Dell Technologies rolls out PowerEdge, ObjectScale and PowerScale hardware updates, alongside new capabilities for the PowerProtect and PowerStore software.
Dell Technologies is releasing updates to its storage hardware and software targeting AI workloads for small and midsize enterprise customers.
The Dell PowerEdge, ObjectScale and PowerScale hardware lines are receiving a refresh for AI workloads. The software products Dell PowerProtect and Dell PowerStore are also getting updates intended to improve security and support new virtualization platform migrations.
Improvements such as support for new virtualization platforms in PowerProtect and a storage size increase for the all-flash PowerScale line are evolutionary rather than revolutionary, according to Marc Staimer, founder and president of Dragon Slayer Consulting.
"These are nice, evolutionary upgrades to their hardware," he said.
According to Dell, these new releases and updates will roll out today through June. All-flash ObjectScale hardware will be available in the third quarter of the 2025 calendar year.
Hardware changes
Several Dell hardware lines will see new releases in the coming months.
Dell PowerScale, the vendor's unified file and object storage hardware, has increased NVMe flash drive capacity to 122 TB in the storage nodes, which Dell claims doubles its prior capacity.
Dell ObjectScale, an object storage line focused on high capacity and data archiving, now supports hybrid cloud backup with cloud storage vendor Wasabi, as well as new HDDs and the X560 and XF960 all-flash appliances.
Dell PowerEdge R-series, edge and SMB rack-mounted server offerings will now be sold with the new Intel Xeon 6 processors in E- and P-core varieties.
AI workloads and demands vary widely, and specific demands or usage surges require differing scales of storage or compute, said Simon Robinson, an analyst at Enterprise Strategy Group, now part of Omdia.
You need flexibility at the architecture layer more than ever.
Simon RobinsonAnalyst, Enterprise Strategy Group
This need for flexibility has led to the rise of disaggregated storage architecture, previously known as three-tier storage, he said. Disaggregated architecture ensures enterprise IT can support the massive unstructured data lakes necessary for AI application development by decoupling the scaling of compute and storage resources to avoid underutilized resources possible in a hypercoverged infrastructure model (HCI).
"Given where customers are, you need flexibility at the architecture layer more than ever," Robinson said. "Dell has always provided that and EMC before that, but we're seeing a [customer] recalibration back to traditional three-tier storage now called disaggregated [storage]."
Dell and Hewlett-Packard Enterprises are both major proponents of the disaggregated approach, Robinson said.
Software updates
Software for Dell PowerStore Prime, the vendor's unified or block-only all-flash storage hardware, now offers additional analytics tools for troubleshooting support and performance metrics. File workloads on the hardware will gain new cloud tiering capabilities and snapshot security features.
The Dell PowerProtect Data Manager software will support backup and recovery of new virtualization workloads, including Microsoft Hyper-V and Red Hat OpenShift Virtualization. Support for additional workloads is planned for later in the calendar year, according to Dell representatives.
Hardware for the PowerProtect line will also gain a small refresh with the launch of the PowerProtect DD6410, an edge and SMB rack-mounted all-flash backup storage offering supporting scaling from 12 TB to 256 TB.
Tim McCarthy is a news writer for Informa TechTarget covering cloud and data storage.
