Dell overhauls data center portfolio with AI-focused storage, servers and cyber resilience tools

Dell Technologies Inc. today unveiled a broad set of storage, compute, cyber resilience and automation upgrades designed to help enterprises modernize data centers for artificial intelligence workloads while continuing to support traditional applications.

The announcements, made at Dell Technologies World in Las Vegas, include a major refresh of the company’s PowerStore storage line, new PowerEdge servers, expanded cyber recovery offerings and new AI-driven automation.

Dell executives positioned the updates as a response to mounting pressure on enterprise infrastructure as organizations attempt to scale AI workloads without disrupting existing operations.

Storage overhaul

A central component of the news is PowerStore Elite (pictured), which the company described as the largest overhaul of the PowerStore platform since its 2020 introduction. It’s “the biggest leap forward in the platform’s history,” said Varun Chhabra, senior vice president of infrastructure and telecom marketing at Dell.

Chhabra said enterprises are struggling with rapidly changing infrastructure economics, increasing data growth and supply chain pressures while being expected to modernize without disruption.

“Customers aren’t just asking us what performs the best,” he said. “They’re asking if their platform and infrastructure choices will make sense as their needs evolve at a speed that they’ve never seen before.”

PowerStore Elite introduces new hardware and software enhancements that Dell said deliver up to three times more input/output operations, throughput and density than previous generations.

The system can scale up to 5.8 petabytes of effective storage capacity in a single 3U appliance and supports both Triple-Level Cell and Quad-Level Cell flash media using standard Non-Volatile Memory Express drives.

Chhabra said the density improvements are particularly notable.

“With 40 drive slots in a single chassis, we can now store up to 5.8 petabytes in 3U,” he said. A U is the metric used to measure the vertical height of equipment inside a server rack, with one U equal to 1.75 inches.

Dell also increased its storage data reduction guarantee from 5:1 to 6:1, calling it an industry-best figure.

The company said the platform is designed to support continuous modernization through modular upgrades and mixed-generation clustering that allows customers to add new systems without downtime or data migration.

“PowerStore Elite is not just a faster array,” Chhabra said. “It is a new class of modern data platform built to help customers lead through change, not just react to it.”

AI servers

Dell is also expanding its PowerEdge server portfolio with 11 new systems targeting AI, high-performance computing and enterprise consolidation workloads.

The new 18th-generation PowerEdge lineup includes liquid-cooled systems for dense AI deployments as well as air-cooled platforms designed to support large-scale consolidation without major data center retrofits. Chhabra described the release as “its most significant refresh in years.”

According to Dell, the servers deliver up to 70% higher performance and a 13-to-1 consolidation ratio compared with earlier generations.

The company also highlighted new cyber resilience capabilities to combat excalating ransomware attacks and AI-driven threats.

PowerProtect One is a unified cyber resilience platform that combines management, orchestration and protection storage into a single environment. Chhabra said it’s meant to address increasing customer demands for simpler recovery operations and integrated protection. “Fragmented tools and manual workflows slow the response that companies can have to attacks and increase the risk that their business faces,” he said.

Dell said PowerProtect One can reduce deployment time by as much as 75% and cut management overhead in half.

The company also announced Dell Cyber Detect, an AI-powered ransomware detection system that analyzes data at the byte level to identify corruption and determine the last known clean copy after an attack. Dell said the technology was trained on thousands of ransomware variants and can identify compromised data with 99.99% accuracy.

Dell is also expanding its private cloud and automation portfolio. New versions of Dell Private Cloud add support for VMware Cloud Foundation 9.1, Microsoft Corp.’s Azure Local and Nutanix Inc. integrations with Dell PowerStore storage.

Customers are increasingly looking for lower-cost alternatives to hyperconverged infrastructure, said Caitlin Gordon, Dell’s vice president of product management for private cloud and AI solutions. She said Dell Private Cloud can yield up to 65% cost savings compared to hyperconverged infrastructure.

Dell also unveiled new agentic AI capabilities for the Dell Automation Platform, including a conversational interface and intelligent software agents designed to automate infrastructure operations.

The new chat interface, called generative UI, “gives a customer the ability to simply talk to the platform,” Gordon said.

Most of the newly announced products will begin shipping throughout the second half of 2026 and into 2027.

 Photo: Dell