Award-Winning PowerVault ME4 Celebrates One Year Anniversary, Introduces New Features including CloudIQ

Dell EMC, the market leader in entry storage[1], is celebrating the one-year anniversary of the PowerVault ME4 Series, Dell EMC’s entry storage array, with an industry award and new features.

Delivering simplicity, performance and affordability, combined with advanced functionality, PowerVault has simplified our entry storage portfolio from four platforms down to ONE exceptional offering, without disrupting our customer’s businesses.

During the past year, PowerVault has demonstrated consistent growth with close to 11,500 systems shipped worldwide (100+ AFAs), representing over 1,400 PB+ of capacity including 35PB+ Flash and 22 million production runtime hours. This tremendous success has been balanced relatively evenly around the world proving the global appeal of PowerVault.

In Q4, PowerVault will join Dell EMC Unity XT, SC Series, XtremIO, VMAX, PowerMax and Connectrix switches with support for CloudIQ. CloudIQ delivers infrastructure insight in the palm of your hand. This cloud-based storage analytics application uses ML and predictive analytics, allowing you to easily monitor, analyze, and troubleshoot your storage environment from anywhere. Users easily connect to CloudIQ via their favorite browser or mobile device to see anomalies, alerts, efficiency ratios, comprehensive health scores and more, for their arrays. The best IT issue is the one you proactively prevent from ever happening.

And, in recognition of PowerVault ME4’s strong worldwide customer appeal and success, we gave it to StorageReview to examine. In June 2019, StorageReview posted their PowerVault ME4 Series Report, naming it their 2019 Editor’s Choice for Entry Storage, reinforcing Dell EMC’s leadership position in its market. Here are some of the StorageReview comments from the report:

  • “The PowerVault ME4 is a clear leader in the entry storage market.”
  • “PowerVault ME4 provides organizations with an easy to deploy and manage storage solution that offers a depth of features.”
  • “The eye opener is just how well ME4 performs in our application tests focusing on SQL Server and MySQL performance…”

PowerVault’s momentum and innovation is moving forward with additional capabilities:

  • New 3.84TB SAS SSD: Customers can use this flash drive for read intensive operations
  • New Software and Host OS support:
    • XenDesktop 7.1
    • OME 3.2
    • RHEL 8
    • VMware 6.7 U2
    • SRM 8.1.x
    • vCenter Plugin 6.7

Customers are enjoying PowerVault’s built-in simplicity, incredible performance, flexible connectivity and impressive scale, allowing them to apply the array to a diverse set of use cases with ease and simplicity. Over 5,700 PowerVault customers – and counting – are implementing these systems to run workloads such as:

  • HPC: Parallel File Systems, NFS, Capacity Expansion
  • Surveillance/CCTV
  • Cost effective virtualization leveraging PowerEdge, Hyper-V and VMware
  • Storage consolidation in SAN environments without complexity or cost
  • Direct Attach Storage for improving Read/Write operations without a network
  • Remote Office / Branch Office environments
  • And many more

“The PowerVault ME4 series has helped us quickly bring up a well-balanced 3PB Lustre file system,” Dr. Alastair Basden, HPC Technical Manager, Durham University notes. “We have found it simple to install this file system with a ZFS back-end, enabling us to store data from large cosmological simulations, aiding understanding in the processes involved in the evolution of the Universe.”

In one year, PowerVault has proven that it’s the ideal entry level storage solution to address customer SAN and DAS challenges – affordably. Customers trust and expect Dell EMC to deliver high quality and reliable products that meet their business needs. We consistently bring these attributes to all our products. PowerVault is no exception.

We hope you’ll see for yourself at www.dellemc.com/powervault and at SC19 November 17–22, 2019 at The Colorado Convention Center in Denver CO. PowerVault will be showcased for HPC environments in booth #913.

[1] IDC WW Quarterly Enterprise Storage Systems Tracker, 2019Q2, September 5, 2019 – Vendor Revenue.

About the Author: Sean Kinney

Sean Kinney is considered an expert in data storage and data protection having spent 20 years in the IT industry. Currently, he is the Senior Director for primary storage marketing at DELL EMC.