New Dell EMC PowerScale storage systems unlock the potential of unstructured data

Dell Technologies has just taken the wraps off a new family of storage systems that aim to unlock the potential for unstructured data that they’ve dubbed as Dell EMC PowerScale.

For the uninitiated, unstructured data is stuff that a normal person would see a pattern to but which can’t be neatly organised in a database due to context or format like videos, social media content, diagnostic logs, emails, documents and images. While it barely sounds like a problem worth mentioning, the fact of the matter is that it’s something that isn’t going to get any better as more and more unstructured data is pouring into an organisation by the day.

IT managers have attempted to tackle this problem for years but the heart of the matter is that at the rate unstructured data is simply being heaped onto the veritable pile of information that an organisation has to process and make sense of, more is being added by the day.

Organisations have to find a way to cost effectively scale their data centre and storage operations or risk being inundated with a ton of unstructured data that that can not only be a potential security risk – seeing as an errant email could hide a malware payload or something NSFW – but also a cost to the company in the long run as actionable data may be hidden in a pile of other useless data. 

As much as sci-fi movies like to show how powerful AI is, the truth is that we’re not there just yet. Advancements in image recognition in AI haven’t advanced beyond object recognition to differentiate a petunia from a potato much less the content and context of a video; something that companies like Facebook have attempted to tackle with large amounts of manpower to filter the petabytes of social media coming in by the day for unsafe content.

“Organisations across Asia Pacific and Japan are looking for their unstructured data storage solutions to do three things well – be scalable, manage the increasing growth of data volume as well as data types and finally, handle data well, no matter where it lives,” said Jay Tuseth, General Manager, Unstructured Data Solutions, Asia Pacific, Japan, China, Dell Technologies. “The Dell EMC PowerScale storage portfolio is designed to address our customer needs and enable them to fully unlock the potential of their data by offering simplicity at any scale, handling any unstructured data, be it across data centres, at the Edge or in the cloud, and providing intelligent insights that are drawn from their data as well as their infrastructure.”

According to Gartner, almost 80% of the data footprint of an organisation is unstructured and enterprises will triple their unstructured data stored from what they had in 2019. This data is also usually geographically dispersed with over 50% of enterprise-generated data processed outside a data center or cloud. 

According to insight from Dell Technologies, the amount of unstructured data data that companies will store as object or file storage is expected to triple by 2024 and demand is growing for a simple, seamless and cost-effective means to store and leverage this rich wellspring of unstructured data.

This creates a siloed data landscape that hampers collaboration and effectiveness which is where the new Dell EMC PowerScale range comes into the picture.

Dell EMC PowerScale introduction

The Dell EMC PowerScale range builds on the rich legacy that Isilon and OneFS have established in scale-out NAS. The PowerScale family runs the OneFS operating system and features the new 1UPowerEdge-based PowerScale all-flash and NVME nodes as well as the Isilon all-flash, hybrid and archive nodes running PowerScale OneFS 9.0 that are currently in service, with the ability to be deployed across edge, core and cloud environments to capture data at scale.
On paper, the PowerScale range is capable of serving up 15.8 million input-output (IOPS) operations per second per cluster to tackle demanding tasks like analytics, digital media, IOT and more. 

That’s half the equation though as you need a tool to gain insight on all that data. This is where Dell EMC DataIQ, a multi-purpose dataset management software, comes to the rescue by scanning, indexing, classifying and allowing fast searches with a single-pane-of-glass visibility into all unstructured data assets available including third-party and public cloud environments. Dell EMC DataIQ is included with PowerScale so users can instantly gain immediate benefits from their unstructured data assets and make more informed decisions.

Dell EMC PowerScale capabilities

What makes Dell EMC PowerScale so appealing for organisations is that it is highly scalable without adding extra complexity to the whole affair with the ability to upscale PowerScale clusters from 11TB raw capacity to 60PB without painful downtimes while additional nodes can be added to PowerScale or an Isilon cluster in just one minute.

The infrastructure behind Dell EMC PowerScale also supports leading management and orchestration frameworks including Kubernetes and Ansible to make app development easier. It also allows for deployment in core data centers, edge clusters or as part of a multi-cloud strategy. 

Dell EMC PowerScale also has intelligent automation for efficient resource distribution along with robust failover policies that ensure 85% storage utilisation across a cluster, with the ability to sustain multi-node failures along with the ability to tackle workload spikes with elastic capacity via flexible pay-per-use options.

Another bonus for budget challenged organisations is its immense versatility as PowerScale One FS 9.0 has wide multi protocol support for both traditional and modern applications including protocols for NFS, SMB, HDFS as well as the new S3 for modern apps reliant on object storage.

“Organisations seeking out ways to manage the exponential growth of unstructured data must understand that this is not just a storage issue, it’s a holistic data management challenge. Dell EMC PowerScale allows companies to easily capture unstructured data, and when combined with new Dell EMC DataIQ software, companies can better understand how to make that data can work for them. PowerScale’s software-defined architecture allows the platform to easily handle today’s unstructured data challenges while not losing sight of what the future might hold,” said Amita Potnis, research director, Enterprise Infrastructure Practice, IDC.

For more details on Dell EMC PowerScale, check out their official page at https://www.delltechnologies.com/en-my/storage/powerscale.htm