Dell Technologies has introduced PowerStore Elite, a new enterprise storage platform focused on AI-era workloads, higher storage density, ransomware detection, and non-disruptive modernisation. The company claims the platform delivers up to three times higher performance and throughput than previous PowerStore systems while offering a new 6:1 data reduction guarantee.
Announced at Dell Technologies World 2026, the new platform combines updated hardware with software-led improvements. Dell says the system is engineered to let businesses modernise storage without downtime or major infrastructure changes.
PowerStore Elite supports block, file, virtual machine, and container workloads. Existing PowerStore customers can also cluster older and newer generations together, allowing upgrades without disrupting operations.
Arthur Lewis, president of Infrastructure Solutions Group at Dell Technologies, said the platform is designed for long-term infrastructure planning. “Private clouds are only as powerful as the storage underneath them. Nearly 20,000 customers trust PowerStore to run their business and with PowerStore Elite, customers get a generational leap in performance and density on a container-based architecture built to evolve with their workloads,” Lewis said.
Performance and density upgrades
Dell claims PowerStore Elite delivers up to three times more performance and throughput compared to earlier systems. The company attributes the gains to software improvements and new hardware architecture.
The updated systems run on Intel Xeon Scalable processors with up to 50% more CPU cores than earlier models. Dell has also added DDR5 memory, PCIe Gen 5 support, and a new 200 Gb RDMA node interconnect for faster failover and load balancing.
Three new models are part of the lineup: PowerStore 1500, 5500, and 9500.
Dell says the flagship configuration can pack up to 5.8 PB of effective capacity into a single 3U chassis with support for 40 drives. The company also highlighted its use of standards-based E3 NVMe flash storage instead of proprietary hardware, which could help customers avoid vendor lock-in and manage flash supply shortages more easily.
AI driven automation and ransomware detection
A major focus of the announcement is automation and cyber resilience. Dell says built-in AI capabilities can reduce manual management tasks by up to 95% by automatically balancing workloads and tuning performance. Fleet-wide AIOps features are also included for predictive monitoring, reporting, and capacity planning.
The company also introduced Dell Cyber Detect for PowerStore, an integrated ransomware detection feature expected later in 2026. According to Dell, the system analyses data at the byte level and can detect ransomware corruption with 99.99% confidence. It is trained using thousands of ransomware variants and helps identify the last known clean copy of data for faster recovery.
Scott Sinclair, practice director at Omdia, said flexibility is becoming a key buying factor in the storage market. “The storage market is being reshaped by AI growth, ransomware pressure and a tightening flash supply, and enterprises can’t afford infrastructure decisions that lock them into a single path,” Sinclair said.
Focus on private cloud and modern workloads
Dell is also positioning PowerStore Elite as a foundation for private cloud environments.
The platform supports cloud stacks from vendors including Broadcom, Microsoft, Nutanix, and Red Hat. Dell claims organizations using Dell Private Cloud with disaggregated infrastructure could reduce costs by up to 65% compared to hyperconverged infrastructure deployments.
For modern application environments, the platform supports unified scale-up and scale-out architecture across four-appliance clusters, with dynamic CPU resource allocation and NAS server mobility for workload balancing.