As organisations, government and even citizens have taken the technology route to ensure continuity in times of COVID19, Dell Technologies have rolled out an exciting hardware – PowerStore 500 that delivers enterprise performance, has resiliency storage and is available at an accessible price. Addressing how Dell Technologies is enabling businesses to unleash the power of data, Amit Luthra, Director and General Manager, Storage Platforms and Solutions, Dell Technologies India, interacted with Puja Banerjee of Elets News Network (ENN).
The COVID pandemic has impacted businesses adversely worldwide. What were the challenges raised by the COVID crisis and how Dell Technologies overcame those challenges?
The COVID pandemic indeed impacted industries, businesses and even government operations adversely. At Dell, our first step was to enable our employees to work remotely with efficiency. We already had a provision where the employees were empowered to work from home, however, enabling them in this point was the most important aspect from our organisation’s standpoint.
From a business standpoint, we have seen that the pandemic has made the digital transformation a reality. There is a sheer amount of data that has been created on a daily basis and often organisations have discussions with us that how do they handle the pressure of managing data deluge. IT is under pressure to have a simpler, agile, and scalable strategy. Each organisation today is looking for a game-changing platform that can realise and unlock the power of data.
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Throw some light on Indian Enterprises’ needs in terms of storage demands.
Each and every organisation is witnessing the growth of data more than ever before. Therefore, most of these companies are relooking their IT priorities to ensure that they are relevant and aligned with their businesses. Firstly, there was a time when IT had its priorities and businesses had their own priorities but in the past few years, IT is completely aligned with the priority of the businesses. Secondly, organisations are not looking for storage solutions, they are looking for solutions as a framework that is scalable in nature. This is because no one can expect growth in capacity or performance during the current scenario and it is important to have something that is scalable. Therefore, the performance or the capacity can be scaled as and when required.
The intent is to extract insights and it is important to extract the right insights. Hence, we can say that organisations are looking for a framework of solutions that enables them to handle data anywhere and deliver the intelligent insights which they have been looking to provide to their businesses.
What are the latest updates and additions to the PowerStore portfolio at Dell Technologies?
PowerStore has been a flagship, high-mid range platform. It has been a year since the platform was launched and Dell Technologies is significantly upgrading the performance of PowerStore in three aspects – software, automation, and hardware.
We have done some enhancements to PowerStore Operating System which is now PowerStore OS 2.0. This is helping businesses to track more IOps and at least a 25 per cent increase in performance has been seen. Secondly, this also helps organisations to do modernisation. NVMe Over Fibre Channel is something that we have given as an option across the data centre. The third most important aspect is our apps on software Imagine wherein there is no need for computing platform and virtualization layer directly writing into the storage. Many of our customers have actually appreciated this feature and have complimented that it is something that is visionary.
Apart from this, we have improved our data reduction rate. Second, we have developed resilience by adding Dynamic Resiliency Engine which helps our customers to withstand dual drive failures. Though NVMe Over Fibre or an SCM drive has very little failure rates but for the organisations looking for such solutions we have built greater resilience. And, the third most important aspect that we have added in terms of automation is master tearing. This is something unique.
There are organisations that are looking for Storage Class Memory (SCM). For example: If there is someone who has a storage infrastructure having NVMe and SCM, both are high-performance technologies, and if this person wants to tear and still keep the highest tear of sound data, he can do that as well. So, these are a few new technologies based on automation that have been added to our PowerStore portfolio.
How is the new PowerStore 500 is more beneficial than the previous-gen PowerStore?
Edtech firms have opened many avenues for As mentioned before, we have added new software and improved our automation capabilities. Also, we have also launched a new platform on hardware and this is our PowerStore 500. We see that in India a significant share of the market is sub-US $50,000 and to address this market we have launched PowerStore 500.
Therefore, this PowerStore 500 is not an entrylevel PowerStore but a highly capable one that has enterprise-level performance with resiliency storage services at an accessible price point. Most importantly, it is scalable as well. Hence, PowerStore 500 is suitable for businesses of any size. It can be used in remote locations, branch location, edge environments, or larger IT deployments by combining multiple PowerStore 500 appliances and making it a large cluster or customers can mix and match PowerStore models as and when their IT demands change. This is the type of framework that customers look for as it can be scaled for performance, storage, capacity, etc.
Dell Technologies is a market leader in the external storage space. What is your take on this?
According to IDC, Dell Technologies has been ranked first in the fourth quarter of 2020 with 30.4 per cent of the market share. Moreover, consistently Dell has been ranked on the top in all categories of storage by IDC.
At Dell Technologies we have been constantly working to provide our customers with the right kind of solutions and services they need in order to unlock the power of data. Therefore, we have been a leader in work from home technologies, we have the industry’s broadest portfolio in solutions that help the workers to turn challenges of accessibility and geography into opportunities. Most importantly, we talk to an organisation about having a data management framework and not a portfolio discussion about what products or services we offer. It is always about having a management framework to unleash the power of data.
What is the way forward for Dell Technologies, considering the currently ongoing COVID crisis?
It is important to be relevant in customers’ environment. These environments in these unprecedented times are changing.
Therefore, one cannot state a particular vision. We work with our customers and take continuous feedback from them, whether it is on Artificial Intelligence or Machine Learning or provisioning them Data Analytics or building large cloud storages. So, we are constantly communicating with our customers and helping them efficiently manage their storage infrastructure. With storage infrastructure, I refer to an engagement discussion which we have with organisations to help them unlock the value of their data.
