Dell PowerFlex The Ultimate Software Defined Solution

With the acceleration of digital transformation, the role of digitization is constantly increasing, and the importance of IT infrastructure is also rising. Enterprises all hope to have a stable, easy to manage, and flexible IT infrastructure to cope with increasingly complex and rapidly changing business needs.

However, there is often a huge gap between reality and ideals

In reality, most data centers have multiple architectures coexisting, and resource silos frequently occur, making it difficult to achieve rapid delivery. At the same time, the operation and maintenance costs remain high. How to bridge the gap between reality and ideals has become an urgent problem for many enterprises to solve. The emergence of Software Defined Infrastructure (SDI) has given people hope, and the emergence of Dell PowerFlex has enabled SDI to land smoothly, finally providing a solution to this problem.

SDI is the ultimate technology for IT infrastructure

Before the emergence of virtualization technology, resources in enterprise data centers were closely tied to business, with a single device dedicated to serving a specific application. Different applications were isolated from each other, with resource utilization rates not exceeding 30%, and there was no unified resource scheduling and management.

To address these issues, virtualization technology has emerged. Virtualization greatly enhances flexibility and scalability through resource pooling, simplifies management, accelerates deployment, and takes a big step forward for IT infrastructure. However, virtualization is not a universal key, and issues such as the complexity of managing heterogeneous platforms still exist.

The emergence of hyper converged architecture (HCI) has simplified IT architecture. Hyper fusion reduces storage costs, accelerates deployment, and simplifies operations by tightly integrating computing and storage. However, the tightly integrated nature of computing and storage in hyper fusion also limits its flexibility, and hyper fusion cannot well meet the asymmetric expansion requirements of asynchronous computing and storage. In this context, the concept of separated hyper fusion (dHCI) has emerged, which overcomes the limitations of traditional hyper fusion. Its computing nodes and storage nodes are separated, enabling independent expansion of storage and computation.

On the other hand, with the emergence of new workloads such as containers, both hyper fusion and separated hyper fusion are inadequate, and shared storage is once again favored, which to some extent promotes the return of traditional three-tier architecture.

Compared to hyper fusion, shared storage provides higher flexibility and scalability, supports emerging workloads, optimizes CPU and storage utilization, and reduces storage costs through advanced re deletion and compression technologies.

In fact, due to the advantages and disadvantages of each architecture, in the long-term process of digital construction, most enterprise data centers have multiple architectures and multiple application loads coexisting, which brings huge challenges to management and operation.

How can we build a unified infrastructure that can meet the needs of virtual machines, bare metal, and containers, while also possessing hyper converged features?

The answer is software defined IT infrastructure (SDI) and its implementation - Dell PowerFlex

Dell PowerFlex successfully implements SDI

SDI integrates the advantages of all previous architectures, meets key requirements such as multi platform compatibility, flexible scalability, and ease of management, and is a next-generation infrastructure for the future. Dell PowerFlex, launched by Dell Technologies in 2020, is a comprehensive SDI solution that can help enterprises overcome the challenges faced by current IT infrastructure, achieve architectural modernization, quickly respond to business needs, while minimizing complexity and downtime, leading enterprises towards a more brilliant digital future.

As an excellent software defined platform, Dell PowerFlex gives customers unprecedented freedom to freely combine different nodes into the desired topology structure. This feature not only brings ultimate flexibility to Dell PowerFlex, but also ensures its outstanding performance, and can reduce the licensing cost of virtualization platform software.

Specifically, Dell PowerFlex is fully compatible with traditional three-tier architectures. In this architecture, applications run on dedicated computing nodes, while data is stored on independent storage nodes. These storage resources are pooled across multiple nodes and connected through standard Ethernet. This design allows customers to separately expand computing and storage resources, thereby gaining sufficient flexibility in the entire lifecycle management.

Dell PowerFlex also supports hyper converged infrastructure (HCI) architecture and separated hyper converged (dHCI) architecture, covering VMware By Broadcom Nutanix、 Microsoft and open-source virtualization platforms can achieve seamless scalability. In addition, it also supports flexible deployment of three-tier architecture and hyper converged architecture, providing customers with the possibility of customizing resources for specific workloads, thereby more efficiently expanding the system and meeting the needs of dynamic business.

Dell PowerFlex combines the strengths of three-tier infrastructure, HCI, and dHCI architecture. It adopts industry standard hardware components, combined with software defined intelligence, to achieve independent expansion of computing and storage, with only one node to be expanded at a time. At the same time, it supports deploying multiple bare metal operating systems, virtualization platforms, and container platforms on the same infrastructure without the need to create separate clusters.

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The support for multiple architectures enables Dell PowerFlex to have flexible scalability, enabling capacity and performance improvements. Dell PowerFlex starts with a minimum of 3 nodes and can scale horizontally up to 1000 nodes, and this improvement is nearly linear and predictable. The flexible scalability of Dell PowerFlex helps it achieve ultimate performance on a small scale. For example, an Oracle RAC database on a 5U rack can achieve 10 million TPM

Highly automated management simplifies operations and maintenance

Dell PowerFlex's management platform, Dell PowerFlex Manager, is also a major highlight. It provides comprehensive support for the entire infrastructure lifecycle, from initial deployment to ongoing operations and maintenance, covering multiple aspects such as provisioning, monitoring, and troubleshooting, providing customers with great convenience.

One key capability of Dell PowerFlex Manager is the automation of operations and maintenance. It has built-in intelligent and automated tools that can help customers handle daily tasks such as capacity planning, performance optimization, and data protection. The use of automation tools reduces a lot of manual intervention, thereby lowering operational costs and ensuring consistent performance. Moreover, utilizing automation tools to handle many repetitive tasks is beneficial in reducing human errors and improving system reliability.

Secondly, Dell PowerFlex Manager also provides rich REST API interfaces that allow it to easily integrate with existing tools and other systems of the enterprise, thereby protecting existing investments and meeting specific business needs of the enterprise. In addition, Dell PowerFlex Manager also provides complete role-based access control to ensure consistency in management.

Through Dell PowerFlex Manager, operational management efficiency has been significantly improved. Research has shown that managing time through it can reduce up to 95%, and the steps required to perform various operations can be reduced by up to 77%, fully demonstrating that it is a powerful tool that can be managed.

From a technical perspective, regardless of the extreme performance requirements, Dell PowerFlex can provide almost unlimited performance support. Its software defined infrastructure has reached unparalleled heights in performance and scale, giving customers confidence in various applications. At present, multiple customers have successfully deployed Dell PowerFlex to thousands of nodes worldwide, fully demonstrating the excellent scalability and reliability of Dell PowerFlex.

Conclusion

As a comprehensive solution for SDI, Dell PowerFlex inherently has powerful and flexible scalability capabilities, while providing customers with great freedom and choice in platform and application architecture by supporting a wide range of operating systems and application architectures to meet the flexibility and scalability requirements of various workloads. And numerous successful cases also demonstrate that enterprises can fully integrate traditional and modern workloads, simplify management, and develop their ideal application architecture on this single and flexible infrastructure, empowering the digitalization process of enterprises.