As data volumes proliferate across various industries, the challenge of managing this influx poses significant demands on organizational infrastructure. With the rise of unstructured data formats such as videos, images, and sensor data, the need for robust storage solutions becomes increasingly critical. To address these challenges, companies must prioritize security, data access, performance, and scalability in their storage architectures. Dell Technologies is at the forefront of this transformation, offering innovative solutions that empower businesses to turn data challenges into opportunities. At the recent Dell Technologies World 2025, the company showcased a series of new product announcements designed to streamline data management and enhance data security.
Strengthening Security in an Evolving Threat Landscape
In the current digital landscape, cyber threats are becoming more sophisticated and prevalent. Recent statistics indicate that phishing attacks have surged by over 1,265%, fueled by advancements in generative AI technologies [SentinelOne]. To combat this escalating threat, Dell Technologies has launched the PowerScale Cybersecurity Suite. This AI-driven solution aims to provide comprehensive ransomware detection, significantly minimize downtime during security incidents, and enable near-instant data recovery. The suite comprises three key components:
- Cybersecurity Software: Offers real-time detection and mitigation of ransomware threats, along with detailed audit trails when attacks occur.
- Airgap Vault: Provides immutable backups to ensure critical data remains secure and isolated.
- Disaster Recovery Software: Facilitates seamless failover and recovery processes, ensuring business continuity even during crises.
This holistic approach to cybersecurity not only protects critical data but also instills confidence in businesses that they can effectively respond to and recover from cyber threats.
Enhancing Data Management Across Diverse Environments
As organizations grapple with managing vast quantities of data, Dell’s forthcoming release of PowerScale software introduces features that aim to streamline bucket and object data management, especially within Amazon S3 environments. The addition of S3 Object Lock WORM functionality allows users to secure data immutability, thus safeguarding it against accidental deletions and ransomware. Enhanced capabilities, such as S3 bucket logging and protocol access logging, provide storage administrators with insights into access patterns, fostering proactive governance and improved storage layer security. Additionally, for industries—including finance, healthcare, energy, and government—introducing multi-party authorization creates an extra layer of defense, ensuring compliance with strict regulatory standards.
Balancing Cloud Agility with On-Premise Control
Dell’s PowerScale SmartSync software is another innovation that simplifies workload management by enhancing resilience and data mobility. Businesses can take advantage of the simplicity offered by S3 while leveraging PowerScale’s File-to-Object SmartSync capabilities. This allows them to automate data replication directly to AWS, Wasabi, or Dell ObjectScale, ultimately reducing backup storage costs while enabling easy cloud burst capabilities for compute-intensive applications.
Accelerating Insights with Enhanced Object Storage
A game-changer within the data management landscape is the integration of S3 over RDMA technology, which significantly boosts data transfer speeds. This innovative pairing of S3 object storage with the high-speed, low-latency RDMA network protocol accelerates the real-time processing of extensive datasets while optimizing GPU utilization. Upcoming support for S3 over RDMA with ObjectScale holds promise for faster AI deployments, enabling enterprises to unlock new possibilities in AI-driven analytics. Preliminary testing reveals that, in AI and machine learning workloads characterized by high-concurrency data transfers, S3 over RDMA with ObjectScale can achieve up to 230% higher throughput, 80% lower latency, and 98% reduced CPU load compared to traditional S3 configurations, underscoring the transformative potential of these advancements.
Optimized Storage Solutions for Large-Scale Data Centers
Dell’s ObjectScale platform is designed to meet the storage needs of large data centers, providing unmatched efficiency and scalability. Built on the latest PowerEdge technology, the new PowerEdge R7725xd boasts the highest storage density NVMe configurations in Dell’s portfolio. This platform is also enhanced by NVIDIA BlueField-3 DPUs and NVIDIA Spectrum-4 Ethernet switches, providing planned connectivity of up to 800Gb per second. This is particularly advantageous for cloud service providers and large AI deployments, supporting multi-petabyte scales and facilitating efficient data management of large datasets while offering improved processing speeds and operational costs.
Introducing Project Lightning: Unmatched Performance
Dell Technologies also unveiled Project Lightning, which features the world’s fastest parallel file system, delivering up to 2x greater throughput than competing storage systems. This project is specifically designed for large-scale AI deployments, capable of handling tens of thousands of GPUs. Collaborations with partners like WWT and institutions like Cambridge University are key to its multi-phase customer validation program, which focuses on rigorous performance benchmarking and feature testing. Furthermore, Dell is working alongside NVIDIA to craft a high-performance inferencing solution integrating Project Lightning, PowerScale, PowerEdge XE servers, and NVIDIA KV-Cache, thereby optimizing large-scale AI inferencing capabilities.
Looking Ahead: Continued Innovation
2025 promises to be a pivotal year for Dell Technologies as it continues to push forward with differentiated features and solutions focused on evolving data strategies. With offerings such as PowerScale, ObjectScale, and Project Lightning, Dell is not just addressing today’s challenges but is strategically positioning itself for the future of data management. Organizations eager to stay ahead of the curve should keep an eye on Dell’s developments as the company continues to innovate in the storage landscape. For further insights, readers are encouraged to explore announcements regarding the Dell Data Lakehouse and Dell AI Data Platform Services.
1 Based on Dell internal ObjectScale S3 over RDMA testing, May 2025. Actual results may vary.
2 Based on Dell preliminary testing comparing random and sequential throughput per rack unit, May 2025. Actual performance may vary.