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PowerStore is engineered from the ground up to take full advantage of the latest storage technologies. Its all-NVMe architecture fully capitalizes on the benefits of solid-state-storage, delivering higher bandwidth and reduced latency. Highly adaptable, PowerStore natively supports block, file, and vVol resources on a single system. It also supports a wide range of storage protocols, including Fibre Channel (FC), iSCSI, NVMe over FC, NVMe over TCP, SMB, and NFS. PowerStore is a versatile unified storage platform. It allows you to consolidate traditional, virtualized, and containerized workloads while delivering optimal performance.
Here are some key benefits that PowerStore offers:
PowerStore is designed for high availability and fault tolerance by incorporating redundant hardware components. Its active/active controller configuration allows both nodes to service I/O simultaneously. The system continuously monitors the storage devices and automatically relocates data from failing devices to prevent data loss. The Non-Disruptive Upgrade (NDU) feature further increases overall PowerStore availability by performing updates in a rolling manner. NDU supports PowerStore software releases, hotfixes, as well as hardware and disk firmware updates.
PowerStore provides applications with additional data protection through array-based snapshots, which are point-in-time copies of the data. The snapshots are space efficient and take only seconds to create. They are exact replicas of the original data which can be used for application testing, backup, or DevOps. Because of the seamless integration with VMware vSphere, you can take vVol-based VM snapshots using Storage Policy Based Management. When initiating VM snapshots from vSphere, the request is forwarded to PowerStore, which creates the vVol-based VM snapshots without affecting VM performance. You can view the VM snapshot information in both PowerStore and vCenter.
For more information about Snapshots, see the document Dell PowerStore: Snapshots and Thin Clones on the Dell Technologies Info Hub.
PowerStore supports asynchronous replication for block volumes, volume groups, NAS servers, and virtual volumes (vVol) between two PowerStore clusters. It uses protection policies to establish snapshot and replication rules, which are then applied to the appropriate storage resources. For more information about replication, see the document Dell PowerStore Protecting Your Data.
Data security is a top priority for organizations, as lost or stolen data can severely harm both reputation and finances, as well as erode customer trust. Dell Technologies addresses this concern with Data at Rest Encryption (D@RE) using self-encrypting drives. When it is activated, the system encrypts data using 256-bit Advanced Encryption Standard (AES) as it is written to disk. PowerStore D@RE enhances application security while eliminating the compute overhead, performance penalties, and administrative burdens commonly associated with software-based solutions. Organizations have the flexibility to use either external key managers or the built-in, array-based self-managed keys.
Additionally, the Secure Snapshot feature offers added protection for your data. A Secure Snapshot is a special type of snapshot specifically for block volumes and volume groups. Unlike regular snapshots, Secure Snapshots cannot be manually deleted by users. Secure Snapshots are automatically deleted when the retention period specified in the snapshot rule expires.
Secure Snapshots offer two main benefits:
For more information about Secure Snapshots, see the document Dell PowerStore: Snapshots and Thin Clones on the Dell Technologies Info Hub.
PowerStore’s always-on inline data reduction feature significantly reduces storage consumption and costs by compressing and deduplicating similar data. It also maintains the expected levels of data availability and protection for applications.
PowerStore provides deep integration with VMware management tools and services with Dell Virtual Storage Integrator (VSI), VMware vRealize Operations Manager (vROps), VMware vRealize Orchestrator (vRO), and VMware Storage Replication Adapter (SRA). For PowerStore X models, the built-in ESXi nodes can be seamlessly integrated into your existing vCenter infrastructure, enabling you to manage all VMware infrastructure and services from a unified management platform.
PowerStore Metro Volume provides bi-directional, long-distance synchronous replication between two PowerStore clusters. This feature is exclusive to vSphere VMFS datastores on PowerStore T models. The stretched cluster volume supports read and write access at both sites simultaneously in an active/active configuration, providing disaster avoidance, application cross-site load balancing, and migration capabilities. Users can choose between non-uniform or uniform host connectivity for configuring Metro volumes. In a non-uniform setup, hosts connect solely to the local appliance. In contrast, a uniform setup allows hosts to access both local and remote appliances. However, a uniform configuration requires host multipath software that supports ALUA, a protocol that helps hosts identify and select the best paths, thereby optimizing performance and reducing downtime risks.
For more information about Metro protection, see the document Dell PowerStore: Replication Technologies and Dell PowerStore: Metro Volume.
As the demand for persistent, reliable storage continues to grow in the Kubernetes world, modern and scalable storage systems are becoming increasingly indispensable for organizations aiming to achieve operational efficiency, scalability, and data resilience. PowerStore provides a Container Storage Interface (CSI) compliant driver, making it compatible with any Kubernetes distributions that adhere to the CSI standard. The PowerStore CSI driver enables containerized workloads to seamlessly request and access storage resources from PowerStore systems. It also extends PowerStore advanced features to kubernetes environments.
This feature enables backing up block volumes or volume groups directly to a PowerProtect DD appliance (physical or virtual edition), eliminating the need for a separate backup host. This approach offloads the backup traffic to the storage appliance, resulting in a more efficient and streamlined process. The backups take the form of remote snapshots on the PowerProtect DD appliance, which can be retrieved for recovery purposes. Users can also enable host access to the remote snapshots using the Instant Access feature. Instant Access provides a convenient and flexible way to view and access data without restoring the snapshot.
To create remote backups, users can create a Remote Backup Rule in a Protection Policy and assign the policy to a supported storage resource. Using a Remote Backup Rule, backups are scheduled and executed automatically according to the desired backup schedule. Users can also initiate a manual backup directly from the PowerStore Manager UI.
Note: This feature does not support Secure Snapshots. For more information, see the documentation Dell PowerStore: Snapshots and Thin Clones.
Dell PowerProtect Data Manager provides robust protection for Kubernetes workloads by streamlining the discovery, protection, and restoration of Kubernetes environments with a centralized user-friendly interface. It offers advanced protection features such as application-consistent protection within Kubernetes, and the ability to perform cluster-to-cluster restores.
For more information about PowerProtect Data Manager for Kubernetes, visit the Data Protection for Kubernetes page. You can also find related information on the Dell Info Hub blog post, Protect your SUSE Rancher managed RKE downstream Kubernetes workloads with Dell PowerProtect Data Manager.
Dell Technologies offers comprehensive protection solutions for a wide range of workloads and environments, including those in on-premises, virtualized, and multi-cloud environments. Learn more about Dell Data Protection solutions at Dell Data Protection.
Dell PowerStore system supports two widely used automation platforms: Ansible and Terraform. Using PowerStore Ansible collection and Terraform Provider, you can seamlessly integrate storage operations and management tasks, such as provisioning volumes, managing file systems, storage containers, snapshot rules, and protection policies, into your DevOps workflow.
Additionally, PowerStore features a comprehensive suite of REST APIs and PowerShell capabilities, allowing you to incorporate PowerStore tasks into your own programs or scripts.
All these tools are available at no extra cost and are published on Dell GitHub repositories.