The Dell PowerMax is the first Dell Technologies hardware platform that uses an end-to-end Non-Volatile Memory Express (NVMe) architecture for customer data. NVMe is a set of standards that define a PCI Express (PCIe) interface used to efficiently access data storage volumes based on Non-Volatile Memory (NVM) media, which includes modern NAND-based flash along with higher-performing Storage Class Memory (SCM) media technologies. The NVMe-based PowerMax array fully unlocks the bandwidth, IOPS, and latency performance benefits that NVM media and multi-core CPUs offer to host-based applications—benefits that are unattainable using the previous generation of all-flash storage arrays.

The following figure shows the PowerMax 2000 and PowerMax 8000 models:

Figure 3.   PowerMax product family

The primary benefits that PowerMax platforms offer to customers include:

• A powerful end-to-end NVMe storage architecture that delivers:

• Up to 15M IOPS, 350 GBps throughput (187K IOPS per rack unit)
• Industry-standard NVMe-based flash and SCM drives
• Native NVMe Drive Array Enclosures (DAEs)

• The ability to use current Gen 6 FC (FC-NVMe) infrastructures and future-ready Gen 7 FC infrastructures
• Enterprise levels of reliability designed for 99.9999 percent availability in a single array
• Investment protection with the Dell Technologies Future Proof Loyalty Program
• Massive workload consolidation by supporting Open Systems (FC, FC-NVMe, iSCSI), Mainframe, IBM i, containers, and file storage on the same array, simplifying management and significantly lowering the total cost of ownership (TCO)
• Storage provisioning operations in under 30 seconds with Dell Unisphere for PowerMax
• CloudIQ, a simple app to track storage health, report on historical trends, plan for future growth, and proactively discover and remediate issues from any browser or mobile device
• An integrated real-time ML engine for automatic data placement

• Automated I/O recognition and data placement across flash and SCM media to maximize performance with no management overhead
• Elimination of high-performance silos and consolidation of all mission-critical workloads and secondary applications

• Global inline deduplication and enhanced compression with virtually no performance impact

• Data reduction that works with all data services
• Granular control that can be turned on or off by application (storage group)

• Unprecedented storage security and protection

• Controller-based Data at Rest Encryption (D@RE), FIPS 140-2 validated, secure snapshots, role-based authentication, and tamper-proof audit logs

• Industry-leading high availability

• Non-disruptive hardware and software upgrades
• Nondisruptive migrations