One of the main assets of companies is data. For this, having modern platforms, where to locate them, how to get the best out of them and how to protect them is essential for all companies. Thus, they will be able to find all the competitive advantages in an increasingly demanding market. To talk about it, Byte TI organized a webinar with the participation of Victor Requena, Data Center Sales Specialist at Dell Technologies and David Herrera, Data Center Sales Executive of Dell TechnologiesIt was David Herrera, Data Center Sales Executive of Dell Technologies who assured that “data is a very important part of organizations. That is where the value of the company is. Let’s not say anything anymore, those that have intellectual property. At Dell, we believe that data has a life cycle that we never have to lose sight of. In recent years we have seen an explosion of data unimaginable years ago. Now the data is generated almost anywhere, on a mobile phone, at a traffic light, in the middle of a roundabout, on a tiny sensor, on a corner, on top of a building. And we multiply this by the number of devices, especially in IoT. The amount of data that can be obtained is immense”After this phase of data collection and storage comes one of the phases to which companies pay the most attention. What can be done with that huge amount of data? Herrera affirmed that “they have to be analyzed, they have to be stored correctly. Imagine yourself in a machine learning or artificial intelligence environment. There, that phase of analysis is even more important. Lastly, the last phase would be archiving and securitization”. In line with these three points, Dell proposes PowerStore as a good option to be able to house that data in developing and exploiting it for the new challenges that every company already has. For Herrera, “the data is not different from what we are used to dealing with, but we do have to store it in a different way. What are we finding with traditional storage? Basically that they are becoming obsolete very quickly and that is why a platform like the one we offer is needed. The paradigm shift for a company is to find a platform that was adapted to the future, that could be easily updated, that was not anchored to the standards that we have right now, simplifying planning and eliminating that initial deployment effort. Logically, it would also have to be easy to carry out these deployments and, above all, have that automated innovation. Well, that platform that does not need to be replaced as we used to do in the past, PowerStore comes to cover these problems that we may have”.

Characteristics

One of the problems surrounding the data is its protection. That’s another of Dell’s PowerStore strengths. As explained by Dell’s Data Center Sales Executive, “this platform also has that intelligent integration in which it can protect itself from cyberattacks, doing predictive analysis, doing automated checks, even optimizing the data autonomously and of course, maintaining that life cycle, these updates in the future, without effort and, for example, with our All Inclusive Software policy, which in case of needing new features, would not require that additional purchase of software that is mandatory on other occasions. PowerStore is integrated with automated industry standards such as Siebel, Kubernetes, and more. It can be automated a little further for those customers who may have that layer of automation a little more advanced.”

One of the issues surrounding data is its protection. That’s another of Dell’s PowerStore strengths.

One of the keys is that the platform has a container-based design on the inside, which provides much greater flexibility than other types of infrastructure usually offer. “With this automated optimization, a greater benefit is obtained because we optimize storage much more, also expanding the cabin easily with Scale Up and Scale Out,” says Herrera. Continuing with the modular infrastructure, Herrera added that “within this infrastructure we have this microservices container layer that helps the PowerStore to have that extra intelligent layer.” The PowerStore has end-to-end NVM protocol in both back-end and front-end. And it is that in Dell they assure that there are already clients who are already thinking about making that extra leap, that extra leap to have an end to end layer from the servers to the cabin, with a specific protocol and reducing the speed, increasing the speed, reducing complexity and many times also facilitating deployments with network infrastructure automation as well.

Security

The PowerStore contains various features that have added value. One of them is closely related to cybersecurity and this resistance to attacks. As Herrera stated, “the PowerStore platform meets the security criteria of the United States Agency. Multi-factor authentication with double authentication is included. We also incorporate our immutable snaps, which cannot be modified or deleted even when the administrator account is captured. In addition, all its features are very easy to manage because it is done from the PowerStore console itself: it can be automated, it can be scheduled and it hardly requires additional management, more than what IT departments are doing right now in their storage cabinets But it was Víctor Requena, Data Center Sales Specialist at Dell Technologies, who focused the most on explaining the data protection and securitization part. In his opinion, “the power of any platform is useless without security. There are several aspects to take into account in this regard. The first is that the level of disruption in our systems has grown, it has increased in an unprecedented way. And the main cause of this disruption is cyber attacks. Malware is growing more than 25% annually. These cyberattacks, in most cases, have data as their objective. Also, in part, this growth has been due to changes in organizations, such as the appearance of the cloud in recent years. Companies are no longer operating solely in their data center, now we take computing and storage to where the data is born and that means taking everything out of our data center, also added to another new factor that is remote employees”. To protect the data , plus there is an increase in the level of complexity. In this sense, at Dell they consider that working with providers with global solutions produces better results than having security segregated in a multitude of providers. “Dell’s vision is simply to offer that protection in a simple, efficient way, to protect both the data we have in our local storage systems, but also in more advanced workloads such as containers, cloud protection, etc. ”, affirms Requena. Dell offers different levels of protection. One of our security solutions is the Dell Data Protection portfolio, where we include our PowerProtect Data Domain, which are our backup appliances, but together with all our backup and protection software, such as PowerProtect Data Manager. Requena focused on its PowerProtect Data Domain solution: “It is a backup appliance that allows us to send all the information from our different production environments, from our applications. From the PowerStore itself we will be able to send the information directly to the Data Domain, which is already a tremendous saving in terms of the backup window, in terms of performance and in terms of security. But we are also going to have applications, environments that we are going to be able to send to our backup appliance. It is a multi-protocol backup appliance, agnostic to backup software. With this, companies are not only going to have the Disaster Recovery option, but now, in current times, the photo of the Travel Recovery Site is born, a third site where we can protect ourselves against cyberattacks.