Breakthrough Simplicity and Performance in Enterprise S3 Object Storage

Dell ObjectScale is the next evolution in object storage from Dell Technologies. Built with a software-defined, containerized architecture, ObjectScale delivers enterprise-class, high-performance S3 object storage that leverages the best of microservices and Kubernetes orchestration.

With ObjectScale, you can deliver cloud-scale storage services with the reliability and control of a private-cloud infrastructure. Developers enjoy on-demand, self-service storage via deployment APIs, accelerating application innovation, lowering TCO and empowering a true DevOps culture.

ObjectScale builds on the trusted, proven Dell ECS codebase and takes it to the next level. With over 20 years of experience delivering object storage systems, it is technology you can trust from the #1 object storage vendor.

ObjectScale Release 1.2: What’s New

This new major code update advances your DevOps initiatives with a simpler out-of-the box and management experience, breakthrough performance for emerging workloads and further enhanced Zero Trust features. More than ever, you’re ready to power emerging application and analytics projects backed by the global scale and assurance only available from Dell Technologies.

Our priority is to keep making your object storage experience easier and more flexible. ObjectScale 1.2 takes this to heart with some important enhancements.

Deployment Your Way

Simplify your experience with an expanded choice of deployment models. With a new faster “software bundle” deployment option, Dell can take care of managing the entire software stack for you, including Kubernetes.

We continue to offer an “as-an-Application” option that provides seamless integration with Red Hat OpenShift, now including the latest 4.12 release. Our jointly developed integrated solution with Red Hat gives you the flexibility to run ObjectScale alongside traditional applications on a full-stack Dell infrastructure that includes servers, primary storage and supporting software. This compatibility ensures users can leverage the power of ObjectScale within their existing OpenShift environments.

CloudIQ AIOps for ObjectScale

Now you can monitor your ObjectScale systems, even across multiple locations, with one easy-to-use interface from CloudIQ. CloudIQ is Dell’s cloud-based AIOps application that uses artificial intelligence and machine learning to proactively monitor and predictively analyze Dell infrastructure products together: storage, server, data protection, hyperconverged and network. More advanced than traditional monitoring, CloudIQ’s algorithms and rich visualization help IT staff speed time to resolution of infrastructure issues by two to 10 times faster and save one workday per week on average.  It’s also included with Dell ProSupport agreements.

Power Emerging Workloads with Breakthrough Performance 

ObjectScale 1.2 features breakthrough performance and efficiency enhancements to support the most demanding, high-throughput workloads at scale.

Your development and IT teams can rely on large write performance up to 2GB per node, which enables faster data ingestion and storage. ObjectScale now supports objects as large as 30TB, including replication of these huge objects. This six-fold increase in the maximum object size surpasses the limits set by Amazon S3, making ObjectScale an ideal choice for large-scale projects such as HPC, analytics, AI and their associated backups.

ObjectScale also now provides reporting of logical capacity usage for Dell APEX, facilitating better resource management and planning.

Protect at Scale with Enhanced Zero Trust Features

ObjectScale features data protection and security features that keep your data safe. ObjectScale Lock protects data in a WORM model. Data-at-rest encryption (D@RE) prevents unwanted data access. Global identity and access management (IAM) controls who can perform what actions on which resources under what conditions. And the list goes on.

With the new ObjectScale release, we’re further expanding ObjectScale security and access protocol capabilities. System users now benefit from Active Directory and LDAP support that enables seamless integration with existing user management systems, simplifying user administration and enhancing security. ObjectScale further expands its IAM model with more flexibility and control over access management.

In addition, more flexible erasure coding (EC) options include support for a minimum of four nodes with a 12+4 EC policy, enabling greater data protection and fault tolerance.

Source: dell.com

Continue reading

Four AIOps Advances in Self-service Intelligence for PowerEdge Servers

Artificial intelligence for IT operations (AIOps) software provides IT administrators and DevSecOps teams with the insights to resolve many infrastructure issues without having to escalate them within their organization or make equipment vendor service requests.

CloudIQ is the AIOps application for Dell’s full range of infrastructure systems. Its artificial intelligence/machine learning (AI/ML) and other algorithms empower IT administrators with system health and cybersecurity notifications and recommendations, and other insights, to resolve issues proactively and quickly.

Over the past few months, we’ve expanded CloudIQ with four self-service-enabling features for Dell PowerEdge servers: VMware virtualization view, performance forecasting, maintenance operations and server systems needing updates. 

VMware Virtualization View

VMware virtualization view identifies the relationship of virtual and physical infrastructure and their status with an interface similar to VMware vCenter, which is popular with VMware administrators. This is designed to maximize server administrators’ virtual machine (VM) management productivity. 

At a glance, CloudIQ displays all vCenter instances, their locations, which servers are associated with each local vCenter and the VMs. This intuitive view lets you quickly check server health status and metrics, such CPU, memory and capacity usage – a first step in ensuring VMs are getting the server resources they need. To troubleshoot this further, you can click from the virtualization view directly into CloudIQ’s deep host server analytics with anomaly detection, as well as vCenter itself.

CloudIQ also provides the same vCenter-like view for Dell storage and hyperconverged systems to maximize their administrators’ VM management productivity.

Performance Metrics Forecasting

Performance forecasting predicts server utilization for proactively avoiding outages, handling surge events, planning system upgrades or rebalancing workloads as necessary. 

Need to plan a maintenance window for a server? See the performance forecast to find possible times of low utilization. Curious if systems will be approaching high utilization or will max out sometime in the future? Performance forecasting also enables users to forecast if or when they should expand their infrastructure footprint by adding more servers and to identify opportunities for balancing workloads onto other systems.

Performance forecasting for servers is supported for CPU, memory, system and IO usage.

Maintenance Operations

Maintenance operations enable privileged users to blink server LEDs, power servers on or off and execute server firmware updates to speed repair and lifecycle management.

Actions are initiated in CloudIQ (hosted in Dell’s highly secure data center) and are executed by Dell OpenManage Enterprise software instances deployed on-premises at your organization’s sites and connected to iDRAC controllers in each of your servers.

For example, server administrators can blink LEDs on a server to facilitate physical discovery and identification within a data center for hardware replacement. If servers are nonresponsive and have undesirable behavior, server administrators can power off and power on servers. If administrators suspect that data in CloudIQ is stale for servers, they can initiate a data refresh. Lastly, server administrators improve their productivity by performing firmware updates for multiple servers at once, even across locations, directly from CloudIQ.

Server Systems Needing Updates

CloudIQ’s systems updates page helps you organize and efficiently manage the process of keeping servers across all your locations optimized and secure with the latest firmware releases. The page indicates which servers and components are compliant with the latest firmware releases, which servers need firmware updates and each firmware release’s criticality (e.g., urgent, recommended or optional). Administrators with the required permission can simultaneously initiate firmware updates for up to 200 servers with a single command directly from CloudIQ’s systems update page.

With increased awareness that CloudIQ brings, administrators can make more timely and proactive firmware updates to your fleet of servers across all your locations. Updating many servers at once provides a simple and fast process to ensure they are consistent with the firmware versions you expect.

Figure 1. CloudIQ provides multi-system, multi-site server monitoring and management operations from a single user interface through seamless integration with OpenManage Enterprise deployed at each site and iDRAC controllers in each server.

See the New Features in Action

Because CloudIQ is SaaS-based, a constant flow of new features like those introduced here become instantly available whenever users log into CloudIQ UI via their browsers – no download required. First-time users can get started with CloudIQ today, because it is included with Dell ProSupport/ProSupport Plus contracts and is easy to initiate.

Source: dell.com

Continue reading

Your Hardware, Now Cloud-enabled

Did you know you can now consume your bare metal as a service? And not just physical servers but networking and storage too? Cloud service providers, systems integrators and enterprise customers alike can now provide compute, storage and networking to end customers and business units as a service – all deployed at the click of a button.

We’re proud to announce Dell Technologies has partnered with MetalSoft, an industry pioneer, innovator and leader in the space of bare metal solutions, to create a joint solution that is unique to the industry that serves integrators, cloud providers and enterprise customers.

Read More: DES-1721: Dell EMC SC Series Specialist Exam for Implementation Engineer

Companies of all sizes and verticals, not just Cloud Service Providers, have bare metal infrastructure at their core. To offer this infrastructure as-a-Service internally or externally, a service provider or enterprise IT organization not only needs to make the investment in hardware, but also needs to have the engineering and operational staff to manage it, for which hiring and retaining can be difficult. What if there was a way to automate the entire hardware lifecycle, free those critical staff members from mundane tasks to focus on other revenue-generating – and probably more exciting – activities?

At the same time, users are now more demanding about the types of services they need with regard to their business requirements, and bare metal infrastructure is no longer able to compete with the public cloud in terms of flexibility and speed of delivery. Users are not content having access to a server in weeks because different teams need to configure networking and storage. In this new landscape of agile development and DevOps, customers want fully functional, ready-to-use infrastructure as part of day zero, ready to host their applications for their business solutions. It’s with that mindset they ask not just for provisioned servers, but also for storage capacity configured for those servers and networking to connect them, all at the click of a button. To have an entire platform of compute, storage and networking, along with a computing stack such as Kubernetes, is the overarching goal for service providers and enterprise IT organizations today. The service needs to be ready to run workloads at an instant.

Here is the list of features this solution enables using Dell hardware and the MetalSoft software:

◉ Full lifecycle automation. Reducing OpEx expenditures and automating deployments and reclamation of assets in their datacenters and co-locations.

◉ Self-service-based consumption. End users can build entire infrastructures complete with bare metal compute, private network segments and storage on their own.

◉ Infrastructure as code. The bare metal infrastructure can now be part of the same CI/CD pipelines as the applications running on it improving the development and reliability.

◉ Instant server replace. By “moving” switch configurations from a failed server to a new server, clients can be up and running with minimal delay after a hardware failure.

CSPs and enterprises can now acquire Dell Technologies hardware via CapEx, term or other consumption models and, using the MetalSoft® software, provide it as a service to end customers and business units, with minimal staff requirements.

At the same time, service providers looking to leverage their footprint with edge-type offerings can leverage the MetalSoft software’s scalability and ability to stand up sites with zero touch and operate them remotely from a single pane of glass.

Another use case is emerging from the same talent shortage: cloud repatriation. Many enterprises that want the advantage of the public cloud’s scale find themselves in the impossible situation of having lifted and shifted workloads to the cloud only to discover they’re unable to optimize their workloads to take advantage of it ending up paying more than estimated.

Automated infrastructure, like the one Dell and MetalSoft now offer, provides an alternative to those companies looking to lower their cloud costs, bringing back some of those workloads on the hardware they own and operate.

We invite our customers and partners to explore this unique new opportunity to expand their business, create a new revenue stream and optimize their operations.

Source: dell.com

Continue reading