How Dell Helps You Meet a Growing Demand for Data Storage

By 2025, the volume of data consumed globally is expected to surpass 181 zettabytes (181 trillion gigabytes) compared to just 41 zettabytes in 2019.

This massive jump of more than 340 percent within a span of five years is largely due to rapid digital initiatives launched during the pandemic.

As demand grew, key industries such as healthcare, financial services and IT delivery pivoted towards digital alternatives. Today, much consumer data, such as health records and banking information, exists in data centres.

Such dramatic growth in data volumes has propelled the need for an equally resilient infrastructure. To meet these demands, IT leaders across organizations have four key questions in front of them:

• How do we grow current storage without affecting operations?
• How do we keep storage costs in check while meeting scalability?
• How do we ensure diverse storage systems operate seamlessly?
• How do we protect data systems from increasing cyberattacks?

We have picked a few storage solutions offered by our partners at Dell Technologies that address each priority individually to help leaders better plan their storage investments.

Dell’s storage solutions are designed around modern storage needs such as cloud-readiness, redundancy and backups. Learn how their products can help you meet your enterprise data needs.

As organizations expand their digital footprint and customer base, they need to scale up their storage systems to meet growing data needs. This can be difficult to achieve with legacy systems that require architectural changes to add more capacity, which can lead to bottlenecks, inefficiencies and increased costs.

To meet these needs, you need a storage solution that can be scaled on demand and can be attached to current storage hardware without disruptions.

Solution overview

Dell PowerScale offers scalability with the help of a distributed and flexible file storage architecture. This system allows organizations to start small and scale out or up, depending on their data needs, without disruptive upgrades or downtime.

Dell’s OneFS operating system integrates with diverse IT environments, simplifying management. Its modular design enables the addition of new storage nodes to the storage cluster, which automatically balances data and workloads across the system. This ensures consistent performance and eliminates the need for complex, manual interventions during scaling processes.

Value propositions

• Simpler to scale: PowerScale simplifies the otherwise complex storage scaling process for enterprise data systems.
• Improved performance: The system ensures high performance and efficiency, even as data volumes increase, by automatically balancing workloads and data distribution.
• Cost efficiency: With its pay-as-you-grow model, PowerScale helps businesses avoid upfront overprovisioning costs, allowing you to invest incrementally as your storage needs evolve.

Use cases it serves

• Big Data workloads: Supports massive data sets, making it ideal for enterprises engaged in Big Data analytics, enabling them to process and analyze data efficiently.
• Media workloads: Organizations that deal with large media workloads can benefit from PowerScale’s ability to handle large files and high-throughput workloads, essential for video production and streaming.
• AI training: Organizations can use the platform to handle the large datasets involved in training AI models while achieving higher hardware utilization and up to 300 PBs of storage.

Most organizations have a diverse IT environment with a mix of cloud and on-prem storage, which affects how data flows across systems. Cloud-based storage may have different protocols to access data that may make it hard to integrate with private NAS hardware.  

This fragmentation hampers seamless data integration, leading to inefficiencies and increased operational complexity. Enterprises need a solution that enables consistent and streamlined data management across various platforms and systems.

Solution overview

Dell PowerFlex is an advanced enterprise storage solution designed to solve data interoperability challenges. It creates a unified and flexible storage platform that integrates seamlessly with various IT environments, enabling organizations to manage and access data consistently across different systems.

PowerFlex’s software-defined architecture supports a wide range of protocols and interfaces, ensuring compatibility with existing infrastructure. The solution reduces unplanned downtime and boosts developer productivity by consolidating storage resources into a single, cohesive platform.

Value proposition

• Unified data management: Brings various storage interfaces onto a single platform to facilitate simpler management of scattered storage assets.
• Enhanced compatibility: Supports multiple protocols and interfaces to ensure smooth integration with existing infrastructure, reducing the complexity of data interoperability.
• Operational efficiency: Minimizes operational complexity related to data storage, allowing businesses to focus on their core objectives.

Use cases it serves

• Hybrid cloud environments: Supports seamless data integration across on-premises and cloud infrastructures, ideal for organizations operating in hybrid cloud environments.
• Diverse workloads: Enterprises running diverse applications benefit from the solution’s ability to handle different data types and access methods, ensuring smooth interoperability and performance.
• Data-intensive industries: Industries such as finance, healthcare and manufacturing, which require efficient data management across various systems, can leverage PowerFlex to enhance data interoperability and streamline operations.

If storage systems are not designed according to the type of data being stored, organizations may waste data capacity with inefficient storage. Duplication of data, improper storage structures and outdated storage mechanisms can bloat storage costs unnecessarily.  

Enterprises need a storage solution that optimizes space, performance and management to handle ever-growing data demands effectively.

Solution overview

Dell PowerStore is an innovative enterprise storage solution designed to address data storage efficiency challenges. It combines the latest storage technologies with intelligent data services to improve how organizations configure their storage needs. The solution reduces unplanned downtime and boosts developer productivity by consolidating storage resources into a single, cohesive platform.

The solution uses intelligent data reduction technologies, including deduplication and compression, to ensure maximum storage utilization, reducing the amount of physical storage needed. Additionally, its autonomous operations and advanced analytics provide real-time insights and automation, simplifying storage management and enhancing overall efficiency.

Value proposition

• Minimal capacity wastage: Advanced data reduction technologies ensure efficient use of storage capacity, minimizing physical storage requirements and reducing costs.
• Enhanced performance: Delivers high performance and responsiveness for diverse workloads.
• Simplified management: Autonomous operations and advanced analytics provide real-time insights and automation for IT management teams

Use cases it serves

• Virtualized environments: Optimizes storage for virtualized environments, ensuring efficient resource utilization and high performance for virtual machines and containers.
• Database applications: Enterprises running database applications benefit from PowerStore’s ability to provide fast, reliable storage, enhancing database performance and scalability.
• Consolidated workloads: Consolidates multiple workloads, streamlining storage management and maximizing efficiency across diverse applications and data types.

Enterprises today face significant data security challenges, including increasing cyberthreats, data breaches and stringent regulatory requirements. Protecting sensitive information and ensuring data integrity are critical concerns. Traditional security measures often fall short in addressing these evolving threats, necessitating robust and comprehensive data protection solutions.

Solution overview

Dell PowerProtect is a data protection solution designed to tackle the complex security challenges faced by modern enterprises. It integrates advanced security features, including encryption, access controls and threat detection, to safeguard data across diverse environments. It provides comprehensive protection for data at rest, in transit and during backup operations.

PowerProtect’s intuitive management platform enables centralized control and visibility over data protection activities. Its scalable architecture allows for seamless integration with existing infrastructure, ensuring that enterprises can implement robust security measures without disrupting operations.

Value proposition

• Enhanced data security: Employs advanced encryption, access controls and threat detection to provide comprehensive protection for sensitive data, ensuring its confidentiality and integrity.
• Regulatory compliance: Helps enterprises meet regulatory requirements and avoid costly penalties associated with data breaches.
• Operational continuity: Ensures that data protection measures are implemented without disrupting business operations, maintaining continuity.

Use cases it serves

• Sensitive data domains: Ideal for industries like financial services and legal that require stringent data protection to safeguard sensitive customer information and comply with regulatory standards.
• Enhancing security for current storage: Provides enhanced security for storage architectures without inherent security features to improve resilience against cyberthreats.

CDW partners with Dell Technologies to provide organizations with advanced solutions to meet their evolving data storage needs. Our joint solutions can help you select and procure the most suitable storage hardware for your IT environment.

Our certified Dell experts consult on possible solution scenarios based on your current storage challenges and goals. Whether installing scale-out nodes or configuring Dell’s Power series devices for complex workloads, we support you in every leg of your journey.

We have made the procurement process easier with the help of our marketplace presence. By leveraging procurement contracts like PISA and NMSO, Canadian federal government organizations can efficiently source Dell products through CDW.

Our value lies in implementing Dell solutions rapidly, securely and cost-effectively, ensuring they can handle increasing data demands and protect your valuable information. With full-stack expertise, CDW designs, orchestrates and manages technologies that drive business success.