Consolidation Simplified with the New PowerFlex 4.0

Consolidation Simplified with the New PowerFlex 4.0

Posted by HSSL Technologies on Sep 14th 2022

The new PowerFlex 4.0 release furthers your consolidation and modernization initiatives.


Dell PowerFlex is an unbounded software-defined infrastructure that maximizes IT ecosystem flexibility. It accelerates customers’ modernization and consolidation initiatives, ensuring optimal workload execution and providing extensive automation capabilities to boost business agility.

We are pleased to bring the latest updates to Dell PowerFlex. This August 2022 software release expands consolidation use cases for PowerFlex, with capabilities that include unified PowerFlex Manager, PowerFlex file services and NVMe/TCP protocol support for host connectivity.
Consolidate and Modernize Without Limits

PowerFlex provides a solid foundation for the customers on their IT modernization journey. It offers support for heterogeneous operating platforms on a common infrastructure deployment, with support for multiple OS, hypervisors and container management platforms. Furthermore, PowerFlex supports a wide variety of Kubernetes and hyperscaler platforms, with the flexibility to utilize either bare metal or virtualized deployment architecture. PowerFlex expanded its repertoire with support for Amazon EKS Anywhere on bare metal to go with Amazon EKS Anywhere in a virtual environment.

The 4.0 release also advances fundamental modernization capabilities for our customers, such as introducing new file services that complement existing block storage services. With this addition, PowerFlex expands its consolidation use cases across file and block workloads, enabling greater consolidation efficiency while simplifying operations.

PowerFlex continues to be at the forefront of cutting-edge technology. With 4.0, we push the edge further with added support for NVMe/TCP, a standards-based protocol that expands PowerFlex host connectivity. This gives customers the option to utilize the next-generation standards-based storage connectivity.

As IT grows and becomes more complex, there is a need for standardization and automation to simplify infrastructure and application workflows. PowerFlex is engineered to streamline operations and boost agility with intelligent software-driven automation. In this release, we have unified tools and UIs needed for lifecycle management and IT Ops with storage management across file and block storage services in the unified PowerFlex Manager. It further simplifies IT Operations and lifecycle management tasks by providing extensive automation within a single user interface, reducing administrative overhead.

Furthermore, a rich out-of-the-box toolset that includes Dell Container Storage Modules (CSM) and CSI drivers, PowerFlex REST API and PowerFlex Ansible modules enhance DevOps productivity and IT agility. Keeping up with the simplification theme, integration with CloudIQ intelligent insights eases monitoring of distributed multi-location PowerFlex deployments by providing a seamless cloud-based AIOps mechanism.
Optimize Your Outcomes

PowerFlex is designed from the ground up to leverage industry standards and software-driven infrastructure optimization. While this release adds new capabilities highlighted thus far, PowerFlex continues to build upon its core competencies.

The architecture delivers massive performance for I/O and throughput-intensive workloads by aggregating resources across many nodes while optimizing data path and placement to deliver the best outcomes. Mission-critical applications running on PowerFlex deliver millions of IOPs at sub-millisecond latency without requiring massive infrastructure build-out, scale performance linearly to thousands of nodes and ensure 99.9999% availability with real-life workloads. The software-driven approach also enables customers to quickly and flexibly scale their infrastructure to address specific resource bottlenecks and reconstruct and reconfigure their resource pools to address changing seasonal or long-term requirements.
Consolidate Like Never Before with PowerFlex

The new capabilities introduced with PowerFlex 4.0 are essential for many of our customers in different phases of their modernization journey. This further expands the values of the PowerFlex software-defined infrastructure platform, helping our customers evolve and modernize their IT on their terms and achieve the objectives that drive their business.