Dell AI Data Platform: Your Enterprise Data, Azure Ready

• • Dell PowerScale for Microsoft Azure delivers enterprise file storage as a native cloud service, giving teams AI-ready data with consistent operations across hybrid cloud.
  • Break down data silos and bring enterprise data together into one consistent, AI-ready source, giving IT teams a faster path from AI ambition to real results.
  • Dell and Microsoft together help organizations accelerate AI value while keeping data secure, governed and easy to manage.

Most organizations are ready to embrace AI. The key is making sure their data is ready also.

The Dell AI Data Platform is an open, secure, modular foundation that turns scattered enterprise data into AI-ready outcomes. At its core are AI-ready storage engines that give your models and agents a trusted, high-performance data foundation to draw from. PowerScale brings that foundation into Microsoft Azure, so your enterprise data sits right next to the AI cloud services you want to use.

That matters because the hardest part of enterprise AI usually isn’t the AI. It’s getting the right data to the right place, ready to work. And that challenge starts with the nature of enterprise data itself. Roughly 80% of it is unstructured, and the vast majority still lives on premises. Estimates suggest a similar share qualifies as “dark” data: you know it exists, you know how much of it you have, but you don’t know what’s in it or how to use it. For many organizations, that makes data, not compute capacity, the real barrier to moving AI into production.

Generative AI doesn’t solve this on its own. Large language models are trained on publicly available information, so they don’t understand your company, your customers or your proprietary research unless you give them that context. And doing so isn’t a one-time project. It takes ongoing curation, metadata enrichment and pipeline maintenance. The trend is clear: data pipelining, not storage capacity, is the primary obstacle to deploying AI at scale. That’s exactly what Dell PowerScale for Microsoft Azure is built to solve.

Accelerated value for your AI strategy

Dell PowerScale for Azure makes enterprise AI practical by addressing the actual bottleneck: preparing, managing, refreshing and governing your data for AI workflows. When your high-performance, unstructured data platform is natively integrated with Microsoft Azure, you gain direct access to the full spectrum of Azure AI services, including Azure AI Foundry, Azure OpenAI Service, Microsoft Fabric and Azure AI Vision. These tools work best when paired with enterprise-grade, high-performance file storage that can sustain the demands of modern AI workloads.

This is the foundation that makes enterprise AI maintainable and repeatable, not just possible.

A persistent layer for AI pipelines

What’s often missing from enterprise AI architectures is a durable, refreshable corpus layer: a single source of truth that AI workflows can draw from consistently. Without it, organizations rely on ad hoc staging folders, fragmented pipelines and no clear path to updating their AI knowledge base when source documents change.

PowerScale for Azure fills that gap by serving as the persistent enterprise corpus layer for Azure AI Foundry. Here’s how a modern Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) pipeline flows with PowerScale for Azure:

1. 1. Corpus source: Your documents, including PDFs, reports and internal knowledge bases.
   2. Storage layer: PowerScale for Azure S3, serving as the persistent, enterprise-managed home.
   3. AI preparation: Text extraction, chunking, metadata enrichment and tokenization.
   4. Azure AI Foundry: Grounded responses with traceable citations.
   5. Validation: CLI-driven confirmation that your pipeline is working.

Critically, when documents change, you don’t rebuild the entire corpus. PowerScale for Azure supports delta updates, reprocessing only what’s changed while keeping the stable object structure your AI workflows depend on.

What sets this platform apart

 Dell PowerScale for Azure delivers enterprise-grade capabilities that go well beyond basic cloud file storage.

 No special connectors required. PowerScale supports NFS, SMB and S3 protocols simultaneously with unified permissions. AI workflows, analytics pipelines and legacy systems connect directly using standard protocols, with no vendor lock-in and no additional integration overhead.

 Scale that fits your workload. The Dell Managed service supports up to 8.4PB usable capacity in a single namespace. Whether you’re ingesting millions of documents or handling petabytes of unstructured data, the platform scales without architectural constraints.

Traceable, repeatable pipelines. Every document maintains stable, traceable object keys that enable clear citation back to source documents, consistent refresh cycles, metadata enrichment at scale and full version control. This traceability is essential where governance and compliance are non-negotiable.

 Security built in from the start. PowerScale for Azure is built on a zero-trust architecture with end-to-end encryption and integrated security, combined with Azure Firewall and controlled access paths, so your data stays protected without sacrificing accessibility.

 Consistency your teams already know. The same tools, features, API integrations and identity management your teams use on premises carry over seamlessly. No retraining, no re-architecting, no refactoring required.

Two service options, one powerful platform

Dell PowerScale for Azure is available in two deployment models to match how your organization operates.

The Customer Managed option gives your team granular control over infrastructure, architecture, deployment and scalability. It runs on Azure virtual machines backed by Azure-managed disks, with support for up to 5.6PiB raw capacity in a single namespace.

The Dell Managed option simplifies operations significantly. Dell handles deployment, monitoring, maintenance and upgrades, freeing your IT teams to focus on strategic initiatives rather than storage operations. You get Dell as a single point of support and Microsoft as a single point of billing. To match diverse workload requirements, the Dell Managed service offers three performance tiers: Standard for foundational workloads, Plus for growing demand and Premium for high-performance computing and analytics.

Both options are eligible for Microsoft Azure Consumption Commitment (MACC) spend, so you can apply your existing cloud commitments toward these solutions.

Get started

Your AI shouldn’t just understand the world. It should understand your company. Dell PowerScale for Azure makes that possible.

Visit Dell PowerScale for Microsoft Azure or contact a Dell Technologies expert to learn how this platform can support your AI initiatives.