Dell unveiled a slate of new features that come with its NAS solution EMC PowerScale on Wednesday, announcing that the tools "provide more flexible consumption, management, protection and security capabilities to eliminate data silos and help you effectively use unstructured data." 

In a statement, the company said the PowerScale hybrid (H700 and H7000) is able to provide 75% more performance than comparable nodes. In contrast, archive nodes (A300 and A3000) are two times more effective than similar products.  

"New PowerScale OneFS and DataIQ software enhancements expand storage management, performance monitoring, auditing and compliance capabilities to simplify file storage at scale. Enhancements to our API-integrated ransomware protection capabilities keep data protected from cyberattacks and now offer cloud deployment options in addition to on-premises," Dell explained in a release. 

"Dynamic NAS Protection, available with PowerProtect Data Manager, delivers a simple, modern way to protect NAS systems through enhanced backup for file data enabling up to 3X faster backups and up to 2x faster restores."

The H700, H7000, A300 and A3000 represent what Dell called a "refresh" of the Isilon line of products that were unveiled last year. Dell said the new nodes offer more cores, memory and cache, additional networking options and more compatibility options. 

Nassos Galiopoulos, CTO at the University of Texas, San Antonio, said the Dell EMC PowerScale provides multiple nodes for transferring unstructured data at high speeds across the school's HPC environment and scaling quickly to support their exponential data growth. 

"We now handle billions of records, along with big data analytics, AI, and machine learning, with tremendous velocity, variety, and volume," Galiopoulos said. 

Later this quarter, Dell will also be releasing updates to OneFS that will allow the OS to "deliver writable snapshots, faster upgrades, secure boot, HDFS ACL support, and improved data reduction and small file efficiency."

DataIQ was enhanced recently to make it easier for users handling large scale clusters, and the updates allowed for UI enhancements as well as the ability to run reports to analyze volumes by time stamps.

Dell unveiled new security features designed to help organizations deal with ransomware attacks. The "Cyber Protection and Recovery solution from Superna for PowerScale" was built to assist enterprises in responding and recovering from ransomware attacks. It now includes the Superna Ransomware Defender tool as well.

"With this solution, customers can recover their data from a cybersecurity event leveraging the public cloud. A new Superna AirGap Enterprise provides more advanced automation to the air gap feature," Dell explained. 

"Additional new productivity features to Superna's Search and Recover and Easy Monitor capabilities also further expand PowerScale's exceptional management and control capabilities. For organizations looking to manage easily, incremental-forever NAS data protection with rapid recovery at the file level, today we announced Dynamic NAS Protection, a simple, modern way to protect your NAS systems." 

USC Australia infrastructure analyst Drew Hills noted that his organization has multiple policies using a variety of backup methods to protect files on their NAS and Windows File Clusters. 

"With PowerProtect Data Manager, Dynamic NAS Protection automatically slices shares, filesystems and volumes into multiple streams that run in parallel within the same policy," Hill added. "It also automatically balances and scales across resources, simplifying management while accelerating backups faster than ever before."

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