Dell Technologies updates storage products for AI

Dell’s latest move in the generative AI market is the introduction of the second-generation of its all-flash PowerScale storage array with smart scaleout capabilities, OneFS enhancements, and validation of Nvidia SuperPOD integration.

Dell’s goal is to make the PowerScale an optimized storage solution for both general AI and generative AI workloads. It achieves this through new hardware and PowerScale OneFS software enhancements, so companies can prepare and infer AI models more quickly. It’s promising a doubling of performance increase over the prior generation in both streaming reads and writes.

“The vast majority [of Dell customers] are planning to shift to an AI-first operating model, and in order to stay competitive in their in their separate spaces, how they’re going to do that is using their own data as the differentiator for their AI operations,” said Martin Glynn, senior director of product management for Dell unstructured data storage solutions, on a conference call with journalists.

Glen said the latest projections for data growth are 175 zettabytes by the year 2025 and the majority of that is unstructured data in the form of images, videos, documents, and audio sensor data, which Dell kept in mind in designing PowerScale.

PowerScale will have a new scaleout architecture to improve single compute node performance and also to get around siloing of data, said Greg Findlen, senior vice president of product management for Dell’s data management solutions.

“A lot of historical or legacy designs have really had coupled compute and storage from a scaling perspective and that has created a lot of limitations and burdens on our customers. [Proper storage] has got to make sure that it has a unified data stack. There’s a huge amount of unstructured data that’s sitting out there, and customers may need to be able to process that,” he said.

Dell’s strategy is to bring AI to wherever data resides, rather than the other way around. It notes that nearly 87% of companies are embracing multicloud strategies. Dell says it is giving customers the freedom to process data wherever it makes the most sense for them—on-premises, at the edge, or in public clouds.

While PowerScale is primarily an on-premises solution, Dell APEX File Storage in AWS and Azure allows customers to take advantage of cloud-native AI and GenAI workflows on data in public clouds as well as on-premises, with improved data access and movement.

Finally, through a collaboration with Nvidia, customers will have a validated combination of PowerScale with Nvidia’s DGX systems, providing high-speed storage connected straight to Nvidia’s AI hardware. Dell’s solution is expected to be the first Ethernet storage solution validated on NVIDIA DGX SuperPOD. Dell PowerScale OneFS software enhancements will be globally available this month.

The new PowerScale systems will be available in the first half of 2024.