“These are the most critical applications with the highest performance requirements,” Josh Lee, chief technology officer at Dell Platinum Partner VirtuIT, tells CRN. “With these boxes, any efficiency to lower cost per terabyte and I/O cost is great news for customers.”

Dell Technologies’ latest updates to PowerMax storage arrays offer partners faster and more efficient I/O rates, three times faster Ethernet connectivity and the ability to back up a petabyte of data per day .

The latest version also introduces 92 percent RAID efficiency to optimize overall storage and industry-leading capacity and environmental monitoring capabilities, Dell said.

“These are the most critical applications with the highest performance requirements,” Josh Lee, chief technology officer at Nanuet, New York-based Dell Platinum Partner VirtuIT, told CRN. “With these boxes, any efficiency to lower cost per terabyte and I/O cost is great news for customers.”

PowerMax upgrades are available on select models, such as the high-end 8500, via a software upgrade to PowerMax 10.2, which Dell said is backward compatible. The enhancements give partners a way to provide customers with more storage and data volume to store their most important data and workloads.

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Varun Chhabra, senior vice president of product marketing at Dell Technologies, said the company has built AI into the product to facilitate alerts, learn the customer’s workload, and then adjust its health checks and thresholds accordingly.

“There is no other vendor in the world that has the capabilities of storage, servers or storage, compute, network, client, PCs, data protection, etc., etc., that Dell has,” Chhabra said in a press briefing. “And as AI is deployed and how AI is deployed and where it is deployed continues to evolve. We think this will be a big differentiator for our customers.”

Dell also recently announced updates to its PowerScale products, which are used to store unstructured data, an area that is exploited by AI models for text, audio and video inference and used in both AI model training and real world applications.

Overall, the new arrays have 63% faster data movement. They have 200 high-speed gigabit Ethernet (GbE) and InfiniBand support for faster data transfer between storage and compute. They also had double the drive density and support for 61 terabyte QLC drives.

Dell says it can cut the data center’s storage footprint in half while providing the ability to improve unstructured search through billions of files and exabytes of data.

For Lee, it all comes down to speed.

“We’re excited to see the density and high-speed networks available,” he said. “The more high-speed Ethernet options available, the more this will reach the market in the mid-range business space, as Ethernet is typically more affordable than InfiniBand.”

Both the PowerScale and PowerMax products are in the Partner First For Storage category, and Chhabra said Dell cannot sell, install and manage the devices itself.

“The role of partners in this space is absolutely critical,” he said. “We’re working together with our ecosystem, whether it’s channel partners or delivery partners that can actually deliver these capabilities. System integrators play an important role in this, whether it’s early on in helping clients strategize, or throughout the lifecycle when it comes to implementation, deployment, etc., we work with partners of all types. “