the world that has the capabilities across storage, servers or storage, compute, networking, client, PCs, data protection, etc., etc., that Dell has,” Chhabra said in a press briefing. “And as AI is deployed, and how AI is deployed, and where it’s deployed continues to evolve. We think this is going to be a big differentiator for our customers.”

Dell also recently announced upgrades to its PowerScale products, which are used to store unstructured data, an area that is being mined by AI models for text, audio and video inferencing and used in both the training of AI models and in real-world applications.

The new arrays over-all have 63-percent faster data movement. They have high-speed 200 gigabit Ethernet (GbE) and InfiniBand support for faster data transfer between storage and compute. They also had double the drive density and support for QLC drives packed with 61 terabytes.

Dell says it can cut data center storage footprint in half, while also offering the ability to enhance unstructured search through billions of files and exabytes of data.

For Lee, it comes down to speed.

“We’re excited to see the density and high-speed networking available,” he said. “The more high-speed Ethernet options available, the more this will come down market into the medium business space since ethernet is usually more affordable than InfiniBand.”

Both the PowerScale and PowerMax products are a part of the Partner First For Storage category, and Chhabra said Dell cannot sell the devices, install and manage them alone.

“The role of partners in this space is absolutely critical,” he said. “We work in conjunction with our ecosystem, whether it’s channel partners or delivery partners that can actually deliver these capabilities. The system integrators play a big role in this, whether it’s early on in terms of helping customers strategize, or throughout the lifecycle, when it comes to implementation, deployment, etc., we work with partners of all types.”