Staying ahead on the ever-evolving frontiers of technologies & requirements

Authored by Niladri Saha, Director and General Manager, Modern Infrastructure, India, Dell EMC  

IT transformation and digital transformation have already disrupted the norms in the global business landscape. New-age workloads that hinge much on social media, mobile computing, cloud-based platforms, and big data analytics are increasingly gaining prominence, creating evolving performance requirements for the enterprise infrastructure, more particularly in the storage field. Predicting the industry scenario in the coming time, an IDC forecast has revealed that various real-time analytics-oriented applications are likely to be the fastest-growing storage workloads over the next five years. And there are good reasons, too.

In today’s time, storage platforms require the flexibility, performance, and functionality to be able to host new-age workloads, in addition to traditional workloads, which demand more power as well. And probably, this is the reason that has always prompted us at Dell EMC to continue with our innovation momentum in the storage business. 

For the past 15 years, we have retained our position as the market share leader (by revenue) in the enterprise storage market. In the first quarter of 2018, we also dominated the global external enterprise storage market by capturing almost 33% of the market share and $2.06 billion in sales. For our first fiscal quarter, we have attained a 10 percent YoY increase in the storage sales of $4.08 billion.

Continuing with our innovation spree, we have recently introduced our first mainstream NVMe-based array, PowerMax, devised mainly for general-purpose use with mixed workloads. PowerMaxis built on the core proven enterprise features of VMAX combined with brand-new end-to-end NVMe hardware and a myriad of software innovations delivering tier 0 storage. Building on the legendary architecture and capabilities of Dell EMC’s flagship storage system, PowerMax is the world’s fastest storage array and delivers up to 10M IOPS and 50% better response times – 2x faster than the nearest competitor. 

Architected with end-to-end NVMe to support NVMe-over-Fabrics and high-speed, low-latency Storage Class Memory (SCM), PowerMax is not only fast, smart and efficient, but it is also engineered to take care of the world’s most demanding application workloads.In addition, the PowerMax OS also includes a built-in machine learning engine that makes autonomous storage a reality, leveraging predictive analytics and pattern recognition to maximize performance with no management overhead. 

For our mid-range customers, we have the industry-leading portfolio, comprising Dell EMC Unity, which provides the best-in-class simplicity and value. With these offerings, we empower organizations to speed deployment, streamline management, and tier unified storage workload to the cloud, seamlessly. Unity’s All Flash and Hybrid Flash unified storage platforms optimize SSD performance and efficiency, with fully integrated SAN and NAS capabilities, thus enabling organizations to enhance efficiency and cost savings for mixed block as well as file workloads. 

When it comes to enterprise-class storage platforms, the industry will gradually witness a slow migration from SAS toward NVMe. I am quite upbeat that soon NVMe-based system will drive half of the sales of all primary storage, proving it dominance in addressing new-age workloads. At Dell EMC, we have already geared up to retain our dominance in the storage evolution. And as aptly said by our Vice Chairman of products and operations, Jeff Clarke, "Nobody, we believe, has the capability to match our ability to build integrated holistic solutions across that whole stack. It's an unmatched capability."