PowerScale Update: QLC Support, Incredible Performance and TCO
Mon, 02 May 2022 15:50:26 -0000
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Dell PowerScale is known for its exceptional feature set, which offers scalability, flexibility and simplicity. Our customers frequently start with one workload such as file share consolidation or mixed media storage and then scale-out OneFS to support all types of workloads leveraging the simple, cloud-like single pool storage architecture.
To provide our customers with even more flexibility and choice, this summer we will introduce new Quad-level cell (QLC) flash memory 15TB and 30TB drives for our PowerScale F900 and F600 all-flash models. And we are seeing an up to 25% or more better performance for streaming reads, depending on workload, with all-flash nodes in the subsequent PowerScale OneFS release.1
Delivering latest-generation, Gen 2 QLC Support
With the many important and needed improvements in reliability and performance delivered by Gen 2 QLC technology, we’ve reached the optimal point in the development of QLC technology to deliver QLC flash drives for the PowerScale F900 and F600 all-flash models. These new QLC drives, supported by the currently shipping OneFS 9.4 release, will offer our customers incredible economics for fast NAS workloads that need both performance and capacity – such as financial modeling, media and entertainment, artificial intelligence (AI), machine learning (ML), and deep learning (DL). With 30TB QLC drive support, we are able to increase the raw density per node to 720TB for PowerScale F900 and 240TB for PowerScale F600 – and lower the cost of flash for our customers.
OneFS.next Performance Boost
Another emerging PowerScale feature of interest, targeted for an upcoming OneFS software release, is a major performance enhancement that will unlock streaming read throughput gains of up to 25% or more, depending on workload, for our flagship all-flash PowerScale F-series NVMe platforms.1 This significant performance boost will be of particular benefit to customers with high throughput, streaming read-heavy workloads, such as media and entertainment hi-res playout, ADAS for the automotive industry, and financial services high frequency, complex trading queries. Pairing nicely with the aforementioned performance boost is PowerScale’s support for NFS over RDMA (NFSoRDMA), which can further accelerate high throughput performance, especially for single connection and read intensive workloads such as machine learning – while also dramatically reducing both cluster and client CPU utilization.
All Together Now
Further, these drives become part of the overall life cycle management system within OneFS. This gives PowerScale a major TCO advantage over the competition. In harmony with this forthcoming streaming performance enhancement, OneFS’s non-disruptive upgrade framework will enable existing PowerScale environments to seamlessly and non-disruptively up-rev their cluster software and enjoy this major performance boost on PowerScale F900 and F600 pools – free from any hardware addition, modification, reconfiguration, intervention, or downtime.
These are just a few of the exciting things we have in the works for PowerScale, the world’s most flexible scale-out NAS solution.2
If you are attending Dell Technologies World, check out these sessions for more about our PowerScale innovations.
- Discover the latest Enhancements to PowerScale for Unstructured Storage Solutions
- May 3 at 12 p.m. in Lando 4205
- Improve Threat Detection, Isolation and Data Recovery with PowerScale Cyber Protection
- May 3 or May 4 at 3 p.m. in Lando 4205
- Top 10 Tips to Get More out of Your PowerScale Investment
- May 3 at 12 p.m. in Palazzo I
- Ask the Experts: Harness the Power of Your Unstructured Data
- May 4 at 3 p.m. in Zeno 4601
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1 Based on Dell internal testing, April 2022. Actual results will vary.
2 Based on internal Dell analysis of publicly available information, August 2021.
Author: David Noy, Vice President of Product Management, Unstructured Data Solutions and Data Protection Solutions, Dell Technologies