Today, Dell Technologies further demonstrates Dell PowerFlex’s versatility with the announcement that PowerFlex has received Amazon Web Services (AWS) Outposts Ready designation. Dell PowerFlex software-defined infrastructure accelerates customers’ modernization and consolidation initiatives, ensuring optimal workload execution and providing extensive automation capabilities to boost business agility.
Fully tested and supported as part of the AWS Service Ready Program, AWS Outposts users can now deploy PowerFlex storage in two on-premises ways: as software-only (virtual) inside AWS Outposts or as a physical (storage adjacent) deployment for AWS Outposts.
PowerFlex Boosts Performance, Capacity and Flexibility for AWS Outposts
AWS customers choose on-premises AWS Outposts when they need low-latency access to on-premises systems, local data processing, data residency or application migration with local system interdependencies using AWS services.
AWS Outposts deployed with Dell PowerFlex enhance AWS Outposts-only implementations with higher performance, larger storage capacities, linear scaling and enterprise-grade availability, delivering a hybrid cloud solution capable of meeting the most stringent application demands for operational simplicity, agility and cost.
An additional benefit of this unique product combination is that customers can simultaneously implement either of these two deployment options separately or together. By providing several combinations, Dell delivers utmost flexibility for achieving and exceeding AWS Outposts’ data protection or application mobility goals.
Bringing New Advantages to AWS Outposts Users
Dell PowerFlex brings a number of advantages to AWS Outposts users, including:
Enterprise-class block storage. Dell PowerFlex and AWS Outposts, working in tandem, deliver higher performance, larger storage capacities and six 9s of availability, improving storage resiliency over what is currently available in an AWS Outposts-only deployment.
Performance and scalability. With maximum business agility and ideal for consolidating diverse workloads, Dell PowerFlex’s scale-out software-defined architecture addresses the mission-critical requirements of customer data centers, co-locations and at the edge. Both PowerFlex deployment options federate all resources across a PowerFlex cluster, rapidly and elastically expanding to increase both performance and/or capacity while maintaining low latency. Every additional PowerFlex node or instance added to the cluster will linearly increase the total available IOPs to meet even the most demanding performance requirements. Able to scale up to 512 storage instances (or nodes) in a single PowerFlex deployment and providing tens of millions of IOPs, these solutions can support over 2000 compute instances (nodes) that consume volumes up to a petabyte in usable capacity.
Regarding the PowerFlex physical deployment, Dell’s internal performance testing has shown significant advantages in terms of throughput. The combination of AWS Outposts and Dell PowerFlex can deliver 12 times more IOPs compared to a native Outposts deployment*, and the performance can linearly scale with additional compute.
Ease of management. PowerFlex’s highly automated and differentiated software helps lower costs by simplifying infrastructure management and orchestration, enabling comprehensive IT Operational Management (ITOM) and Life Cycle Management (LCM) of its key components. And it does all this using the same interface and APIs irrespective of deployment method, which complements the simplified user experience for which AWS strives.
Consolidation. With no requirement for physical segmentation, any excess storage capacity not utilized for AWS Outposts can be quickly and easily used to consolidate diverse workloads, positively reducing a customer’s IT footprint and eliminating disparate silos of technology.
Enhanced resilience. Rather than relying on an over-abundance of data replication or the addition of redundant data copies, PowerFlex’s unique distributed mesh-mirror architecture used with AWS Outposts increases resiliency and the speed of self-healing with each PowerFlex instance added.
“As a combined best-of-breed solution, AWS Outposts with Dell PowerFlex software-defined storage adds significant advantages and value to AWS customers. The AWS Outposts Ready designation for PowerFlex represents our continued investment in driving innovations that matter for our customers.”
– Shannon Champion, Vice President, Product Marketing, Dell Technologies
To find out more about why Dell PowerFlex and AWS Outposts is a great combination for databases, analytics, Dev/Ops, financial services, healthcare, retail, manufacturing, next-generation applications and more, visit the Dell PowerFlex home page, talk with your Dell sales team or contact us.
To learn more about implementing a PowerFlex physical system, please read the Administration Guide. To learn more about a PowerFlex software-only implementation, please read this User Guide.
*Based on a July 2023 Dell internal testing comparing 100% Read workload results for PowerFlex (running v3.6) using AWS Outposts instance stores (4 x i3en.12xlarge) and single compute instance versus standard AWS Elastic Block Storage (gp2) configuration (compute and storage). Actual results may vary.
