Dell announced New EMC PowerScale Features as Well as Other Security Enhancements

Dell announced New EMC PowerScale Features

On Wednesday, Dell announced a number of new features for its EMC PowerScale NAS solution, claiming that the tools “offer more flexible consumption, administration, protection, and security capabilities to eliminate data silos and enable you better use unstructured data.”

The PowerScale hybrid (H700 and H7000) provides 75 percent greater performance than equivalent nodes, according to the business, while archive nodes (A300 and A3000) are two times more effective than comparable goods.

“New PowerScale OneFS and DataIQ software enhancements expand storage management, performance monitoring, auditing and compliance capabilities to simplify file storage at scale. Enhancements to our API-integrated ransomware protection capabilities keep data protected from cyberattacks and now offer cloud deployment options in addition to on-premises,” Dell explained in a release. 

“Dynamic NAS Protection, available with PowerProtect Data Manager, delivers a simple, modern way to protect NAS systems through enhanced backup for file data enabling up to 3X faster backups and up to 2x faster restores.”

“Dynamic NAS Protection, which is included with PowerProtect Data Manager, provides a simple, modern solution to safeguard NAS systems by providing up to 3X quicker backups and up to 2X faster recoveries for file data.”

The H700, H7000, A300, and A3000 are a “refresh” of the Isilon series of products introduced last year, according to Dell. The new nodes, according to Dell, include more processors, memory, and cache, as well as more networking and compatibility options.

The Dell EMC PowerScale, according to Nassos Galiopoulos, CTO of the University of Texas at San Antonio, enables many nodes for transferring unstructured data throughout the school’s HPC environment at fast rates and scaling swiftly to accommodate their exponential data growth.

“We now handle billions of records, along with big data analytics, AI, and machine learning, with tremendous velocity, variety, and volume,” Galiopoulos said.  Later this quarter, Dell will also be releasing updates to OneFS that will allow the OS to “deliver writable snapshots, faster upgrades, secure boot, HDFS ACL support, and improved data reduction and small file efficiency.”

DataIQ was recently updated to make it easier for users to manage big scale clusters, including UI improvements and the ability to generate reports to monitor volumes by time stamps.

Dell has introduced new security capabilities aimed at assisting businesses in dealing with ransomware threats. The “Superna for PowerScale Cyber Protection and Recovery solution” was created to help businesses respond to and recover from ransomware attacks. It now also comes with the Superna Ransomware Defender utility.

“With this solution, customers can recover their data from a cybersecurity event leveraging the public cloud. A new Superna AirGap Enterprise provides more advanced automation to the air gap feature,” Dell explained. 

“Additional new productivity features to Superna’s Search and Recover and Easy Monitor capabilities also further expand PowerScale’s exceptional management and control capabilities. For organizations looking to easily manage, incremental-forever NAS data protection with rapid recovery at the file level, today we announced Dynamic NAS Protection, a simple, modern way to protect your NAS systems.” 

Drew Hills, an infrastructure analyst at USC Australia, said his company has several rules in place to secure files on their NAS and Windows File Clusters, and that they use a number of backup ways to do so.

“With PowerProtect Data Manager, Dynamic NAS Protection automatically slices shares, filesystems and volumes into multiple streams that run in parallel within the same policy,” Hill added. “It also automatically balances and scales across resources, simplifying management while accelerating backups faster than ever before.”
Jennifer Thomas
Jennifer Thomas is the Co-founder and Chief Business Development Officer at Cybers Guards. Prior to that, She was responsible for leading its Cyber Security Practice and Cyber Security Operations Center, which provided managed security services.