As Indian enterprises shift from experimenting with artificial intelligence to deploying it at scale, Dell Technologies is betting that the future of enterprise AI will be built inside private data centres rather than relying heavily on the public cloud.
On June 30, Dell unveiled its new PowerStore Elite storage platform in India, positioning it as an enterprise-grade solution for organisations looking to run AI workloads on-premises while keeping sensitive data within their own infrastructure.
The launch comes as businesses increasingly focus on data sovereignty, lower latency, predictable operating costs and long-term infrastructure investments. Dell says PowerStore Elite is designed not just as a storage platform but as the backbone of a modern data centre capable of supporting evolving AI workloads without requiring major hardware overhauls.
Venkat Sitaram, Senior Director and Country Head of Dell Technologies’ Infrastructure Solutions Group in India, said the platform integrates AI ecosystems from companies such as NVIDIA, OpenAI and Google into a single, centrally managed infrastructure.
New hardware, greater storage capacity
The new 3U storage appliance replaces proprietary storage modules with industry-standard E3 NVMe flash memory. According to Dell, the shift improves storage density while reducing vendor dependency and minimising supply chain risks. The company has also adopted a modular hardware design that makes future upgrades easier.
Customers can replace controllers, networking components and other hardware without shutting down systems, eliminating the need for large-scale data migrations during upgrades. PowerStore Elite also supports mixed-generation clustering, allowing organisations to integrate newer systems alongside existing deployments without disrupting operations.
Dell says the platform delivers up to three times the performance, throughput and storage density of its previous-generation storage systems. It also offers an effective storage capacity of up to 5.8 petabytes through a guaranteed 6:1 data reduction ratio.
The company says the increased storage density allows AI models to operate closer to primary datasets, helping reduce latency and improve workload performance.
PowerStore Elite is powered by next-generation Intel Xeon processors, DDR5 memory, PCIe Gen 5 connectivity and an upgraded node interconnect. Dell says software enhancements, including an AI-optimised data path and intelligent workload balancing, further improve read performance while lowering CPU usage and reducing the need for manual storage management.
Cutting cloud costs
Dell is positioning PowerStore Elite as an alternative to recurring cloud expenses for enterprise AI deployments.
According to the company, businesses running locally hosted AI models on its Deskside Agentic AI system can reduce software costs by as much as 87 per cent over two years. The estimate applies to AI models ranging from 30 billion to one trillion parameters.
For larger enterprise deployments, Dell also introduced PowerRack, an integrated platform that combines compute, networking and storage into a unified infrastructure.
Built on NVIDIA’s Vera Rubin architecture, PowerRack can reportedly be deployed in less than six and a half hours. Dell says the platform is designed to reduce the cost per token for large-scale AI inference workloads.
Focus on security and enterprise adoption
Alongside the new storage platform, Dell announced Cyber Detect, an AI-powered security solution expected to launch in the third quarter of 2026. The software scans storage systems at the byte level to identify ransomware attacks, with Dell claiming a detection accuracy of 99.99 per cent.
If malicious activity is detected, the platform automatically isolates the most recent clean copy of affected data, which Dell says can reduce manual recovery efforts by up to 95 per cent.
Dell also highlighted growing enterprise adoption of its private cloud infrastructure in India. Among its customers is Omega Healthcare, which uses the platform across its delivery centres in India to support administrative and clinical operations for hospital networks in the United States, where uninterrupted access to critical data is essential.
