Public Preview of Azure Native Dell PowerScale
Dell and Microsoft are extending their partnership by bringing Dell's flagship unstructured data product, OneFS, to Azure as a new fully managed offering – now in Public Preview. Dell PowerScale for Microsoft Azure packs all the well-known benefits from OneFS in an Azure Native ISV service. This is a result of a co-development effort to create an easy-to-deploy and easy-to-manage filesystem-as-a-service. Power of choice Microsoft customers can now choose between two flavors of Dell PowerScale. One is the existing customer managed version, and the other is the newly released Dell managed PowerScale for Microsoft Azure. Both solutions allow customers to run OneFS in Azure, an enterprise-grade software-defined solution that integrates scale-out PowerScale and Microsoft's public cloud platform. PowerScale offers an end-to-end data solution for many AI, HPC and enterprise use cases with keeping simplicity top of mind. Both solutions offer efficiency, performance, resiliency, multi-petabyte scalability and feature set expected from an enterprise storage solution like PowerScale to Azure. You can replicate your data estate between on-premises and Azure-based deployments and optimize your hybrid data estate with data reduction through compression, deduplication and file tiering to scalable, cost-effective Azure Blob Storage with Cloud Pools. Rich Azure ecosystems for AI and Analytics services, cloud-based disaster recovery, or application bursting are now easily accessible for existing and new PowerScale customers. The only difference is the way you deploy and manage your storage solution. In a customer managed Dell PowerScale for Azure solution, customers deploy and manage the entire software and infrastructure stack. All the compute, networking and storage resources are in a customer’s tenant. If this is the preferred option, you can start with the deployment guide and provision a standalone PowerScale cluster now. However, if you are looking for a fully managed solution, Dell PowerScale for Microsoft Azure is the right choice. As a managed service, Dell implements and manages the underlying infrastructure stack, and is responsible for support activities, including platform upgrades and maintenance tasks. What is Dell PowerScale for Microsoft Azure, An Azure Native ISV Service Dell PowerScale for Microsoft Azure is a fully managed service, implemented as an Azure Native ISV service (LINK). It is deployed and managed through the Azure Portal and transactable through Azure Marketplace. This allows all Microsoft customers to use their existing Azure commitments and contracts to easily pay for and use this new offering. Unlike existing customer managed Dell PowerScale for Azure, this implementation runs in a Dell managed environment. The responsibility for service deployment and maintenance belongs to Dell while the customers consume the service in a cloud-native manner. The same ease-of-use typically tied to SaaS services, now applies to a traditional, enterprise grade storage system, like PowerScale. Customers can simply deploy the resource with the familiar Azure portal experience and start consuming a new petabyte scale OneFS cluster. As an Azure Native ISV service, Dell PowerScale for Microsoft Azure allows customers to manage their solution with a well-known Azure user interface. Customers can choose between Azure Portal, Azure CLI, or PowerShell. “Two industry leaders, one powerful solution raising the bar for enterprise cloud storage. Dell PowerScale for Microsoft Azure offers seamless scalability up to 8.4PB in a single namespace, versatile multi-protocol support, robust security, and is fully managed by Dell. This integration simplifies hybrid cloud operations while maintaining consistent high performance for data-intensive workloads like AI/ML, and EDA, helping you stay ahead to unlock your next breakthrough." Travis Vigil, SVP, Infrastructure Storage Group, Product Management at Dell Technologies. Dell PowerScale for Microsoft Azure provides up to 8.4PB in a single namespace and is available in 9 Azure regions. Supported regions: US East US South Central US West 2 West Europe North Europe UK South Germany West Central Australia East Southeast Asia How to take the next step Azure Marketplace Listing Request a Dell Reference Number for Public Preview Dell DocumentationAzure HPC Cache Updates: New Caching Option, Discounted Pricing, and More!
New Releases Azure HPC Cache Premium Read-Write We’re excited to announce the preview of Azure HPC Cache Premium Read-Write. This next generation of premium caching for high-performance computing workloads is designed to provide high-bandwidth and low-latency access to files. Azure compute clients are provided with read and write performance like what they would experience from a local NVMe drive. Premium HPC Cache provides lower latency than the Standard HPC Cache for your compute-intensive enterprise workloads. You can provision up to 84 TB of capacity in a single cache and point thousands of compute clients at the cache to get up to 20 GB/s of read throughput. Premium HPC Cache’s highlights include: Increased Read Throughput: up to 20 GB/sec against an 80+ TiB dataset Reduced Latency: 150 µsec for reads, 1 msec for writes Increased Write Throughput: 24.5% increase in write operations IOPS Scalability: 170,000 random 4 KiB writes; 450,000 random 4 KiB reads With our lowest-latency cache, Premium HPC Cache provides our best file-based performance to meet your time-sensitive workloads like media rendering, simulations for genomics and financial models, as well as chip design. Getting Started with Premium Read-Write Azure HPC Cache Premium Read-Write is currently available as a Public Preview in select regions. If you are interested in participating in the preview, you can create a new cache and choose the Premium (Preview) option. Overview of Current and New Offerings Attribute Read-Write Standard Caching Read-Only Caching Read-Write Premium Caching Throughput SKU 2, 4, or 8 GB/sec 4.5, 9, or 16 GB/sec 5, 10, or 20 GB/sec Write Throughput 1.1, 2.2, 4.4 GB/sec N/A GB/sec (write-through) 2.3, 4.6, 9.2 GB/sec Read IOPS 62.5K, 125K, 250K ops/sec 160K, 320K, 480K ops/sec 500K, 1M, 2M ops/sec Write IOPS 16.75K, 33.5K, 67K ops/sec N/A ops/sec (write-through) 135K, 270K, 540K ops/sec Cache sizes 3, 6, or 12 TB for 2 GB/sec 6, 12, or 24 TB for 4 GB/sec 12, 24, or 48 TB for 8 GB/sec 21 TB for 4.5 GB/sec 42 TB for 9 GB/sec 84 TB for 16 GB/sec 21 TB for 5 GB/sec 42 TB for 10 GB/sec 84 TB for 20 GB/sec Maximum number of storage targets 20 20 20 Compatible storage target types Azure Blob, NFS (on-premises), ADLS-NFS (NFSv3-enabled Azure Blob) NFS (on-premises), ADLS-NFS (NFSv3-enabled Azure Blob) Azure Blob, NFS (on-premises), ADLS-NFS (NFSv3-enabled Azure Blob) Caching styles Read caching or read-write caching Read caching only Read-write caching Cache can be stopped to save cost when not needed Yes No No *Results were without use of the priming feature. Additional details on priming will be included in our next blog post. Lower Pricing for Azure HPC Cache - Standard While it seems like the cost of everything is going up, we’re happy to report a price drop. As part of our commitment to provide the most cost-effective performance cache, we’re excited to share that we have dropped Azure HPC Cache – Standard prices by up to 33% percent in some regions. The new pricing is effective immediately. This enables cost-conscious verticals like media and entertainment to meet strict rendering deadlines while spending less on caching. Life sciences customers who rely on grants to fund their genomics research can now stretch their funds further. And chip designers can run their EDA workloads at a lower cost and still maintain the high performance for their tools repositories that they’ve come to expect. Terraform Terraform, an open-source software tool created by HashiCorp, provides an orchestration layer to deploy Azure resources. Using Terraform, you can deploy your own vdbench test system with all the required resources to run a performance benchmark. To try this yourself, the HPC Cache team has created a vdbench NFS-backed storage cache Terraform recipe to deploy a Premium 5G cluster and 30 clients. You can additionally run your own benchmarks against a 5G storage cache. Instructions and examples can be found on HPC Cache GitHub.
