Dell PowerScale is already powering up the holiday season with the launch of the innovative OneFS 9.7 release, which shipped today (13th December 2023). This new 9.7 release is an all-rounder, introducing PowerScale innovations in cloud, performance, security, and ease of use.
Enhancements to APEX File Storage for AWS
After the debut of APEX File Storage for AWS earlier this year, OneFS 9.7 extends and simplifies the PowerScale in the public cloud offering delivering more features on more instance types across more regions.
In addition to providing the same OneFS software platform on-prem and in the cloud, and customer-managed for full control, APEX File Storage for AWS in OneFS 9.7 sees a 60% capacity increase, providing linear capacity and performance scaling up to six SSD nodes and 1.6 PiB per namespace/cluster, and up to 10GB/s reads and 4GB/s writes per cluster. This can make it a solid fit for traditional file shares and home directories, vertical workloads like M&E, healthcare, life sciences, finserv, and next-gen AI, ML and analytics applications.
PowerScale’s scale-out architecture can be deployed on customer managed AWS EBS and ECS infrastructure, providing the scale and performance needed to run a variety of unstructured workflows in the public cloud. Plus, with OneFS 9.7, an ‘easy button’ for streamlined AWS infrastructure provisioning and deployment.
Once in the cloud, existing PowerScale investments can be further leveraged by accessing and orchestrating your data through the platform’s multi-protocol access and APIs.
This includes the common OneFS control plane (CLI, WebUI, and platform API), and the same enterprise features: Multi-protocol, SnapshotIQ, SmartQuotas, Identity management, etc.
With OneFS 9.7, APEX File Storage for AWS also sees the addition of support for HDFS and FTP protocols, in addition to NFS, SMB, and S3. Plus granular performance prioritization and throttling is also enabled with SmartQoS, allowing admins to configure limits on the maximum number of protocol operations that NFS, S3, SMB, or mixed protocol workloads can consume on an APEX File Storage for AWS cluster.
Security
With data integrity and protection being top of mind in this era of unprecedented cyber threats, OneFS 9.7 brings a bevy of new features and functionality to keep your unstructured data and workloads more secure than ever. These new OneFS 9.7 security enhancements help address US Federal and DoD mandates, such as FIPS 140-2 and DISA STIGs – in addition to general enterprise data security requirements. Included in the new OneFS 9.7 release is a simple cluster configuration backup and restore utility, address space layout randomization, and single sign-on (SSO) lookup enhancements.
Data mobility
On the data replication front, SmartSync sees the introduction of GCP as an object storage target in OneFS 9.7, in addition to ECS, AWS and Azure. The SmartSync data mover allows flexible data movement and copying, incremental resyncs, push and pull data transfer, and one-time file to object copy.
Performance improvements
Building on the streaming read performance delivered in a prior release, OneFS 9.7 also unlocks dramatic write performance enhancements, particularly for the all-flash NVMe platforms – plus infrastructure support for future node hardware platform generations. A sizable boost in throughput to a single client helps deliver performance for the most demanding GenAI workloads, particularly for the model training and inferencing phases. Additionally, the scale-out cluster architecture enables performance to scale linearly as GPUs are increased, allowing PowerScale to easily supports AI workflows from small to large.
Cluster support for InsightIQ 5.0
The new InsightIQ 5.0 software expands PowerScale monitoring capabilities, including a new user interface, automated email alerts and added security. InsightIQ 5.0 is available today for all existing and new PowerScale customers at no additional charge. These innovations are designed to simplify management, expand scale and security and automate operations for PowerScale performance monitoring for AI, GenAI and all other workloads.
In summary, OneFS 9.7 brings the following new features and functionality to the Dell PowerScale ecosystem:
| Feature | Info |
| Cloud | · APEX File Storage for AWS 60% capacity increase
· Streamlined and automated APEX provisioning and deployment · HDFS, FTP, and SmartQoS support |
| Simplicity | · Job Engine Restripe Parallelization
· Cluster support for InsightIQ 5.0 · SmartSync GCP support |
| Performance | · Write performance improvements for NVMe-based all-flash platforms
· Infrastructure support for next generation all-flash node hardware platforms |
| Security | · Cluster configuration backup and restore
· Address space layout randomization · Single sign-on (SSO) lookup enhancements |
We’ll be taking a deeper look at these new features and functionality in blog articles over the course of the next few weeks.
Meanwhile, the new OneFS 9.7 code is available on the Dell Online Support site, as both an upgrade and reimage file, allowing both installation and upgrade of this new release.