Podcast #114: Dell Alpine Delivered – PowerFlex on AWS

Brian recently caught up with Dell’s Michael Richtberg to get the latest on PowerFlexOS and dive into what’s on the roadmap for Storage Products from the Advanced Innovations team.

Brian recently caught up with Dell’s Michael Richtberg to get the latest on PowerFlexOS and dive into what’s on the roadmap for Storage Products from the Advanced Innovations team.

Michael has been a strategist for many years helping technology companies develop the next great “thing.” His specialty is product management, product marketing, M&A, and innovation discovery. Prior to joining Dell EMC in 2014, Michael spent his time working with organizations focused on storage, cloud services, and HCI with an eye on Software-Defined Storage.

StorageReview.com has spent a lot of time with Dell storage platforms and most recently covered the introduction of adding PowerFlex to AWS Marketplace. It’s easy to see Michael’s “fingerprints” all over that achievement.

Michael provides a great description of how the cloud model works for PowerFlex on AWS MarketPlace with real-world examples. If you have time to listen to the full 40 minutes, you will not be disappointed. However, we have broken down the Podcast into five-minute segments to help you get to the topics that are of interest to you.

00:00 Introduction

• PowerFlex and Software-Defined Storage
• Cloud-enabled
• ScaleIO
• PowerEdge

05:00 Cloud Storage

• How does Dell collect and aggregate storage in the cloud
• Creating high-capacity storage
• Deploying across availability zones (AZ)
• BC/DR across regions
• Rebuilding systems in the cloud

10:00 More on multi-AZs

• On-prem infrastructure requirements
• Multi-rack deployment
• Where does PowerFlex fit in the portfolio
  • PowerStore
  • PowerMax
  • PowerFlex
  • Engineering solutions

15:00 PowerFlex vs PowerScale

• Differences
• Building the system
• Scalable
• How is early adoption on AWS Marketplace
• How customers are using cloud and on-prem

21:00 Running on AWS

• How does it compare
• Compliments AWS service
• On-prem customer vs AWS customer

25:00 Is there an Edge play?

• Starting small
• Growth design
• Use cases
• Oriented to mission-critical applications

30:00 Product design

• Scale-out
• Performance and cost savings
• Efficiency
• Address the entire stack
• Cloud vs on-prem
  • Everything is the same

35:00 How updates work

• Automating the process
• Alpine
  • Simplify delivery
  • Expansion
    • Geos-other clouds

40:00 How do customers get there from here?

• The easiest path to get there
• Based on workloads
• Qualified sales experts to guide the customer
• Wrap up