Dell and Microsoft have announced the Public Preview of Azure Native Dell PowerScale, a fully managed offering that gives you access to Dell’s flagship unstructured data product, OneFS, on Azure. The Public Preview means two flavors of Dell PowerScale are now available; Customer Managed Dell PowerScale for Azure and Dell PowerScale for Microsoft Azure (New).
In the first flavor, the customer deploys and manages the entire software and infrastructure stack and has access to compute, networking, and storage resources in their tenant. In the new option, Dell implements and manages the underlying infrastructure stack, including support, upgrades, and maintenance and all the resources run in a Dell-managed environment which is a fully managed service.
Microsoft said that the new fully managed offering is implemented as an Azure Native ISV service. It is deployed and managed through Azure Portal and is transactable via Azure Marketplace. This allows existing customers to use their existing Azure commitments and contracts. Customers can manage the solution with various familiar tools including Azure Portal, Azure CLI, or PowerShell.
This solution brings numerous benefits, chiefly, you get the full capabilities of OneFS with enterprise-grade efficiency, performance, resiliency, and multi-petabyte scalability. Another benefit is that it supports data-intensive workloads such as AI/ML, HPC, and EDA. It also offers scalability of up to 8.4 petabytes in a single namespace.
Another benefit is that it allows for hybrid data estate optimization, including: replication between on-prem and Azure-based deployments; data reduction through compression and deduplication; and file tiering to cost-effective Azure Blob Storage with Cloud Pools. Finally, it enables easy access to rich Azure ecosystems for AI and Analytics services, cloud-based disaster recovery, and application bursting.
This service from Dell is available in nine Azure regions including: US East, US South Central, US West 2, West Europe, North Europe, UK South, Germany West Central, Australia East, and Southeast Asia. To get started, check out the Azure Marketplace listing, request a Dell Reference Number for Public Preview, and check out the Dell documentation.
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