PowerStore, designed to take advantage
of the performance and economics of the next wave
of storage media. At its core, PowerStore
is a highly optimized I/O stack with inline data services,
including deduplication, compression, as well as QOS. With the advantage
of integrated data protection, the flexibility to scale up and down,
as well as scale out, PowerStore delivers industry-leading
economics and simplicity with a predicted performance
as a result. Additionally, PowerStore
has been built ground up to cater to the multiple consumption
models desired by the market. It can be deployed
as a purpose-built appliance that serves storage
to external applications by network storage protocols FC, iSCSI, SMB, as well as NFS. Appliances can be deployed further
inside of a converged system that combines the appliances with servers,
as well as networking. Customers will have the option to purchase
the PowerStore appliance up front or as a flexible pay-as-you-use
installment option. There are two deployment modes
for PowerStore, meaning PowerStore T models refer
to the SAN or NAS deployment modes, whereas PowerStore X models
refer to the SAN and built-in ESX hypervisor
deployment modes. For further details, please see the
PowerStore X video for greater knowledge. PowerStore T and PowerStore X will offer
an application-centric approach with enterprise-level
high availability, data mobility, and predictive analytics for a customer's application workloads. By incorporating
market-defining capabilities, such as class-leading performance,
ability to scale-up/scale-out, as well as next generation NVMe media, PowerStore will be a success
in a wide range of customer use cases. The capability to scale-up/scale-out will offer the flexibility to customers to scale to meet their business needs
as they evolve. PowerStore will allow customers to start
with a single two-node appliance and scale up capacity
within that appliance. In addition,
customers will have the ability to scale out, meaning the data center infrastructure will subsequently
be increased by adding a cluster of additional
two-node appliances. A detailed video documenting
the clusterability and the overview will be available
for review as well. With the variety of hardware offerings,
each model type offered for PowerStore will include pre-defined CPU
and memory configurations. From a dimension perspective, each
base enclosure is about 2U in rack height, 31.2 inches in depth, and about 92 pounds
when fully loaded with drives. Because of the weight,
two people are required to lift and install the system. In terms of physical hardware,
both PowerStore T and PowerStore X have the same hardware
configuration options, starting with the 1000 model,
leading up to the 9000 model. From an architecture perspective,
each base enclosure will be dual node for high availability,
with dual Intel CPUs in each node, or four total
CPU sockets per appliance. For each base enclosure, the two nodes
are in an inverted arrangement, with Node A on the bottom
and Node B on the top. Each node has a 4-port mezz card,
as well as an embedded module, including two 1-Gig ports
for management and service and two SAS expansion ports for
connecting to expansion enclosures. Each node also has
two I/O module slots for additional front-end connectivity and also includes one power supply unit,
or PSU, for powering the system. In the case of a power failure,
rest assured, a single PSU can power the entire appliance. Each appliance has 25 drive slots in the base enclosure which support
both NVMe SSD or NVMe SCM drives. Depending upon the storage requirements
of the customer, each appliance will be capable of supporting
up to three expansion enclosures. Each expansion enclosure will also
be 2U in rack height and offer the ability to scale up to add additional storage
as customer requirements change. Wrapping up the storage and compute
customer requirements, top-of-rack switches will be
required per configuration. The top-of-the-rack switches can be used
for cluster and appliance management. At the time of PowerStore ordering,
a number of Dell switches can be ordered alongside the configuration,
leading to a specialized integration and ease of cluster management. PowerStore will be a product
that is capable of an extremely efficient and seamless
out-of-the-box rack, stack, as well as install. The ability to install base
and/or expansion enclosures, in addition to
Dell networking switches, will be supported in either
a customer supply rack or within the Dell 40U rack. If a self-racking install
is preferred, each enclosure supports
seamless install with a toolless approach and a clear
and concise quick start guide.
