Dell EMC freshens high-end SANs with VMAX makeover, PowerMax
Summary
With a heritage in all-flash VMAX, PowerMax arrays offer improved performance as well as support for inline data deduplication.At Dell EMC World last week in Las Vegas the company announced a refresh of its high-end storage range, with PowerMax unveiled as a successor to EMC’s VMAX and the latest in an evolution that originated in its historic Symmetrix family.PowerMax takes much from the existing VMAX architecture but brings significant upgrades such as support for NVMe flash drives and inline data deduplication.Dell EMC claims the PowerMax 2000 can deliver up to 1.7 million IOPS (read, 8k blocks) with latency below 300µs, which is about 50% better than the VMAX equivalent.The two new PowerMax models are available this week, with Dell EMC indicating that new configurations that incorporate Intel Optane drives are set for 2018 release.