Dell has updated PowerFlex, PowerProtect, and PowerMaxOS, and has also added PowerStore to the Nutanix Cloud Platform.
Dell Technologies and Nutanix have announced a new level of collaboration with support for Dell PowerStore on the Nutanix Cloud Platform. The announcement highlights a trend shaping the modern data center: IT leaders demand an infrastructure that can scale seamlessly, unify management, and ensure resilience without compromising performance or efficiency.
The modern data center is not just about raw horsepower. It is the interplay of automation, lifecycle management, resilience, and hybrid cloud flexibility that defines its value. Dell’s latest portfolio updates, spanning PowerStore, PowerFlex, PowerMax OS, and PowerProtect, provide a clear picture of how infrastructure is evolving to meet the expectations of solutions architects and administrators responsible for maintaining enterprise-class environments.
PowerStore and Nutanix: Designed for What’s Next
Dell and Nutanix have a long history rooted in innovation, performance, and customer success. The addition of PowerStore support in Nutanix environments builds upon milestones such as XC Plus turnkey solutions and the earlier integration of PowerFlex as Nutanix’s first external storage platform.
By bringing PowerStore into the Nutanix Cloud Platform, Dell combines its data-driven innovation with Nutanix’s operational model. For organizations already relying on Dell infrastructure, this means they can fully benefit from Nutanix’s virtualization and cloud services without compromising on enterprise-class storage capabilities.
The recent release of PowerStoreOS 4.2 makes the platform even more “cloud-smart.” Highlights include the new PowerStore 5200Q, delivering up to 60% more IOPS than prior QLC-based systems, bridging the gap between affordability and elite performance. With full software parity between TLC and QLC models, Dell enables seamless workload mobility inside mixed clusters.
Security and resilience also take a step forward in 4.2. Already certified by the U.S. Department of Defense, PowerStore now adds biometric SSO, TLS 1.3 encryption, HashiCorp key management, Fibre Channel replication, and anomaly detection. For organizations advancing Zero Trust strategies, these are mission-critical building blocks. Dell also integrates AI-powered self-healing, reducing downtime risk and cutting resolution times by up to 90%. This feature fixes problems autonomously without requiring a code update.
Within the Nutanix environment, PowerStore’s strengths amplify outcomes. Combining Prism’s VM-centric management with PowerStore’s operational simplicity helps architects automate infrastructure at scale with fewer manual interventions. The result is an enterprise-grade, flexible infrastructure that aligns with today’s real-world hybrid strategies.
What Customers Can Expect: Beyond Storage
Dell emphasizes that storage is foundational, but not the whole story. This is where Dell Private Cloud, powered by the Dell Automation Platform, enters. This enables organizations to set up private clouds with appliance-like simplicity while maintaining independence in terms of compute and storage scaling. With 90% fewer manual deployment steps and workload-ready clusters in as little as 2.5 hours, Dell Private Cloud enhances the modern agility of the PowerStore base.
For IT architects, this speaks directly to deployment risk, lifecycle management, and resource efficiency. Features like intelligent pre-checks, blueprint validation, and transferable subscriptions allow infrastructure to remain change-ready and reusable, a key characteristic demanded by organizations refreshing data centers for the next decade.
PowerFlex: Scale-Out Freedom
While PowerStore addresses many enterprise hybrid storage needs, the growth of data at the petabyte scale creates unique challenges. Enter PowerFlex Ultra with the Scalable Availability Engine (SAE). PowerFlex has always been purpose-built for massive environments where growth is nonstop, and SAE represents a major leap in software-defined architecture.
SAE unifies resiliency, consolidation, and performance through a fully distributed, erasure-coded design. Organizations can achieve 10-nines availability, virtually eliminating downtime even under failure scenarios. Efficiency reaches up to 80%, supported by high-density capacity that reduces physical footprint by more than 50%.
PowerFlex also emphasizes scale-out freedom, letting compute and storage grow independently without waste. Coupled with intelligent automation and a unified management plane across on-premises, private, and hybrid clouds, PowerFlex is a backbone architecture for those solution architects running mixed workloads at true cloud scale.
The technical and financial implications here are clear: improved resiliency, dramatically lower overhead, and sustainability gains in power and cooling efficiency. At a time when efficiency equals competitive advantage, these architectural foundations matter.
PowerMaxOS: Mission-Critical Resilience
At the top end of enterprise requirements sits PowerMax, and the recent release of PowerMaxOS 10.3 pushes automation, performance, and resilience further. Designed for mission-critical workloads such as SAP, Oracle, and Salesforce, PowerMax continues to set the bar for Tier 1 environments.
The update emphasizes automation above all. Customers can now execute 1-click software updates in under six seconds, with zero disruption. Zero-touch management installations and a predictive Workload Planning Dashboard reduce the steps required for configuration tasks by up to 66%. For IT administrators, this improvement is not just convenience; it translates into lower operational risk and the ability to reallocate staff effort toward strategic projects.
A standout highlight is the support for QLC flash drives in PowerMax 2500, the first time Quad-Level Cell drives have been available on the platform. This enables affordable scaling for capacity-intensive workloads without compromising service levels. Organizations can start with as few as ten drives (122TB) and scale into multi-petabyte environments, with Dell’s cache-centric architecture and write-folding techniques protecting durability over time.
Security is equally advanced. Integrations, such as Single Sign-On (SSO) with Microsoft Entra ID and secure, encrypted email alerting, enhance compliance while streamlining administrative overhead. Performance is similarly refined, with systems achieving up to 25% more IOPS through software-level optimization.
For architects, the story is one of continuous validation and efficiency. PowerMax offers the combination of scalability, resiliency, and ease of management that highly regulated or performance-sensitive industries require.
PowerProtect: Cyber Resilience Reimagined
The rapid escalation of ransomware has made cyber resilience as critical to the modern data center as performance or scale. Dell’s PowerProtect portfolio, anchored by Data Domain, directly addresses this challenge with a strategy that balances secure, detect, and recover pillars.
- Secure: End-to-end encryption, immutability, retention lock, and secure supply chain reduce the attack surface from the start.
- Detect: Advanced anomaly detection and AI-based services identify potential threats with 99.99% accuracy.
- Recover: With automated validation tools and isolated recovery environments, organizations can confidently and quickly restore clean data.
PowerProtect Data Domain forms the core, trusted by over 15,000 customers. The all-flash architecture delivers leading performance and a 65:1 data reduction guarantee, along with up to four times faster restores, twice the speed of replication, and significant space and power savings.
Notably, Dell is expanding the reach of PowerProtect. A new entry-level Data Domain appliance will bring enterprise-grade security and efficiency to smaller organizations, offering scalable capacity ranging from 8 TB to 32 TBu. Likewise, the PowerProtect Data Manager Appliance will provide integrated management in a compact form, enhancing operational simplicity without compromising resilience features such as anomaly detection and data immutability.
For IT leaders, this creates an ecosystem that secures data, whether in large corporate data centers or edge-sized deployments, and a recognition that cyber resilience is universally relevant.
Raising the Bar
The integration of PowerStore into the Nutanix Cloud Platform is not an isolated development, but part of a larger strategy. Dell is already charting a path where Dell Private Cloud will fully support Nutanix with disaggregated infrastructures and automated lifecycle management in early 2026. Compute and storage will scale independently, with seamless integration across PowerStore and PowerFlex, positioning Dell as a backbone for hybrid modernization.
Later this year, the next wave of XC platforms built on the latest PowerEdge servers will arrive, delivering more performance headroom inside Nutanix environments. Each of these milestones reflects a consistent, practical trajectory: enabling today’s hybrid workloads with resilience and efficiency, while making tomorrow’s transitions seamless.
The Modern Data Center
The modern data center is defined by choice, adaptability, and trust. Dell’s portfolio, from PowerStore’s cloud-smart automation, to PowerFlex’s scale-out freedom, PowerMax’s mission-critical simplicity, and PowerProtect’s cyber resilience, reflects an effort to meet customers where they are and equip them for what’s next.
Rather than chasing features in isolation, Dell is stitching together automation, efficiency, and security into a cohesive infrastructure story. For IT decision-makers and architects, it’s a practical roadmap: scalable, validated, and grounded in real-world requirements. As customer demand leans toward hybrid models, resilience at scale, and cyber-ready operations, Dell and Nutanix are positioning themselves not just as providers of storage and compute, but as enablers of what the modern data center must become.
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