Dell PowerScale for Azure is now Generally Available

We’re thrilled to share that Dell PowerScale for Azure – Dell managed is now officially Generally Available (GA). After a successful Public Preview at Ignite, PowerScale for Azure is now ready for enterprise workloads in a production environment.

This service has been collaboratively developed with Dell and offers an Azure Native Integration. It brings Dell’s renowned scale-out NAS technology along with the PowerScale OneFS operating system straight into Azure. This means you can expect top-notch performance and scalability, combined with the ease of Azure-native provisioning, management, and billing.

Designed for demanding, data-centric workloads, this solution excels in areas like AI/ML pipelines, media and entertainment, electronic design automation (EDA), high-performance computing, backup and recovery, and enterprise content management.

Key Features of Dell PowerScale for Azure

• Managed by Dell: Enjoy a hassle-free experience as Dell takes care of deployment, monitoring, maintenance, and upgrades, allowing your IT teams to concentrate on more strategic initiatives.
• Azure-Native Experience: You can provision, manage, and monitor PowerScale directly from the Azure portal. It fully integrates with Azure Resource Manager (ARM) and offers unified billing on your monthly Azure invoice.
• Enterprise-Grade Durability: The system distributes data across multiple nodes within the cluster, ensuring high durability and fault tolerance.
• Advanced Data Protection: With space-efficient erasure coding and SyncIQ asynchronous replication across different sites, your data remains accessible even during outages.
• Secure Private Access: It integrates smoothly into your Azure Virtual Network (VNet) via VNet Injection, and your data is kept secure at rest using Microsoft-managed keys.
• Impressive Scale & Multi-Protocol Support: It supports a staggering 8.4PB in a single namespace with simultaneous NFS, SMB, and S3 access, powered by Dell’s custom PMEM-enabled compute SKUs.

Imagine a large healthcare organisation managing PACS (Picture Archiving and Communication System) imaging archives and Electronic Health Record (EHR) data pipelines, as well as AI/ML-driven diagnostics, all on a Dell PowerScale cluster. As the PACS volumes increase alongside the need for AI-empowered diagnostics, the organisation aims to expand its capabilities into Azure for GPU-accelerated model training without overhauling their existing setup. With Dell PowerScale for Azure, they can effortlessly provision this fully managed service via the Azure portal. This gives clinicians, researchers, and applications swift, multi-protocol access to a unified global namespace across NFS, SMB, and S3. Moreover, since Dell manages deployment, monitoring, and upgrades, the IT team can prioritise patient care instead of worrying about infrastructure, all while maintaining the security of sensitive patient data with enterprise-grade durability and encryption.

Where to Find It

You can access Dell PowerScale for Azure via the Azure Marketplace or the Azure portal—just look for Dell PowerScale for Azure – Dell managed. The GA rollout is taking place in phases, starting with the US East region, with more regions set to come online soon.

How to Get Started