PowerFlex appliance uses PowerFlex, which uses the local disks of existing PowerFlex nodes to create a storage pool. It is designed to scale to thousands of PowerFlex nodes.
The integrated scalable network architecture is available with a choice of the following:
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Hardware consisting of either Cisco Nexus switches or Dell EMC PowerSwitch switches
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Bandwidth depending on the customer needs
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Complete flexibility in designing the converged system with the following options:
- PowerFlex hyperconverged nodes
- PowerFlex storage-only nodes
- PowerFlex compute-only nodes
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Supports 25 GbE or 100 GbE port activity for backend connectivity
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Supports native asynchronous replication between sites (PowerFlex storage-only nodes are only supported at this time)
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PowerFlex nodes supports SSD and NVMe drive technologies
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Improved node maintenance using protected maintenance mode (PMM)
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Supports self-encrypting drives (SEDs) enabled by Dell EMC CloudLink
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Supports horizontal scaling by adding PowerFlex nodes to extend storage or compute capacity
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Secure and scalable storage using PowerFlex
- Seamlessly increase storage capacity or performance with horizontal node scaling
- Optional data compression feature that improves storage efficiency
- Optional Data at Rest Encryption (D@RE) feature provides data security using CloudLink as a software encryption layer, or as a key manager for self-encrypting drives
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End-to-end life cycle management with PowerFlex Manager
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An optional PowerFlex management node is also available to act as a host for PowerFlex management applications. The PowerFlex management node is based on the PowerFlex R640 node and includes hardware RAID disk redundancy.