Home Enterprise Dell EMC PowerMax Introduces SCM As Persistent Storage

Dell EMC PowerMax Introduces SCM As Persistent Storage

by Adam Armstrong

Today Dell EMC announced that it will be leveraging Storage Class Memory (SCM) as true persistent storage. The Dell EMC PowerMax product will now ship with dual port Intel Optane drives. To further boost performance, PowerMax now supports NVMeoF, with 32Gb NVMeoF for Fibre channel connectivity.


Today Dell EMC announced that it will be leveraging Storage Class Memory (SCM) as true persistent storage. The Dell EMC PowerMax product will now ship with dual port Intel Optane drives. To further boost performance, PowerMax now supports NVMeoF, with 32Gb NVMeoF for Fibre channel connectivity.

When Dell EMC PowerMax first came out at Dell Technologies World 2018, we had the following to say: Touted as the future of enterprise-class storage, the Dell EMC PowerMax is architected with end-to-end NVMe and a built-in, real-time machine learning (ML) engine. Replacing the VMAX, the PowerMax has quoted performance of up to 10 million IOPS, 50% better response times and twice as fast as the nearest competitor. The end-to-end NVMe also supports NVMe-oF for those in the need of very fast storage with very low latency. This makes it ideal for the most demanding applications and workloads. With the support of AI-ML-powered data placement across NVMe SCM and NVMe flash drives, and the use of SCM PowerMax can now deliver up to 350GB/s, up to 15 million IOPS, all with 50% lower latency.

Recently at VMworld 2019, Dell Technologies announced Cloud Validated Designs including those for Dell EMC PowerMax and Dell EMC Unity arrays. These new designs allow for independent scaling of storage and an easy way for PowerMax to be incorporated into customers’ cloud strategies. PowerMax has gotten some updates to automate VMware deployments and heterogeneous environments as well. These include:

  • Plug-in for VMware vRealize Orchestrator (vRO) enables development of end-to-end automation routines including provisioning, data protection and host operations. Customers can also offer these automated routines as self-service catalog items on the VMware vRealize Automation platform.
  • Pre-built modules for RedHat Ansible allow customers to create Playbooks for storage provisioning, snapshots and data management workflows for consistent and automated operations.
  • The new Container Storage Interface (CSI) plug-in for PowerMax is available to provision and manage storage for containerized workloads running on Kubernetes. The CSI plugin extends PowerMax’s performance and data services to a growing number of applications built on a micro-services based architecture.   

Dell EMC PowerMax

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