TL;DR
- Infrastructure requirements are changing rapidly as a result of AI, with many enterprises forced to work with outdated, low-performance platforms that can't contend with surging workloads
- Investment in AI-ready storage infrastructure is increasing as IT leaders look to meet performance and efficiency demands
- Dell PowerScale can play a crucial role in underpinning enterprise AI strategies, providing high-performance, scalable storage capabilities
For many enterprises, storage infrastructure still remains a key bottleneck, particularly when it comes to AI adoption. With enterprises contending with increasingly cumbersome AI workloads, the need to scale capacity based on rapidly-changing demand is critical.
2025 analysis from Omdia noted that high-performance storage solutions are “essential for processing large AI models because it directly impacts the efficiency and speed of the entire workflow”.
Simply put, high-performance storage is critical to ensure that data pipelines across the AI adoption lifecycle – from training and inference to deployment – run efficiently.
It’s no wonder, then, that infrastructure investment is now a key priority for IT leaders alongside AI investment itself.
A survey of IT leaders from TechTarget in late 2025, for example, found 89% of respondents plan to make sizable infrastructure investments to underpin and support broader AI projects.
Many IT leaders are also moving fast on this front, with 83% of respondents revealing they plan to upgrade storage within the next two years.
Why Dell PowerScale is a go-to option
With this in mind, it’s critical that organizations looking to upgrade and enhance their storage capabilities choose the right options. There’s a variety of key considerations such as performance, flexibility, scalability, and cost to take into account, however.
This is where platforms like Dell PowerScale excel at modernizing storage in the age of AI.
Trusted by more than 25,000 customers worldwide, Dell PowerScale is a unified file and object scale-out storage platform designed specifically for streamlining data management.
The platform offers enterprises high-performance storage capabilities, as well as robust security and scalability options across both on-premise and cloud architectures. It’s also highly optimized for AI and analytics workloads.
Dell PowerScale in an AI-centric world
AI places significant strain on storage infrastructure due to the vast volumes of data required to fuel models and applications.
This means enterprises now face extremely cumbersome workloads that continue to grow as many shift away from early-stage training processes to tasks such as inferencing.
Research from McKinsey found inferencing workloads are expected to account for more than half of all AI workloads by 2030.
What this means is that enterprises – regardless of whether they’re still in AI training phases or moving to inference activities – require high-performance, scalable storage.
When it comes to performance, Dell PowerScale is designed with AI in mind: it offers high throughput and low latency for optimized performance as well as intelligent tiering features.
This allows enterprises to store and retrieve data efficiently and rapidly, which is crucial for both training and inference.
Given AI workloads are growing in size, scalability is also a key consideration for IT leaders. Enterprises can consolidate large portions of their AI data into single Dell PowerScale clusters, instead of spreading across the IT estate.
From an efficiency perspective, this not only reduces manual toil, but helps keep vital unstructured data exactly where it’s needed and close to the source.
These clusters can also be scaled based on changing requirements, allowing enterprises to seamlessly expand storage capacity as their AI strategies and adoption programs gather pace.
Crucially, this can be achieved without compromising data center space or performance, which is a key differentiator for PowerScale versus non-Dell offerings.
Security in the spotlight with Dell PowerScale
The data used to fuel AI workloads – and thereby customer facing applications and in-house tools – is highly sensitive, meaning security is crucial when it comes to storage infrastructure.
Dell PowerScale supports a zero-trust-aligned security model, including role-based access control, data segregation, and encryption for data at rest and in transit, plus policy-driven compliance and control features built into OneFS.
PowerScale OneFS, the operating system that underpins the storage platform, comes with a “comprehensive set of built-in security features”, according to official Dell materials.
This includes:
- Role-based access controls
- Data segregation capabilities
- Encryption features for data at-rest and in-flight
Dell PowerScale values sustainability
Power demands placed on IT infrastructure as a result of AI have become a recurring talking point over the last three years, and research from Seagate in mid-2025 found IT leaders are still conscious of the impact on sustainability goals.
Almost all (95%) of respondents said they were concerned about the environmental impact of their infrastructure operations amidst rising data volumes and surging AI workloads.
Dell PowerScale ranges are designed with energy efficiency in mind. The PowerScale F910 platform, for example, offers high-performance storage while helping to reduce overall power consumption.
The design of the F910 means it has 20% more density per rack unit than the previous F710 model. The raw performance capabilities of this model also lend well to energy efficiency - simply put, it’s a faster option that provides AI insights up to 2.2x faster than previous iterations for certain AI workloads.
“Let’s take that into context for a minute. If learning an AI model takes 10 hours to complete, being able to do it 2.2 times faster means it would be finished in approximately 4.55 hours,” Dell Technologies explained in a 2025 blog post. “That’s a significant improvement in efficiency and productivity.”
If you think a PowerScale is the right storage solution for your business, find out more on the Dell website: US readers click here and CA readers here.
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