Power as Big as Your Ideas

The family that brought you the world’s smallest, the world’s thinnest and lightest, the world’s most manageable, the world’s most powerful AND the world’s first Ready for VR mobile workstations is at it again, this time with faster memory, professional-grade graphics and the latest 8th Gen Intel® Core™ i7+ vPro™ processor and Intel® Xeon® processor that are unsurpassed.

With an impressive industrial design and innovative features to boost performance, like the Dell Precision Optimizer and 4K InfinityEdge display, this new series of fully customizable Dell Precision mobile workstations is perfect for both creative collaborations and for running the most demanding professional software. Our high-end 7000 Series are also up to 15 percent smaller in size, so your customers can now handle bulky projects without the bulky hardware.

On top of that, each of these workstations is certified with the professional applications your customers need to deliver their best work. Together with a complete array of accessories, including state-of-the-art docking solutions, it’s easy to see why Dell Precision workstations are the #1 workstations in the world.

Where the Competition Can’t Compete

Dell Precision has many advantages over its competitors – one being Dell Precision Optimizer. Your customers shouldn’t have to waste hours manually setting up their workstations just to get the best possible Independent Software Vendor (ISV) application performance when they can set it up at the touch of a button. The Dell Precision Optimizer will automatically tune their Dell Precision workstation to the software they’re using, delivering performance gains of up to 394 percent2 and allowing them to get on with their mission-critical work. Our top competitor can’t come close to that claim.3 If that’s not enough, the latest version of Dell Precision Optimizer will use machine learning to identify optimization opportunities and apply performance improvements as it runs.

You can further help get your customers’ Dell Precision workstations up and running faster than ever before with ProDeploy Plus. With ProDeploy Plus your customers can save up to 35 percent of deployment time4. We load their image on their new Dell Precisions in our factory which accelerates the deployment of software like heavy CAD and design packages. Your customers receive their workstations ready to use straight from the factory. They’ll also receive a single point of contact for project management and service delivery, including up-front deployment planning, configuration, data migration and knowledge transfer. 

Precision Peripherals With a Purpose

The days of eDocks on our Dell Precisions are a thing of the past. And although this takes some getting used to, the benefits are undeniable. Our Dell Thunderbolt™ Dock allows your customers to connect their Dell Precision to a single data and power source that delivers up to 130W of power for the ultimate display performance. Your customers will enjoy faster data transfers and up to three FHD displays or two 4K displays. Customers can keep their performance topped up with Dell ExpressCharge™ technology, which can charge their Precision battery up to 80 percent capacity in about an hour and to full capacity in 2 hours5.

Speaking of displays, the Dell 27” UltraSharp Monitor with Premier Color (UP2716D) is the perfect display for ideal color coverage and incredible clarity on color-critical projects. Your customers can realize their creations in real time and enjoy an exceptional viewing experience made possible by ultrathin bezels, stunning resolution and ultrawide viewing.

Whether your end users are designers, video and photo editors, engineers or architects, having access to an interactive workspace that lets them naturally create in the digital world is an incredible advantage. The Dell Precision 5000 or 7000 Series can help break the boundaries of their traditional workspace when it powers the Dell Canvas. The revolutionary “do” surface interacts seamlessly with Dell Precision workstations to encourage hands-on collaboration with 20 points of touch recognition for exact replication of what was imagined.

VR and AR Solutions for Professionals

We work closely with our hardware and software partners to bring you Ready for VR solutions optimized for creation and utilization in collaboration with professional ISV applications.

The new Dell Precision mobile workstation series is the perfect platform for virtual reality (VR) and augmented reality (AR) content creation and advanced commercial visualization. They’ve been upgraded with the latest 8th Gen Intel® Core™ i7+ vPro™ processor and Intel® Xeon® processor that have more cores and performance for multi-threaded applications that are ideal for professional modeling, analysis and calculations. But don’t take our word for it; try out our Dell Precision virtual reality game to get your sales team engaged with the latest suite of products.

Communicate With Precision

We’ve created a set of marketing assets that will help expand your revenue potential by pinpointing your customer communication on the benefits of the new Dell Precision mobile workstations.

You can add your own personal touch to these marcom assets for deeper engagement, while the quick-reference call scripts provided will equip your sales force with the right answers when engaging customers.

All the assets are available for download on the Digital Marketing Platform, so that you can deploy the email and social content directly to your customers from the tool.

You can also download the newest Dell Precision Family Brochure now available and tune into the webinar find out how you can transform your customers’ workplace into a hub of productivity.

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Dell OptiPlex Celebrates Anniversary with All-New, Space-Saving Solutions

This year marks the 25th anniversary of desktop innovation. During that time, the world’s most secure commercial PCs have continuously redefined “less is more” with revolutionary form factors that deliver increased elbowroom while providing reliable, intelligent performance and flexibility that allow users to truly work the way they want.

Now Dell OptiPlex has cleared the path to outstanding productivity even more with the launch of the newest Dell™ OptiPlex™ Micro and All-in-One. On top of their innovative form factors, opulent views and collaborative advantages, the new OptiPlex Series provides more mounting options than ever, and integrative designs that allow ecosystems to adapt to the new ways people work.

In addition, they come packed with performance-enhancing features like the latest 8th Gen Intel® Core™ i7+ vPro™ processor – a combination of the greater security and productivity via vPro™ CPUs and Intel® Optane™ memory, the smart and adaptable system accelerator. This provides an unparalleled amount of high throughput, low latency, high-quality service and high endurance. This helps your customers save room, resources, time and money – all while delivering the ultimate in versatility for desktop users.

Micro PCs Deliver Macro Opportunity

According to a recent Forrester report, 52 percent of PC buyers cite space utilization as a top challenge when it comes to traditional desktops1. As the need for office space steadily increases, the demand for micro PCs has never been greater1. Perhaps that’s why 72 percent of IT decision makers (ITDMs) are either maintaining or increasing their investment into micro PCs1.

With the full functionality of a traditional desktop at a fraction of the space and cost, the new OptiPlex Micro desktops, including the OptiPlex 7060 Micro enabled with Intel® Unite™ software for faster content sharing among teams, provide more collaboration across multiple devices and platforms. It’s no wonder 66 percent of ITDMs agree that adopting PCs like the OptiPlex Micro improves the overall employee experience1. But that’s not all; OptiPlex Micro can also help:

◈ Improve ergonomics

◈ Enhance flexibility of deployment

◈ Reduce clutter and downtime

It’s safe to say that, with 81 percent of workers using a desktop as their primary computing device1, the desktop is still a key business tool. From smart classrooms to call centers to doctor offices and beyond, the new OptiPlex Micros are designed to transform any workspace into a space-saving environment that encourages greater employee productivity.

Everything You Need, All in One Place

The all-new OptiPlex AIO series is comprehensive, to say the least. It’s fully featured design comes in small form factors that deliver an impressive interface and security solutions. So whether it’s desk work, working remotely, dashing between conference rooms or a combination of all of them, these OptiPlex AIOs offer superior manageability and can accommodate an extensive portfolio of peripherals and services to give users a superior desktop experience in any of these scenarios.

These flexible AIO devices, with award-winning displays and multiple wireless options that promote a cleaner and more functional workspace, also come available with optional virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI) solutions via Dell EMC VDI Complete Solutions. This means ITDMs can protect vital content, support a vast array of clients and efficiently manage desktops and remote offices for their workforce all from one central location. With VDI, they can:

◈ Simplify VDI planning, deployment and management with a single point of contact from Dell

◈ Enable BYOD and securely deliver any Windows application to any user on any device

◈ Add energy-efficient, award-winning Wyse thin clients and software to suit any budget, application or performance requirements. Designed for cost-effective virtual desktop deployments, the All-in-One thin client delivers great value from day one with minimal initial investment and power-efficient operation.

Also available is the optional Intel® Standard Manageability technology that offers remote out-of-band management capabilities for increased productivity and support

More Monitors, More Manageability, More Support

If your customers are looking for even more ways to simplify their workspace management through smart solutions, then Dell Multi-Display, Client Command Suite with the New Dell Remote Provisioning Toll for Intel® Core™ vPro™ processors and ProSupport Plus with SupportAssist are the answers. Top 3 reasons for multi-display setup:

INCREASED PRODUCTIVITY

◈ Up to an 18 percent increase in user efficiency2

◈ Quickly and accurately complete tasks

◈ Locate information and content faster HIGHER USER SATISFACTION

◈ 91 percent of multi-display users report greater satisfaction at work2

◈ Display more information at once

◈ Increase your visual work area

IMPROVED TASK ACCURACY

◈ Simultaneously compare and view information

◈ Improve task accuracy and overall efficiency

◈ Reduce app window switching by 15 percent2

The Dell Client Command Suite offers a set of end-to-end tools that make Dell commercial client systems the world’s most manageable client devices. Your customers will be able to:

◈ Automate and streamline system deployment, configuration, monitoring and updates

◈ Manage all Dell systems simultaneously across the globe, regardless of their IT method (SCCM, Kace, LANdesk, etc.) with unique one-to-many Intel® vPro™ capabilities that allow significant time reduction for remote manageability through its Remote Provisioning Tool.

◈ Maximize hardware investments, increase efficiency and reduce time spent on manual, error-prone tasks.

Bottom line: With Dell Client Command Suite, your customers can save up to $57 per PC per year.3

For support that keeps your customers ahead of trouble, they’ll find Dell ProSupport with SupportAssist the most complete service for their PCs. It’s predictive and proactive significantly increasing PC optimisation by resolving failed hard drives faster – 10x faster than HP, Lenovo or Apple4, with up to:

◈ 91 percent less time to resolution

◈ 48 fewer minutes to resolution

◈ 72 percent fewer steps in the support process

◈ 21 fewer steps to resolution.

Spread the Word

We’ve built a set of marketing assets that will help expand your revenue potential by putting you at the forefront of your customer communications when explaining the benefits of the new OptiPlex Micro desktops and the new OptiPlex AIOs.

You can add your own personal touch to these marcom assets for deeper engagement, while the quick-reference call scripts provided will equip your sales force with the right answers when engaging customers.

All the assets are available for download on the Digital Marketing Platform, so that you can deploy the email and social content directly to your customers from the tool.

You can also download the newest OptiPlex Family Brochure now available and tune into the webinar find out how you can transform your customers’ workplace into a hub of productivity.

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Dell EMC PowerEdge Tops Big Data Analysis Systems Benchmark

Dell EMC Re-takes Performance Lead on TPCx-Big Bench Benchmark at Scale Factor 10000 Using 14G Hardware Platform

Computer benchmarking is the practice of discovering, measuring and assessing the relative performance of a system for a specific workload. Industry standard benchmarks allow researchers to compare the best performance being achieved by their systems to those of another entity (competitor) or to an entirely different industry. This information can then be used to identify gaps in an organization’s performance processes to achieve a competitive advantage. It is also used to compare the performance of the various vendor offerings within the Industry.

Dell EMC uses industry-standard benchmark tests to provide objective and verifiable performance data to its customers as it relates to its hardware platforms and solutions. Customers can use this data when designing and sizing a solution to deliver optimal performance for their business use cases and to scale as needed.

As big data analysis systems (BDAS) mature, the pressure to evaluate and compare both the performance and the price performance of these systems rises. To address this, the Transaction Processing Performance Council (TPC) developed the TPCx-Big Bench (TPCx-BB), a benchmark standard for comparing BDAS solutions.

Dell EMC published a SF10000 TPCx-BB benchmark result that occupies the number 1 position for both the Performance and Price/Performance tables on the TPC website. With this result, and as at that date, Dell EMC topped the Performance and Price/Performance tables of the TPCx-BB benchmark at SF10000. 

System Under Test

For this submission, the System Under Test (SUT) comprised 1 x DELL EMC PowerEdge R640 Server (Master node) and 18 x Dell EMC PowerEdge R740xd Servers (Slave nodes) as depicted in the System Configuration diagram below:

What was tested and measured?

The benchmark is designed to stress the CPU and IO systems of a Big Data Cluster using a single stream (power test) and concurrent streams (throughput test) of 30 queries (workloads).  Each run is performed under 3 phases: Load, Power and Throughput. For the test to pass an audit, 2 sequential performance runs must be executed.

Results

The overall TPCx-BB performance data for the Dell EMC R640/R740xd configuration is summarized in the table below:

Load Test: 2,190.66s

Power Test: 18,949.43s

Throughput Test: 70,134.07s

Performance Metric: 1,660.75 BBQpm@SF10000

Total System Cost $908,125

Price/Performance 546.82 $/BBQpm@SF10000

Availability Date: March 20, 2018

Competitive Landscape

The TPCx-BB benchmark standard has published results on SF1000, 3000, 10000 and 30000. Dell EMC has one SF10000 published result submitted in May, 2017 based on 13G hardware (Intel Xeon Broadwell based processors). As of April 04, 2018, only Dell EMC and HPE have published results at SF10000 based on servers with Intel Xeon Skylake processors. The published results for SF3000 and 1000 from HPE and Huawei are based on Intel Broadwell and Haswell family of processors. The only result the Dell EMC 14G performance data can realistically be compared to is the latest HPE SF10000 result:

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Boosting Business Agility, Eliminating Bottlenecks with 25GbE

Networks are the modern data center’s foundation. Rapid information growth and evolving applications require real-time responses. This has led businesses of all sizes to build up their corporate data centers by including a growing number of modern compute and storage platforms. These modern data centers require high-performance interconnections between all of the various server and storage devices via a high-speed information superhighway, both within the rack and between the racks.

Unfortunately, a bottleneck exists within the data center network infrastructure that prohibits organizations from reaching optimum application performance. That bottleneck is the 10GbE I/O connection from the server/storage devices to the top-of-rack (ToR) Ethernet switch (See Figure 1).

This problem is exacerbated when there is an abundance of virtualization and cloud-based traffic occurring in real time. The rapid growth of server virtualization introduced significantly more east-west Virtual Machine (VM) network traffic between servers and the chassis to accommodate the real-time mapping of resources and led to a migration to 10GbE connections.

However, along with increased use of server virtualization, many organizations are also implementing multi-processor servers, all-flash storage systems and cloud-based technologies that require even higher-speed I/O communications. These transformations are described in the IDC study “Accelerate Business Agility with Faster Server Refresh Cycles,” where businesses must keep infrastructures up to date in order to support the scale and complexity of a changing application landscape. So, now as companies consider and plan their server refreshes as part of IT Transformation, they need to consider upgrading their network – by upgrading to 25GbE.

Figure 1 – 10GbE In-rack connectivity

Based on the projected rapid growth of 25GbE adoption in a 2017 Ethernet Switch market update by the Dell’Oro group, server and storage vendors are now shipping 25GbE I/O on their platforms (See Figure 2). These new 25GbE I/Os utilize more efficient chip technology and provide 2.5x the bandwidth over existing 10GbE connections. That’s like taking an existing 4-lane highway and expanding it to a 10-lane highway.

There are also some added benefits when using 25GbE including a more efficient use of valuable switching ASIC I/Os (1 instead of 4 used by 10GbE and 40GbE) and the ability not having to replace existing 10GbE fiber optic cabling when upgrading to 25GbE. This expanded 25GbE connectivity will greatly enhance traffic flows between devices in the rack as well as enhance traffic up into the data center fabric and to other racks connected to the fabric.

Figure 2 – Data Center switching speeds (Dell-Oro Group 2017)

There are a number of switch vendors in the market, including Dell EMC, who are shipping 25GbE switches to ensure their servers are operating at peak performance and achieve transformational SLAs. These new switches offer ports that can provide native 25GbE connections as well as multi-rate speeds that include 10/25/50/100GbE connections. The best news is that both enhancements in 25GbE chip technology and higher levels of customer demand are helping to bring the cost of 25GbE technology to almost the same price of existing 10GbE platforms.

When going through a server refresh campaign within the data center, it now makes sense to take a closer look at incorporating 25GbE I/Os in those new servers. Also coordinate with the networking team to take a look at the ToR Ethernet switches within the racks and see if they can efficiently handle 25GbE switching connectivity within the rack. If not, it might be a good time to investigate the implementation of a new generation of 25GbE Ethernet switches that support IT Transformation initiatives and additional OPEX savings by using less power, requiring less cooling and taking up less space as compared to existing switches in the rack.

When you’re making the switch over, remember that not all infrastructure is the same. It must be modernized. You don’t have to use the same vendor you’ve always used. In fact, being vendor indifferent is preferred for modern networking. Rather than just upgrading to yet another proprietary switching solution, take the time to investigate Dell EMC 25GbE open networking solutions that can provide you with open, standards-based technology disaggregation that embraces choice, flexibility and innovation within the network infrastructure. For example, when adopting an open networking solution with a choice of operating system (OS) software running on the switch hardware, Linux-savvy server administrators can take advantage of a Linux-based OS running on their switches and adopt a more common interface across both server and networking resources (see Figure 3). They will also be able to leverage the large talent pool available in Linux and open source standards-based communities for data center automation and orchestration tools that help accelerate rapid innovation and organizational agility.

Figure 3 – Empowering Linux in the data center with 25GbE Open Networking

As applications and their respective server platforms continue to evolve, adoption of 25GbE into the data center networking infrastructure is a necessity for all organizations. Including a 25GbE upgrade to the network when going through a server refresh ensures the elimination of bottlenecks that rob modern infrastructures of their performance and agility gains. Let Dell EMC help transform your IT with modern data center 25GbE solutions.

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Teraflops and Engineering Your Way to Artificial Intelligence Scale

Often I talk to customers who are in a journey to implementing Artificial Intelligence (AI) in their organization. I wrote about some best practices around Deep Learning. In this blog, I am going to get more prescriptive about how you would and probably should explore “Scaling AI” inside your organization.

To start, I am assuming that organizations have already developed a noteworthy model. This can be at inception Modelling or Natural Language Processing. You can deploy on GPUs or CPUS.  Stochastic Gradient Descent or Micro-Batches. You have trained your model and are ready for inference deployments. Or are you?

Models – Day 2

What happens when you want to train more than one model at a time?  What happens if you are sourcing multiple inference models at the same time?

Welcome to a few days into your production AI/Deep Learning environment and your environment starts hosting multiple models and Data Science teams at once.

What is the best way for you to capture these statistics at scale? What components matter most when you Scale AI?

Queueing Theory

Queueing theory is probably most eloquently articulated in the postulate around “Little’s Law”.  Little’s Law deals with the queueing of “arrivals” and response times.  In algebraic terms for infrastructures, process or file occupancy = latency x bandwidth.  Each process (be it GPU or CPU) to train or deploy a production model depends on how fast it can get serviced and completed.  Mathematically, the discussion of latency vs bandwidth has been debated for decades.  This is hindered by each implementation of a storage operating system with its locks and latches, network latency, storage bandwidth, network bandwidth, and compute parallelism that drives great arrival rates.  It has been argued that bandwidth is far greater than latency for servicing requests at scale.  Great bandwidth causes increased latency depending on the latches and locks on the underlying storage infrastructure.  As such, this becomes a puzzle that has customers often asking for help when they wrap their heads around Scaling AI.

Other Factors

There have been a number of studies looking at various elements of running analytics at scale.  Compression and Encoding algorithms for data files were the topic of one recent study at storage content at scale.  For most of my lab testing, we use Protocol Buffers (ProtoBuf) with LZO compression.  There are native hooks into the Deep Learning Frameworks (e.g., Tensorflow, Caffe2) to handle native ProtoBuf file serialization and streaming on read.  This allows for effective utilization of binary encoding and CPU optimized compression.

When you are singly running training models or deploying models for inference, it is easy to tweak data to fit the whole model in cached memory.  What happens when this environment becomes multi-tenant?  A dev or data scientist can no longer guarantee that all model data be loaded into memory for training or inception.  This pushes down more concurrency and arrivals to the storage layer.  Caches, spill space, and software defined caches can certainly help.  At any given scale, this will probably still push a large amount of concurrent requests to the storage layer for servicing around inference or training models.

Containers are all the rage.  Containerization of workloads certainly makes trouble shooting and deploying models and environments easier.  The complexity comes into the ability to load durable storage into the container.  Either all the data is loaded into each container, the container security model is breached to allow durable storage connections, or a container bridge is deployed that allows full fidelity security containers that can leverage file or object external systems for durable model data.  Our recommended approach would be a container bridge to maintain container security and allow external shared durable storage for model and training data.  This allows manageability and scale to be maximized.

What does good look like?

Let’s start to tie back some of the items raised above to drill into the specifics.

Let’s assume you have a series of Inception and NLP models running at scale.  Based upon our internal analysis running several deep learning frameworks, storage profiles as Random IO (i.e., random reads) for Deep Learning.  If you assume a highly read centric workload when training or deploying inference models, they each have different level of parallelism.  Training can only go so embarrassingly parallel with respect to GPU size and how the mini-batch optimizers are organized.  Inference of trained models can deploy in very embarrassingly parallel configurations.  This brings different levels of dynamics when all are running at once in the same cluster.  If the training is isolated to one cluster of compute/storage and inference is serviced via another cluster, this will be easier to model mathematically.  If you have serialized your data, it will allow a manageable compression and optimization of file management.  A single serialized file will add more single file concurrency than managing a myriad of small files though.  The tradeoff occurs when a storage subsystem doesn’t degrade latency via little’s law with more concurrent connections and allows optimization of storage and management through serialization.  If the overarching factors start to sound like chess vs checkers, then you are starting to realize the complexity associated with Scaling AI.

If you assume a compute farm worthy of embarrassingly parallel workloads, then you can start the math model around your environment.  Little’s Law is a good place to start.  How many concurrent models should we expect of what types (training vs inference)?     What types of architectures within the Neural Network on what sized images, text bits, or serialized files in what configurations (e.g., CNNs, RNNs)?  What is the expectation around turn time with regard to wall clock model completion times?  These factors can be leveraged into network capabilities modelling (10G vs 40G for example), storage chassis with concurrency and bandwidth metrics (1M concurrent reads per second at 15 GB/sec per 4u storage chassis).

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More Secure Software for a Safer Digital Transformation

Many cyberattacks can be linked to a software vulnerability exploited by attackers seeking to gain unauthorized access to targeted organizations’ systems or applications. The digital transformation which brings more software to smart connected devices, also creates more opportunities for attackers to exploit vulnerabilities.

We all have a role to play: The battle to ensure that organizations achieve the full potential of their digital transformation must be fought on two fronts:

Organizations need to transform their security by using a risk-driven, proactive approach, which at Dell we call “Security Transformation”.

Developers must build more secure software to minimize software vulnerabilities and the exposure of devices on which their software is deployed.

Developing more secure software is less about technology, and more about people and processes. It requires an industry-wide effort that focuses on educating software engineers and driving the adoption of a secure software development process.

I discussed the need to start teaching security to all developers at the time we teach them how to code, not years later, after they have graduated from college.

On the process side, I am excited to share that SAFECode recently released the Third Edition of its Fundamental Practices for Secure Software Development. Security experts from Dell EMC and from other SAFECode member companies have created this authoritative best practices guide based on their extensive experience in order to encourage the industry-wide adoption of secure development practices.

Successful digital transformation must be built on a foundation of secure software. Please help us drive adoption of secure development practices by sharing SAFECode’s Fundamental Practices for Secure Software Development with security practitioners and with every software professional in your organization.

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Powerfully Simple: Modern Management for Dell EMC Data Protection

Visibility across Dell EMC Data Protection Software and protection storage brings simplicity.

Dell EMC is announcing modern, simple management for Dell EMC Data Protection.

This modern management enables users to gain control over their data protection through:

◈ Complete visibility via customizable dashboards

◈ Unified management across multiple sites and systems

◈ Simple search and recovery enabled by Google-like keyword search

◈ Comprehensive reporting generated with a single click

◈ Simple protection automation

◈ VMware integration

Dell EMC Data Protection management software is easily downloadable and included without additional cost with Dell EMC Data Protection Software.

Complete Visibility via Dashboards

A comprehensive view across data protection environments allows users to gain a complete picture of their data protection environment. Through customizable dashboards, they can instantly identify the health of their data protection environment and the capacity of their protection storage and servers. Dell EMC Data Protection management software also provides an efficient method to manage policies across multiple systems and ability to swiftly identify/resolve issues with real-time alerts.

Unified Management Across Sites and Systems

Our unified management allows users to manage their data protection across multiple sites, systems, and consumption models with centralized management.  It addresses the majority of day-to-day tasks from a single pane of glass to perform policy management and run backups on-demand.

Simple Search and Recovery

Dell EMC Data Protection makes search and recovery simple.  Our management software offers a Google-like keyword search and powerful filtering that makes it easy to find relevant file(s) across data protection systems. Users can recover directly from their search results, greatly reducing the time to recovery.

Comprehensive Reporting    

                                             

Businesses often need up-to-date information about the data protection process as a whole to ensure SLOs are being met. Comprehensive reporting allows you to run pre-configured reports on-demand with a single click.

Simple protection automation

Through our management software, backup administrators can automatically discover database assets, provision protection storage, and enforce policy management, allowing them to efficiently monitor and enforce SLO compliance.

VMware Integration

VMware integration enables vAdmins to protect VMware environments from native interfaces and protect across multiple vCenters from a modern vSphere plugin.

Dell EMC modern management enhances our comprehensive portfolio of data protection in the industry, making it powerfully simple!

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Cyber Recovery: One Cyber Threat Many CISOs Might Overlook

Most CISOs you meet will assume that with the best-of-breed elements of their layered, defense-in-depth cyber protections all in place and updated, they might rest easy. But they may likely have overlooked proper protections for their premise-based, backup-and-recovery data. That oversight can be a big risk for them and a big opportunity for Dell EMC channel partners.

Despite CISOs’ best efforts to defend against intrusions, threat actors can find new ways to penetrate networks and find their way to the backup-and-recovery data, which can cause serious and often costly business disruptions.

In our experience, if enterprises lack a securely segmented or air-gapped enclave for this extra-critical data, they have a good chance of suffering an insider attack that gains access to that data. And, if that happens, odds are even greater that the hackers will destroy the backups.

“Cyber Recovery” — mitigating a stealthy vulnerability and giant risk

For many organizations and their CISOs, the issue of what we call “Cyber Recovery” flies far under their threat radar. As a CISO at one national retail chain told us after a private briefing, “You’ve made me aware of a problem I didn’t know I had.” And she’s not alone among her peers at other companies.

In her case, she thought her backups were fully secure in the data center, but we told her that general backups are not secure there, and bad guys can get in and destroy the data. As a solution, she agreed that an isolated copy of the data that cannot be attacked but can be restored as needed would be a good idea. We call this concept our Dell EMC Isolated Recovery solution.

This solution combines an optimized Dell EMC data-protection hardware and software solution with professional consulting services. It keeps an isolated copy of critical data off the network, ensuring that an uncompromised “gold copy” of customers’ most vital data always exists. When that copy needs updating, automated software establishes a connection only for the duration of the update. When done, the software re-establishes the air gap between the target and source servers, like a bank opening and closing its vault door.

Needed: C-level, board-level discussions about risk

The costs of an organization losing its backup-and-recovery data can be huge. We know that for many of the companies that suffered 2017’s Petya and NotPetya encrypting ransomware attacks, the damages were in the millions. That’s why, given the scale of these losses, cyber-recovery discussions deserve C-level and even board-level attention. If anyone understands the nature of business risk, it’s a company’s top executives and board members.

Here are some questions to ask to lead the discussion:

◈ How are you doing disaster recovery for your data? What are you protecting against?

◈ Have you ever had a disaster where you had to “Declare”?

◈ How much money is spent on disaster recovery safeguards in any given year?

◈ What is more likely to happen in the future: a disaster recovery event or a serious cybersecurity event?

◈ If cybersecurity is a primary concern, how much do you spend on Cyber Recovery safeguards in any given year?

Alas, chances are they will say their Cyber Recovery spending is zero. At this point, you can then steer the discussion to addressing this particular vulnerability as a matter of business-risk mitigation — and present the Dell EMC Isolated Recovery solution.

Needed: Hardware, software and high-margin professional consulting services

To implement the Dell EMC Isolated Recovery solution, your customers will need to acquire hardware, software and your own professional consulting services. Once the solution is set up, it can operate alongside their existing backup-and-recovery solutions.

In addition, you can set yourself apart from your competition with the Dell EMC Isolated Recovery solution. That’s because our solution is mature with proven deployments, compared to many of our competitors who merely talk about hardened approaches to vital backup-and-recovery data.

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Dell EMC CI Life Cycle Assurance Update: New RCM Portal

Dell EMC set the standard of Life Cycle Assurance for IT Transformation way back in 2009 with the release of the original Vblock.  With the Vblock, we created the converged infrastructure (CI) category with the basic premise to simplify IT. Later we extended IT simplification with our hyper-converged infrastructure (HCI) systems, and continued innovating on this idea all the way through the release in February of our VxBlock 1000, the industry’s premier all-in-one CI system.

Now we are taking life cycle assurance in a new, innovative direction as we release our Dell EMC Release Certification Matrix Portal (RCM Portal), a new, searchable online database aimed at quickly and easily providing the latest and greatest proactive system upgrade options for our customers.

I’ll give you the full story in this blog, and you can visit us at Dell Technologies World Booth 325 for a live RCM Portal demo.

A Little History about Life Cycle Assurance

The RCM provides a trusted life cycle assurance process: a systematic, certified and tested upgrade path documentation and codes (i.e., component firmware and hypervisor software releases) for our CI and HCI systems.

Since the RCM’s inception, we have delivered RCM updates and patches on a regular basis to our customers via emailed notifications and alerts.  Leveraging RCM information from our online Technical Resource Center — as well as our Vision Intelligent Operations software — customers determine the level of RCM compliance and optimization across their CI or HCI systems. Customers directly download new releases and patches from the Technical Resource Center and then confidently apply the upgrades based on guidance from the RCM documentation.

The ESG analyst firm found that the entire upgrade process (Audit, Research, Plan, Download/Stage, Update and Validate) for an RCM-based system was 6 times faster than “do it yourself” and reference architecture based infrastructure upgrades. This can spare IT staff hundreds of hours of system administration per year, freeing them for more strategic IT priorities.

New Online Portal for Life Cycle Assurance

The RCM Portal, a new feature in the Technical Resource Center, simplifies the infrastructure upgrade process even more.  It is a new proactive, database-driven, online tool for our customers to interact with the RCM, allowing them to dramatically cut the time to research and plan their systems’ upgrades and patches.

Using the portal, our customers will:

◈ Gain visibility into their entire RCM compliance environment – including primary and expansion components – from a dynamic central database

◈ Receive ongoing, proactive update recommendations customized for a specific system and RCM combinations

◈ Receive filtered security alerts, technical alerts and feature updates that apply to their specific, watched systems – no more manually filtering through alert emails and browsing and downloading dozens of irrelevant alert-related documents to find right patches

◈ Quickly compare RCMs (with deltas highlighted) and receive regular notifications of changes in watched RCMs

◈ Receive inclusion of RCM release updates within the primary RCM view making security and defect updates easier to consume

The following figures illustrate some of the capabilities.

Figure 1: RCM compare functionality allows users to display two RCMs and highlight changes quickly.

Figure 2: RCM Watch Lists allow users to select a system type and RCM combination to follow allowing them to get notified with information important to them.

Figure 3: Users can now quickly search for and drill down on Technical Alerts, Security Alerts, and Common Vulnerability and Exposures (CVE)

Figure 4: Quickly display, watch/follow, export system RCMs including any relevant addendums.

Life Cycle Assurance Innovation Yields IT Simplicity

Our customers will register their CI/HCI systems and RCM combinations in the RCM Portal and then receive proactive RCM updates and alerts filtered for their selected, watched systems. Once a profile is created and activated, the IT administration efficiencies will be even more dramatic than before, so customers can redirect significantly more time to more strategic projects.

But we won’t stop there. Stay tuned for more innovations with the combination of the new RCM Portal and our Vision Intelligent Operations software. This all adds up to Dell EMC offering new paths to making IT Transformation real.

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Data Protection is More Than an Insurance Policy – It’s an AI Must-Have

Data is king

In a world reshaped by digital transformation, data has become an integral piece of the decision-making process within an organization. All business models today are built around data, enabling leaders to make big decisions to increase revenue, decrease cost, and reduce risk. However, too often organizations view the protection of that data as an overhead or an insurance policy, rarely ever looking at the data they’ve actually stored. That data has a lot of value in it that if accessed…could be a game changer when it comes to business insights and intelligence.

Organizations need to start thinking about data management by considering the following questions:

1. How accessible is your data?

2. How likely is it that your data will survive multiple disasters?

3. What meta-data do you need?

4. How important is the privacy and security of your data?

And of course, there are industry trends that will shape the way you think data management and protection.

With Artificial Intelligence and Deep Learning, risk and responsibility lead to big outcomes.

Over 70 percent of enterprise companies are expected to leverage AI by the year 2021. Innovation in specialized hardware is accelerating deep learning capabilities in the data center, translating into business insights that drive growth through historical data that can now be derived from machine learning algorithms.

Building AI models and instantiating them is a vital investment – which of course, comes with risk.  That data is incredibly valuable.  The reality is that at some point your valuable data may be lost, damaged, corrupted, or compromised – the equivalent of taking 500 of the smartest people at your company and having them disappear.

Data protection, and the accessibility of that data, has become significantly more important (than ever) for the future of the data center – and everywhere it lives – including the cloud and at the edge. This is more than just an insurance policy – this is critical in ensuring your most valuable data assets are there when you need them to drive growth and a competitive market position.

Making your data protection intelligent is complicated.

Data protection today is a very complex task. There are a lot of manual configurations to consider, a need for specialized administrators, and an intense process for accessing historical data.

Fast forward into the future: we would like to have a fully autonomous system that isn’t just storing data arbitrarily, but using compute capacity to gain insights and develop a model to create the brain for your business. This would instantiate data through which the algorithms, results, trends, and trained models could extract the most value. Think about what this could do!

When you consider data protection – protecting and trusting where your data lands – it’s not just about making sure it is resilient. It’s about making sure that all that effort you expended to develop an AI learning system over an extended period of time – the code and the data – lands somewhere that it is actually protected. The system must be intelligent enough to know on which location to store the data, what meta-data you need to produce the data, and be able to predict possible data loss events and prepare for them in advance.  And intelligence drives simplicity.

New storage technologies give data protection a boost.

Most protection data is kept on spindles. As new media storage is becoming cheaper, high capacity QLC flash devices continue to expand in capacity without increasing the price. Arriving to the market, these systems are able to store secondary data (i.e. the backup data) on a much faster storage device and still gain the price and efficiency of a data protection system.

The future protection of storage will be integrated into an AI system and thus insights of past data will be available.

Being able to gain insights directly from the secondary protection system will also allow reducing some of the load and capacity on the primary storage arrays, allowing a wider adoption of new storage technologies like storage class memory (SCM) for primary storage.

It’s an AI, new application, multi-cloud, and IoT must have!

As data becomes critical to the organization, a simplified, coherent data protection plan is required for new application development mechanisms too. Not only that, but more and more enterprises are moving to use hybrid cloud and multi-cloud strategies, meaning data not only resides on premise or on a single cloud, but rather on multiple different clouds. Over 20 percent of the enterprises believe that they will use more than five separate clouds in the future. This makes management protection of the data an even more complex task. But it also opens opportunities. In addition, the IoT devices that generate huge amounts of data pose a challenge for proper data management and protection strategies. I plan to explore all of this and more in future posts.

As we can see, the value of business data paired with the reality of artificial intelligence has created a new world order. Our research shows that data protection initiatives were one of the most common initiatives undertaken by companies that are looking to transform and modernize their IT. The outcome? A robust, current environment adapted to keep up with the likes of the data generated by artificially intelligent infrastructure. Data protection is not merely an insurance policy. It’s a must-have to make big decisions and insights in order to stay competitive in this digital landscape.

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Fasten Your Seatbelt Networking Industry!

I couldn’t be more jazzed about all the news and buzz in the Networking industry. And much of it was happening at last week’s Linux Foundation Open Networking Summit in Los Angeles. Packed keynotes and vibrant conversations characterized the event, as the industry’s collective vision of Open Networking comes more and more into focus.

We at Dell EMC made some news. But more importantly customers made their own news in support of Open Networking. Some sharing their success and others sharing their contributions to the open source community. We were particularly proud of the session we co-hosted with Verizon where they shared their Telematics production environment and the role that our OS10 Open Edition is playing in their disaggregated networking stack.

The buzz was palpable, as was the absence of the dominant industry player. Interestingly, they did make some ‘news’ of their own this week, from afar, with their announcement about disaggregating their carrier-grade OS from underlying hardware. While this is a big step for them, for many it seems more like ‘rear-view mirror’ news.

The fact is, disaggregating networking hardware and software is old news. In fact, we pioneered this notion over 4 years ago. And 4 years in, there is a vibrant Open Networking ecosystem to support this vision offering customers unmatched choice and capability. And the competition has since followed our lead including nearly all of the top-tier OEMs.  Clearly, there’s a movement happening.

Figure 1. Our vision for the open network—from 1.0 to 2.0

But we, and the industry, are not sitting idle which is why we see this as yesterday’s news. You see, the industry is rapidly moving beyond its ‘1.0’ state where networking hardware and software is separated, to a 2.0 state where the software stack itself becomes disaggregated. And we at Dell EMC are doing everything we can to foster these development.

Gavin Cato, our Networking engineering leader, spoke to a standing-room-only audience about this industry shift from 1.0 to 2.0. We also made a very important news announcement with Metaswitch this week announcing commercial offerings around this 2.0 vision. Needless to say it’s an extremely exciting time to be in the Networking industry as vendors and customers of all sizes step on the gas of Open Networking. So fasten your seatbelt, it’s going to be a wild ride!

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