Home > Storage > PowerFlex > White Papers > Red Hat OpenShift on VMware vSphere Infrastructure with Dell PowerFlex > PowerFlex on-premises consumption options
PowerFlex leverages software to unlock the full potential of rapid advances in industry-standard hardware and deliver extreme SLA outcomes. PowerFlex aggregates resources across a broad set of nodes, unlocking massive input, output, and throughput performance while minimizing the latency. Its self-balancing architecture eliminates any hotspots and ensures consistency and simplicity over time. You can scale the system while linearly scaling performance from a minimum of four nodes to thousands of nodes, on-demand and without any disruption. PowerFlex with its self-healing architecture can handle outages, upgrades, and maintenance without downtime resulting in 99.9999 percent availability.
PowerFlex delivers transformational agility that enables organizations to rapidly respond to changing business needs. PowerFlex offers flexibility to mix and match the storage, compute, and hyperconverged nodes in a dynamic deployment, allowing you to scale storage and compute resources together or independently, one node at a time as per your requirements.
The platform can also support a broad range of operating environments simultaneously such as, bare metal operating systems, hypervisors, and container platforms with a unified underlying infrastructure platform and management. You can also support heterogeneous workloads with varying requirements on a flexible shared infrastructure platform and modernize your application architectures on your schedule.
PowerFlex offers full-stack IT Operations Management (ITOM) and Life Cycle Management (LCM) with PowerFlex Manager. It provides extensive automation capabilities with PowerFlex Manager REST APIs and custom Ansible modules to integrate with your infrastructure, application, and DevOps workflows. PowerFlex Manager enables automated deployments and expansions with minimal firsthand time for the IT team, letting them focus on other strategic initiatives.
PowerFlex is designed to deliver superior outcomes at any scale for the most-demanding mission-critical environments. It is optimized for a wide range of validated workload solutions ranging from traditional relational databases and modern cloud-native NoSQL databases to throughput-intensive analytics workloads.
Figure 1. PowerFlex family
Software is the key factor of success in the PowerFlex offering. PowerFlex software components provide software-defined infrastructure. The software components help to simplify the infrastructure management and orchestration with comprehensive IT Operations Management (ITOM) and life cycle management (LCM) capabilities that span compute and storage infrastructure, from BIOS and firmware to nodes, software and networking.
PowerFlex is the software foundation of the PowerFlex platform. It delivers high performance, highly resilient block storage service that can scale to thousands of nodes.
PowerFlex Manager is the software component in the PowerFlex family that enables ITOM automation and LCM capabilities while enabling flexible APIs and extensive automation.
PowerFlex is available in multiple consumption options to help customers meet their project and data center requirements. PowerFlex appliance and PowerFlex rack provide customers the flexibility to choose a deployment option to meet their exact requirements.
PowerFlex rack is a fully engineered system, with integrated networking that enables the customers to simplify deployments and accelerate time to value. The preconfigured and flexible network options, ingrained security controls, end-to-end life cycle management, secure call home, and single call support are some of the many key features that helps customer streamline day-2 operation, deliver agility and resilience, and maintain security posture.
PowerFlex appliance offers customers a smaller starting point of four nodes, while enabling them to use their existing network infrastructure.
With PowerFlex, the customers deploy to match their initial needs and easily expand with massive scale potential, without having to compromise on performance and resiliency.