We’re excited to announce the public preview of Dell PowerScale for Microsoft Azure – a fully managed, enterprise-grade file storage solution natively integrated into Azure. This offering brings Dell’s proven scale-out Network-attached storage (NAS) technology directly into Azure, delivering the performance and scalability enterprises expect with the simplicity of Azure-native management.
Supporting up to 8.4PB in a single namespace, Dell PowerScale offers the scalability needed for demanding modern workloads. With multi-protocol support (NFS, SMB, S3), it ensures seamless access across diverse applications while maintaining the trusted Dell PowerScale user experience. This Dell-managed solution handles monitoring, maintenance, and updates, enabling organizations to streamline operations, optimize storage, and focus on business priorities with confidence in their data’s security and accessibility.
This natively integrated solution uses purpose-built virtual machine infrastructure provisioned by Microsoft in the standard Azure hyper scaler environment. This special VM leverages cache to flash persistent memory technology using NVDIMM-N specifications suitable for the fast linked journaling transactions. These purpose-built VMs enable higher performance throughput and max capacity scale.
Capabilities of Dell PowerScale for Azure
- Multi-protocol access – Global permission structure shared across users and protocols.
- Seamless scalability – Easily adjust to changing workloads with scale-out capacity.
- Operational consistency – Same experience as PowerScale on-premises.
- Smooth data mobility – Transfer data across environments without disruption.
- Advanced data protection – Safeguard critical information with comprehensive backup and recovery solutions.
- Snapshots – Fast data backup and recovery.
- Native replication – Asynchronous replication for data migration or disaster recovery.
Why Dell PowerScale for Azure?
Dell PowerScale is purpose-built for modern data-intensive workloads that require high performance and scalability — such as AI/ML pipelines, media & entertainment, EDA (electronic design automation), backup & recovery, and enterprise content management.
Key Benefits of the Integration:
- Dell-Managed Service: Enjoy a streamlined storage experience, with Dell handling deployment, monitoring, maintenance, and upgrades — freeing your IT teams to focus on higher-value initiatives.
- Scalable & Elastic: As business requirements grow, PowerScale dynamically scales capacity and performance by adding nodes on demand, without any downtime.
- Enterprise-Grade Durability: Data is distributed across multiple nodes within the cluster, ensuring high durability and fault tolerance.
- Advanced Protection: Uses erasure coding for space-efficient protection and features like SyncIQ for asynchronous replication across sites — keeping your data available even during outages.
- Secure Private Access: PowerScale integrates into your Azure Virtual Network (VNet) through Vnet Injection, ensuring secure, high-performance data access.
- Azure-Native Experience: Provision, manage, and monitor PowerScale from within the Azure portal. It supports full integration with Azure Resource Manager (ARM), upcoming support for CLI/Powershell/Terraform, and supports native billing.
How to Use the Integration:
- Mount shared volumes to Azure VMs or Kubernetes running in the same VNet.
- Run analytics or AI workloads that need parallel access to high-throughput file storage.
- Support backup, disaster recovery, and archival workflows across sites.
- Store and manage media assets or research data in regulated industries.
Getting Started with Dell PowerScale for Azure
Getting started with Dell PowerScale is simple:
- Navigate to Azure Portal
Go to https://portal.azure.com and search for Dell PowerScale in the Marketplace. The offer is named Dell PowerScale for Azure - Dell managed (Public Preview). Contact Dell for a private offer and request a Dell Reference Number. - Deploy the Storage Resource
Follow guided steps here to configure your resource or cluster - Connect Your Workloads
Use standard NFS or SMB to mount volumes from Azure VMs or AKS.
More Resources
You can subscribe to the service through the Azure Marketplace online store or through the Azure portal. Search for it by name: Dell PowerScale for Azure - Dell managed (Public Preview)
To learn more about the service, check out Microsoft docs as well as Dell docs
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