Home > Workload Solutions > SQL Server > White Papers > Dell EMC PowerMax Storage for Mission-Critical SQL Server Databases > White paper overview
In 2018, Dell EMC introduced the PowerMax storage family with a Non-Volatile Memory Express (NVMe) back end for PCI Express (PCIe)-based access to Non-Volatile Memory (NVM) media, which includes modern NAND-based flash along with high-performance storage class memory (SCM) media. Dual-ported NVMe drives with flash-optimized protocol access provide very low latencies and extremely high I/O densities for mission-critical applications.
In Q3 2019, Dell EMC enhanced PowerMax systems to support end-to-end NVMe, SCM drives, and 32 Gb Fibre Channel (FC) NVMe to offer an unprecedented level of performance for host applications.
The Dell EMC PowerMax family includes PowerMax 2000 and PowerMax 8000 systems for scale-up and scale-out multicontroller reliability, availability, large write-cache buffering, back-end write aggregation, and security.
Benefits of PowerMax systems include:
Integration with Kubernetes—The Container Storage Interface (CSI) driver for PowerMax systems enables integration with Kubernetes open-source container orchestration infrastructure and delivers scalable persistent storage provisioning operations for PowerMax all-flash arrays. See Appendix C: SQL Server on Kubernetes with PowerMax persistent volumes for more details about how customers can use the CSI driver for SQL Server deployment on Kubernetes containers.
PowerMax systems extend the benefits of VMAX All Flash systems with high performance and low latencies for Tier 0 applications using an NVMe back end. PowerMaxOS advanced data reduction that includes inline compression and deduplication (dedupe) further improving storage efficiency without any overhead on the applications.
PowerMax systems are ideal for running SQL Server mission-critical databases, where high performance, resiliency, protection, and security are required. The following figure shows the multidimensional scalability, performance, and data services that are offered by PowerMax systems:
Figure 1. Multidimensional performance and scalability of PowerMax systems
This white paper describes the benefits of using Dell EMC PowerMax storage for Microsoft SQL Server databases. It includes test cases that demonstrate how to deploy PowerMax systems in a SQL Server environment for optimal performance to support mission-critical databases.