Dell UltraSharp Monitor Family Expands with Workforce Transformation in Mind

A new era of office technology has arrived to meet the demands of the evolving attitudes toward work-culture, workforce and workspace design. Introducing the latest innovation from the world’s favorite monitor brand – all-new Dell UltraSharp Monitors. Enabling your customers’ workforce with better technology, including the right displays, is a way to heighten their experiences, which in turn impacts their customers’ experiences. Research shows that there is growing demand for larger screen size, better support for multitasking, higher resolution displays and a clutter-free work area to enhance the visualization of data. As the demographics of your customers change and millennials become professionals, visually appealing monitors that help in productivity will be key to customers attracting and retaining the best talent.

This launch presents a great opportunity for you to reach out to your customers and exceed their expectations with innovative technology designed to drive productivity, providing ultimate screen performance and unmatched user experience. These new UltraSharps also give you access to a broad range of sales and marketing support from Dell, so you can generate demand, close sales more quickly and strengthen your reputation as a more trusted advisor.

Dell UltraSharp 49 Curved Monitor (U4919DW) brings brilliance uninterrupted

Meet the world’s first 49” curved dual QHD monitor featuring the revolutionary ultra-wide 32:9 aspect ratio for seamless multi-screen productivity. Delivering an immersive experience, this expansive monitor is the ideal replacement for customers who are currently employing two 27” QHD monitors. The large onscreen space with 5120 x 1440 resolution and IPS technology allows them to view more content and see fine details with consistent color across a wide viewing angle. They’ll be able to multitask on content from two different PCs with Picture-by-Picture, and toggle between and edit the content using a single keyboard and mouse with the built-in Keyboard, Video and Mouse (KVM) feature. In addition, convenient USB-C connectivity allows them to charge the connected laptop with up to 90W of power while transmitting data and video signals, all from one single cable to reduce cable clutter.

Dell UltraSharp 24 and 27 USB-C Monitors are designed for performance

Deliver details and accurate, true-to-life color to your customers’ end users with these beautifully crafted UltraSharp monitors, which feature a thin side profile and small monitor base to optimize the desk space. Virtually borderless InfinityEdge bezel offers an edge-to-edge viewing experience, ideal for a seamless multi-monitor set up for up to 18 percent boost in productivity. The new 24“ (FHD) and 27” (QHD) monitors come with two different options, with and without USB-C connectivity, for superb screen performance in an innovative design. USB-C options deliver up to 65W power delivery while transmitting data, audio and video signals all from one single source reducing cable clutter.

You can deliver an even more outstanding screen performance by upselling your customers with the Dell UltraSharp 32 4K USB-C Monitor (U3219Q), with VESA certified DisplayHDR™ 400 for stunning, true-to-life images, or the Dell UltraSharp 34 Curved USB-C Monitor (U3419W), the ultra-wide 34” curved screen (WQHD (3440 x1440), IPS technology) with 21:9 aspect ratio for a panoramic view, ideal for multitasking.

New UltraSharps at a glance

◈ The revolutionary Dell UltraSharp 49 Curved Monitor is the world’s first 49” dual QHD monitor with ultra-wide views, multitasking features and seamless connectivity to drive productivity

◈ Experience brilliant color and clarity on the Dell UltraSharp 32 4K USB-C Monitor with VESA certified DisplayHDR™ 400

◈ Discover precise performance and an immersive experience on the Dell UltraSharp 34 Curved USB-C Monitor

◈ Dell UltraSharp 24 and 27 USB-C Monitors embody innovation in design and technology to deliver outstanding screen performance and productivity features in a space saving design that optimizes the workspace. Variants without USB-C connectivity are also available.

Maximize desk space and reliability

Upsell space-saving comfort with the Dell Dual Monitor Stand – MDS197; it can mount up to two 24” or 27” monitors, providing the screen real estate you customers’ end users need to be most productive. With dual monitors, you can increase your productivity by up to 18%.

All of this is backed by Dell’s 3-Year Advanced Exchange Service and Premium Panel Exchange. You can even upgrade your customers to optional ProSupport  for added peace of mind, knowing they will have 24×7 access to tech support from highly qualified in-region ProSupport engineers.

Accelerate your sales

From quick reference call scripts to email and social content, now you can access and download all the marcom assets you need to grow your sales on the Digital Marketing Platform.

You can also download the newest Dell UltraSharp Monitor Family brochure or tune into the webinar to find out how you can help strengthen your customers’ performance in the field.

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Magic Three-peat: Gartner Recognizes Dell EMC as a Leader in Distributed File and Object Storage for Third Year in a Row

For the third straight year, Dell EMC has been recognized by Gartner as a leader in the 2018 Magic Quadrant for Distributed File Systems and Object Storage. We feel the report evaluates Distributed File and Object Storage vendors that help enterprises manage the rapid growth in unstructured data. Per Gartner, by 2022, more than 80% of enterprise data will be stored in scale-out storage systems in enterprise and cloud data centers, up from 40% in 2018.

Around the world, organizations are realizing that data is their most valuable asset. As a leader in this space, Dell EMC takes the responsibility to act as a trusted advisor when it comes to maximizing data value and providing solutions that help the world unlock data capital, which is the value created from leveraging data for deriving business insights and operational excellence.

The Dell EMC Unstructured Data portfolio consists of Dell EMC Isilon and Dell EMC ECS. With more than 10 years of proven market leadership, Isilon is Dell EMC’s scale-out NAS platform. Last year, we announced Isilon’s Generation 6 hardware platform, which includes all-flash, hybrid, and archive systems. The modular design of the Gen-6 platform allows customers to easily upgrade performance or capacity independently as their needs evolve.

As Dell EMC’s flagship object storage offering, ECS is designed specifically for next-generation apps that demand massive unstructured data storage capacity, global access and cloud-scale economics. In addition to object protocols, ECS supports file and Hadoop (HDFS) protocols, which enable customers to consolidate data from multiple sources into one single, global storage platform. The newly announced ECS EX-Series provides organizations with unparalleled flexibility, starting in smaller capacity increments, while remaining ready and able to grow as their needs change in the future.

Not only have we made significant enhancements with both product lines, we have also improved the overall customer experience with Dell EMC.  Both Isilon and ECS are part of Dell EMC’s Future-Proof Loyalty Program, which provides customer satisfaction, efficiency and migration guarantees so Dell EMC customers can enjoy purchase peace of mind when choosing to partner with us.

We believe Gartner Magic Quadrants help customers gain a quick overview and understanding of a market’s competing technology providers and their ability to deliver on what end users require today, and in the future [1]. Gartner’s 2018 Magic Quadrant recognizes Dell EMC as a leader in Completeness of Vision and Ability to Execute within the Distributed File and Object Storage category.

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It’s Here! Running SAP HANA in Production on HCI

Our infrastructure portfolio for SAP HANA just got stronger.

Today we have great news! Our SAP HANA certified infrastructure portfolio has grown to include running SAP HANA in production on Dell EMC hyper-converged infrastructure (HCI).

And the timing could not be better, especially if you are already running SAP Business Suite applications on Dell EMC. Just consider the momentum of SAP HANA1;

◈ Since the 2011 release of SAP’s market-leading SAP HANA platform for real-time computing, adoption has grown to 25,000 customers.

◈ With the pending end of maintenance and support for SAP Business Suite 7 applications in 2025, customers are looking to move to S/4HANA. Since its launch in 2015, licensed customers for S/4HANA has grown to 8,900 in Q2/18.

Dell EMC has partnered with SAP since the release of SAP HANA in 2011, when they announced the HANA Appliance model for targeted workloads. Since then, our portfolio has expanded for SAP’s Tailored Datacenter Integration (TDI) deployment model for SAP HANA. The SAP TDI model enables customers to lower the TCO by deploying SAP HANA as part of your shared IT model.

As HCI adoption has rapidly increased over the last few years—with 75% of deployments in the core data center2—it is no surprise that we have been increasingly asked by our customers, “What about running SAP HANA in production on Dell EMC HCI?”

Similar to our investments for Dell EMC servers, storage and converged systems, Dell EMC solutions and engineering teams worked closely with SAP to test, validate and document our configurations meeting SAP HANA performance KPIs for our HCI infrastructure.

Dell EMC HCI—in particular, VxRail— is architected to support in-memory database applications such as SAP HANA, with features such as Intel® Xeon® Scalable processors including high-memory options; Dell EMC PowerEdge servers designed for software-defined storage; next-generation future proofing technologies, such as NVMe cache drives; and powered by the leading HCI software, VMware vSAN and VMware vSphere.

Our ultimate goal is to deliver the most seamless package of HCI software and infrastructure on VxRail, powered by VMware. Specifically, SAP has certified Dell EMC VxRail P-Series all-flash (P570F), powered by VMware’s HCI software platform (VMware vSphere and VMware vSAN) to run SAP HANA on HCI for production.

VxRail P-Series All Flash (P570F) Performance Optimized System

In addition to VxRail for SAP HANA running on HCI, we have even more news!

We understand that SAP provides customers choice for HCI software platforms including Nutanix. For SAP customers choosing Nutanix, Dell EMC XC Family also has achieved certification.

Dell EMC XC940xd-24 and XC740xd-24 All Flash HCI Appliances

With both VxRail and XC Family, Dell EMC delivers a fully engineered, hyper-converged infrastructure solution that enables businesses to innovate faster and accelerate IT operations.

Customers implementing the solution can expect the following benefits:

◈ Agility―A modern SAP landscape management experience that delivers automated provisioning capabilities for SAP applications including SAP HANA and provides a faster time-to-value.

◈ Engineering―Compute, networking, and storage components that are integrated with the specified prerequisites, and dependencies that have been tested to deliver a seamless solution experience.

◈ Optimization―Design and deployment guides that highlight proven performance, automation, and resiliency best practices for SAP landscapes including SAP HANA.

If this topic is top of mind for you, I encourage you to visit the Dell EMC Booths and meet our experts at SAP TechEd 2018 in Barcelona or talk to your Dell EMC account rep today. We’d be happy to discuss the benefits of SAP HANA on Dell EMC HCI, as well as our broad Dell EMC portfolio of solutions and services that are ideal for any customers’ infrastructure needs in SAP environments.

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Dell EMC Strengthens Last Line of Data Protection Defense Against Cyber Attacks With New Cyber Recovery Software

We have all seen the headlines with increasing frequency this past year and know them all too well. And because October is National Cybersecurity Awareness Month, we’re reminded that ransomware and cyber attacks have cost business billions, affected government and public services, and provided IT headaches to organizations. These sophisticated attacks use malware and methods that can quickly bring global operations to a standstill while encrypting or destroying critical data.

While these threats are increasing and getting more dangerous, customers are not always confident their runbooks and infrastructure are equipped with the right incident response and recovery procedures to bounce back from one of these attacks.

Data Protection infrastructure and architectures, commonplace in IT, are optimized for Operational Recovery, as well as Disaster Recovery providing excellent results and added business resiliency in scenarios such as natural disasters, system, or human error. However, counter to what other solution vendors in the marketplace would like you to believe, these systems are not a sufficient defense for sophisticated cyber attacks.

Disaster recovery does not equal cyber attack recovery

According to Gartner, traditional backup services are not designed for recovery from cyber attacks1. Gartner, along with other industry analysts, and several government agencies, recommend making backup images or gold copies inaccessible from the network through air-gapped media. Keeping gold copies of your essential business data protected away from the surface of attack is key to quicker business recovery and better resiliency.

The Cyber Recovery Solution from Dell EMC – a combination of hardware, software and professional services, assumes that you as a customer have optimized backup and disaster recovery infrastructure and procedures in place. Augmenting these optimized aspects of your data protection strategy with a Cyber Recovery Vault and automated data isolation workflow gives customers a last line of defense against ransomware and destructive cyber threats.

Introducing Dell EMC Cyber Recovery software

Today, Dell EMC is announcing further innovation and building upon the current Cyber Recovery Solution with the release of Dell EMC Cyber Recovery, which is easy-to-deploy management and automation software. Under the covers, Dell Cyber Recovery leverages industry-leading back-up technology from Dell EMC Data Domain including secure replication, data invulnerability architecture, retention lock, and data efficiency.

Modern UI/UX for management and automation

Dell EMC Cyber Recovery software provides a framework which automates workflows end-to-end, protects critical data within the Cyber Recovery Vault, helps identify malicious cyber-threats, and performs recovery when needed. At the center of this solution, a new REST API automation framework, provides seamless integration with a modern UI/UX.

The intuitive and clean design of the UI provides for faster environment status and easier orchestration of key workflow management tasks. Management and access via the UI and/or REST API is done from within the CR Vault, again keeping the solution’s management points away from the surface of attack.

Proactive analytics in the Vault

Customers can realize even greater benefit from our data isolation approach over other ransomware recovery solutions by performing security analytics on the retained data. Serving as the ideal test bed, the CR Vault allows customers to perform security analytics without having to perform a restore and potentially activating the malware. Dell EMC Cyber Recovery software was designed with flexibility rather than incorporating a proprietary and monolithic data analytics engine. It integrates with analytics tools that perform data scanning and early malware detection and reporting. Within the automation framework, analytics can be automatically performed on a scheduled basis.

Incorporating the power of Dell Technologies and its ecosystem partners further increases the value and power of Dell EMC Cyber Recovery through its flexibility. One example of this is Dell EMC’s partnership with Index Engines and its CyberSense security analytics tool.

CyberSense applies over 40 heuristics to determine indicators of compromise and can alert the user of potential problems. The rapidly changing threat landscape demands an adaptive analytics framework, so the solution stays ahead of the bad actor by enabling tools that incorporate Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Machine Learning (ML) analytics methods to the CR Vault.

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New Dell EMC Multi-Cloud and VMware Data Protection Enhancements Improve Customer Experience and Cost Efficiencies

As a key component of the new Dell EMC Cloud Marketplace, Dell EMC’s Data Protection solutions enable customers to meet service level requirements for backup and recovery as they adopt a multi-cloud operating model as part of IT Transformation initiatives. We’re introducing new updates for Data Domain and Data Protection Suite (DPS), further enhancing our hybrid and multi-cloud data protection capabilities to help customers reduce costs, risk of data loss and improve their operational management efficiencies.

Traditional applications, cloud native applications, and IoT/edge devices are generating a tsunami of data residing in multiple clouds that needs to be effectively protected. With new protection products and capabilities for the cloud and for your physical data center – particularly VMware environments – Dell EMC is further expanding your ability to achieve simpler, easier to manage data protection, on-premises and in the cloud.

Data Domain and Data Protection Suite (DPS) together already provide a complete and comprehensive data protection solution for enterprises and these new updates are designed to help you embrace data protection in the cloud, improve IT efficiency with management and virtualization enhancements, and expand confidence that enterprise data is protected based on comprehensive coverage.

New updates to Dell EMC Data Protection Software and to DD OS 6.1.2 across DD VE & Data Domain appliances!

New Cloud Enhancements: Improved Scale, Object Storage Support, Hybrid Management

1. Data Domain Virtual Edition (DD VE) 4.0 now brings unprecedented scale and cost effectiveness to software-defined protection storage in Amazon Web Services (AWS), Microsoft Azure, and VMware Cloud on AWS environments. DD VE leverages the power of DD OS and is available to run on-prem or in the cloud with DPS. This software-only solution can be downloaded, deployed and configured in a matter of minutes.With DD VE 4.0, you can now run up to 96TB DD VE instances on AWS, Azure or the VMware Cloud, which allows you to protect a significantly larger amount of deduplicated data directly in the cloud. Capacity can be easily moved between cloud deployments, virtual instances and/or locations, and can be purchased in 1TB increments. This flexibility allows customers to grow capacity as the business demands it.

Run Data Domain Virtual Edition and Data Protection Software in the cloud!

DD VE 4.0 can back up via less expensive object storage, delivering increased efficiencies and a lower cost-to-protect. By running DD VE with DPS in the cloud, our customers can leverage a simple-to-deploy, software-only solution that will make it easier and more cost effective to protect applications in the cloud.

Dell EMC provides a complete, software-only protection solution – directly in the cloud!

2. Modern Management enhancements for Data Domain and Data Protection Suite are designed to further simplify and improve operations whether you are protecting data in the cloud or in your data center. One highly-requested feature in DD OS 6.1.2 is the ability to manage on-prem and in the cloud Data Domain deployments together. This hybrid management reduces operational costs across your environment, and empowers your entire IT organization with key insights.

Manage any target, at any location!

Data Protection Suite has also further enhanced modern management across your data protection software and protection storage by simplifying the experience for backup and recovery of VMware images, applications and file systems with an enhanced HTML 5 UI.

3. Data Domain Cloud Disaster Recovery (CDR) has been enhanced for application-consistent cloud disaster recovery in AWS, as well as Recovery to VMware Cloud on AWS. DD CDR saves CAPEX costs by reducing the need to build additional data centers for disaster recovery and with these new enhancements further improves the viability of public cloud disaster recovery options.

4. Cloud Snapshot Manager, a SaaS offering, now extends to Microsoft Azure as a multi-cloud solution, making it easier for customers to protect public cloud workloads in both AWS and Azure. Customers can quickly discover, orchestrate and automate the protection of workloads across multiple clouds and regions based on policies for seamless backup and disaster recovery, using one SaaS tool that does not require installation or infrastructure.

5. Data Domain Cloud Tier has further reduced transactional overhead for long-term retention by increasing the object size written to cloud. And, data storage utilization has been improved thanks to tight integration with Virtustream Storage Cloud and Dell EMC ECS. As a lower cost option for DD Cloud Tier, new support for AWS Infrequent Access & Azure Hot Blob Storage (including Government Cloud) have been added to the number of public and private clouds supported for long-term cloud retention.

6. VMware vCloud Director and Dell EMC Data Protection Suite have greatly enhanced their integration, making it easier for service providers to jointly deliver VMware and Data Protection-as-a-Service. Our leading VMware integration extends data protection into the vCloud Director tenant UI. This eliminates the need for a separate Backup-as-a-Service portal. Now cloud service providers with multi-tenant VMware environments can offer their customers robust, integrated data protection with a best-in-class user experience. Plus, service providers and their customers benefit from Dell EMC Data Protection’s proven low operating cost and high scalability and performance.

Additional Recovery, Automation, and Coverage Enhancements:

In addition, new Data Domain and DPS enhancements offer customers better recovery, automation and virtualization capabilities, including:

◈ DD OS 6.1.2 brings an increased boost in performance by leveraging an enhanced data cache when instantly accessing and restoring VMs. Backup validations and test/dev backups are now made even more efficient with a 4x increase in IOPS – Data Domain can now deliver up to 40,000 IOPS with under 20 milliseconds of latency using DPS. Those leveraging DPS will also find it easier to find and restore files via file-level search.

◈ Self-Service with SLO Compliance Automation has been expanded to Oracle in the latest DPS release. High-performance, self-service protection for Oracle databases, now includes rule-based automation, governance and SLO compliance controlled by the backup team, so they can ensure that mission critical data is being backed up by DBAs in compliance with enterprise policies.

Dell EMC Data Protection Software empowers your database admins with self-service protection

◈ Hyper-V Performance Improvements in DPS have been implemented by utilizing Microsoft’s change block tracking technology.

◈ DD VE has expanded its hypervisor ecosystem to include support for KVM, in addition to EXS and Hyper-V.

◈ The DD Boost File System (BoostFS) plug-in has now been extended to support Windows applications in addition to Linux.

With many enhancements across our Data Domain and Data Protection Software offerings, Dell EMC continues driving innovation without compromise. Make sure your organization is completely protected by choosing Dell EMC’s #1 solution. Now is the perfect time to connect with your local rep about purchasing new deployments or upgrading to a complete Dell EMC Data Protection solution to take advantage of all of these announcements and our full cloud data protection capabilities.

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Discover the 8 Key Steps for Successful AI Initiatives

Promote the use of a new checklist and advanced PowerEdge server technology to help customers explore the potential of AI for their organizations

Artificial Intelligence (AI) is being embraced and adopted by organizations of all sizes across the world. According to a global survey of data and analytics technology decision makers, 51% of firms have already implemented or are expanding their implementation of AI – and an additional 20% plan to implement AI in the next 12 months.

Are your customers looking at the opportunities offered by AI implementations too?

Industry analyst Forrester Consulting suggests that, to ensure success and mitigate the risks, it’s up to CIOs to take the lead on AI projects.

From a hardware standpoint, Dell EMC PowerEdge should be the leading technology solution being considered by CIOs.

CIOs are optimally positioned to build overall AI capabilities

The data, applications, server, accelerator, fabric and storage infrastructures that CIOs manage are critical for driving business value with AI. So it’s natural to identify them as the best placed individuals to engage their organization’s lines of business around their AI initiatives, to modernize the IT infrastructure and ultimately to drive the AI agenda.

While CIOs should be your primary targets for discussions around progressing IT Transformation in their businesses, it’s important to also understand that their IT teams will also need to transform.

To plan and manage successful AI implementations, CIOs will need to invest in new software applications, infrastructure and the platforms necessary to run AI – and also modernize existing systems to better support the increasing number of AI initiatives. Simultaneously, they must also take responsibility for tracking the business outcomes that AI is driving, to sustain and further grow their investments in the technology.

As a Dell EMC partner, you’re ideally placed to offer trusted technical advice and assistance they’re likely to need in this brave new world.

Promote PowerEdge R940xa servers: Extreme acceleration for business

There are plenty of business opportunities to explore with your customers and prospects around the adoption and implementation of AI. Foremost among those is the promotion of advanced PowerEdge servers as the ideal solution for providing a solid foundation for future success.

In particular, your conversations should focus on Dell EMC’s PowerEdge R940xa.

Built from the ground up to deliver extreme acceleration for businesses and featuring next-generation Intel® Xeon® Scalable processors, the PowerEdge R940xa server is a very impressive 4U 4S solution that’s specifically designed to deliver dynamic scalability, which is ideal for machine learning and artificial intelligence applications.

8 key actions for implementing successful AI initiatives

Hot on the heels of introducing your customers to the transformational capabilities of the new PowerEdge R940xa server, you could also share the 8 essential steps that CIOs must take to implement successful AI initiatives.

Dell EMC recently commissioned Forrester Consulting to examine the impact of AI on IT teams, technologies and processes when it comes to an organization’s ongoing IT Transformation efforts.

The result of a subsequent global online survey is a checklist that’s designed to help CIOs lead the AI strategy to drive business outcomes and reduce risk across the enterprise.

The checklist groups the 8 overall steps within 3 main areas of activity:

1. Become the nexus for AI initiatives across the enterprise

> Engage lines of business on their AI needs

> Start measuring the impact of AI and track its progress

The first steps fall under the category of taking stock of ongoing AI initiatives, learning from them and shaping them into a cohesive and transparent AI program.

2. Modernize and automate your infrastructure

> Modernize the IT infrastructure for existing workloads

> Deploy platforms for building AI solutions

> Invest in infrastructure for AI at scale

The next area of activity involves focusing on improving operational efficiency and investing in the new infrastructure and technologies needed for AI.

3. Lead the charge on driving business outcomes with AI

> Take charge of the organization’s AI strategy

> Build the IT department’s (and the organization’s) AI capabilities simultaneously

> Continuously build the business case for further AI investments

The final steps concern championing ongoing AI initiatives, supporting them internally and initiating new projects for driving value with AI.

For any organization looking to follow these 8 steps to transforming with AI, Forrester suggests that CIOs start with projects that have mature use cases and a proven ROI.

Start talking to your customers today about where and how they could use optimized PowerEdge server technology to drive AI initiatives within their business.

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Dell EMC Enhances DPaaS for Service Providers

Provides the Best User Experience for Customers

Driven by a strong customer demand, and an explosive increase in cloud workloads, Dell EMC is well-poised for the growth of cloud-ready data protection and recovery needs of customers. Data Protection as-a-Service (DPaaS) is a core requirement customers have when selecting a cloud service provider.  However, until now, there have been no native solutions to address this need with existing solutions requiring a separate tenant portal or additional user interfaces, making the process more complicated for both cloud service providers and, most importantly, their customers.

Announced at VMworld 2018, VMware and Dell EMC have partnered to deliver tenant self-service DPaaS for VCPP partners leveraging VMware’s vCloud Director (vCD) platform. vCloud Director Data Protection is available directly within the vCD tenant portal UI, eliminating the need for tenants to access a separate user interface specific to Data Protection.  For tenants or cloud providers interested in orchestrating via APIs, all Data Protection capabilities are also integrated directly into vCloud Director’s REST API, via extensions.

Dell EMC’s complete software solution for protecting VMware workloads, consisting of Avamar with Dell EMC Data Domain, can easily be managed by Cloud Providers. Now cloud service providers with multi-tenant VMware environments can offer their customers robust, integrated data protection with a best-in-class user experience. Plus, service providers and their customers benefit from Dell EMC Data Protection’s proven low operating cost, high scalability and performance.

Dell EMC Data Protection with vCloud Director delivers these advantages:

◈ Best user experience: Dell EMC is the only vendor that provides data protection fully integrated into VMware vCloud Director – competitors require a separate tenant portal and often require service user accounts to be created within the vCloud environment.

◈ Superior scale & performance: A scale-out architecture combined with Avamar’s quick and efficient backups provides assurance that backups will complete within the scheduled window

◈ Costs up to 80% less to protect: Through the VMware VCPP, service providers can offer their customers industry-leading de-duplication with a 55:1 deduplication rate that greatly reduces protection storage requirements and minimizes operating costs

◈ Utility Pricing through VCPP: Software-defined data protection can be purchased through VMWare’s VCPP program, enabling consumption-based billing – with billing in arrears, service providers pay only for what their customers consume and under a single contract

◈ Flexible BaaS: Flexible backup options enable backups to be run automatically through policies and/or on-demand.  Self-service restores can be executed by tenants at the vApp-level, the VM-level, and even the individual file level.

TELEFONICA: A Strong Cloud Provider in Europe and Latin America

The data protection vCloud Director extension from Dell EMC recently helped Telefonica widen its cloud service offerings to Data Protection as a Service (DPaaS) and strengthen their support for customers in their journey to the cloud when choosing them as their Cloud Provider.

Known as a carrier that provides Mobile, Broadband Internet access, TV and corporate connectivity, Telefonica is also a Tier-1 Cloud Service Provider.  Telefonica Business Solutions manages globally the Enterprise, Multinational and Wholesale (including Roaming) businesses within the Telefonica Group. This organization relies heavily on a cloud-first strategy to support their customers in their digital transformation process, providing more than just core solutions – but also solutions such as Cloud, Big Data, Security and IOT.

Telefonica now allows customers to utilize Dell EMC data protection in a DPaaS consumption model integrated into their new virtual data center offering – VDC 4.0. This new service puts control of data protection in the hands of Telefonica’s customers, eliminating the need for them to file tickets in order to initiate restores, as an example.  Now Telefonica can offer their customers robust data protection as a service with a superior user experience while at the same time minimizing their cost-to-serve.

“Our goal is to make our customer’s life easy,” said Sandro Bertelli, Global Product Manager, Telefonica. “Dell EMC provides the best customer experience and offers the only fully integrated user interface with VMware vCloud Director for our customers through a single tenant portal. This allows the cloud administrator to eliminate and separate backup processes and manage everything from a single management interface. Furthermore, backups of VMware vApps and enterprise applications are all optimized for faster backups, maximum deduplication and efficient recoveries.”

“VDC 4.0 is one of the largest VMware implementation in the world running in 8 data center  in Americas (Argentina, Brazil, Chile, Colombia, Mexico, Perú, USA) and Europe (Spain) converging to the best solution for every kind of customer’s needs. The strong partnership between Telefonica, Dell EMC and VMware has really helped us to get to this point and our customer’s experience is our first priority. With an “everything as a service” approach, observing the trends of the multicloud market, and the demands of workloads in the cloud, we are thrilled with the solution that Dell EMC and VMware created to offer our users data protection as a service through the extension to vCloud Director. “

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Network Automation with Ansible

OS10 and Automation solutions overview

This era of digital transformation aims at reducing operational costs for IT infrastructure, as a result of which converged IT processes are becoming increasingly important. DevOps is an operational model that helps businesses achieve agility, efficiency and as of late networks are also becoming part of this model.

Network automation is a crucial component in this model, as networks are expected to act, react and perform reliably based on the changing business needs.OS10 is a next-gen Linux based network operating system that provides a rich set of programmatic interfaces to configure and maintain network devices

This ability of OS10 and integrations with tools like Ansible makes it a prime choice to operate well in DevOps environments. Ansible Integrations provide the ability to treat network equipment as software components thus reducing the complexity of automating configuration and maintaining the networks.

Dell EMC networking and Ansible Automation

Dell EMC Networking integration with DevOps tools such as Ansible helps simplify network deployment, improve uptime, increase configuration consistency, add capacity more easily, and reduce overall OpEx.

The most common use cases for network automation will be Rapid provisioning, configuration management and deploying configs at scale. The 1990’s model of network provisioning through CLI and some TCL scripts will simply not work with the present web-scale networks. The below figure depicts how networks were configured before the advent of automation choices

Network provisioning usually involves a fair mix of the following tasks, infrastructure set up like DHCP, AAA and SNMP servers, switch deployment which includes racking and powering up the switch and switch configuration and validation. The network administrator is expected to build a configuration from scratch or copy paste previous configurations and edit it manually by hand to create the new configuration. This new configuration is built in a staged environment and then installed /shipped to its permanent location. This process does not scale and is highly error-prone, which makes fabric wide network validation a nightmare.

What is Ansible?

Ansible is a radically simple IT automation engine that automates cloud provisioning, configuration management, application deployment, intra-service orchestration, and many other IT needs.

Designed for multi-tier deployments since day one, Ansible models your IT infrastructure by describing how all of your systems inter-relate, rather than just managing one system at a time.

It uses no agents and no additional custom security infrastructure, so it’s easy to deploy – and most importantly, it uses a very simple language (YAML, in the form of Ansible Playbooks) that allow you to describe your automation jobs in a way that approaches plain English.

Ansible and DellEMC Integrations

DellEMC network devices and networking software can be automated through Ansible. DellEMC networking provides support for Ansible modules and Ansible roles to deploy and maintain OS10 and OPX offerings. The DellOS ansible role library can be found in ansible galaxy, which facilitates feature-specific configuration on devices running OS10/OPX including installing and upgrading software images on the network device.

OS10 modules for Ansible

◈ dellos10_command: Run commands on remote devices running OS10

◈ dellos10_config: Manage configuration sections on remote devices running OS10

◈ dellos10_facts: Collect facts from remote devices running OS10

OS10 Roles for Ansible

There are 26 ansible roles available for OS10 and few of them are as DellOS-BGP, Dell)S- Image Upgrade, DellOS-VLT etc.,

Key Benefits of Ansible Integration with OS10

Solution	Benefits
Agentless	Ansible does not require a agent on the switch, so it can be run against any DellEMC networking devices
Idempotency	Ansible modules are idempotent and this gets network device to the desired state without affecting the existing state.
Extensible	Ansible can be integrated into many existing DevOps workflows making network a part of the IT environment
Deployment	Ansible Integration reduces deployment time and operational costs needed to deploy a Data Center or campus network.
Scale	Ansible integration with OS10 can help automate network devices at scale by using template based solutions.

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Modern Data Protection Provides Essential Support for Successful IT Transformation

A modernized data protection strategy enables customers to more efficiently transform their IT – delivering benefits all round.

In the fourth of a series of blogs inspired by influential research published by industry analyst ESG, we learn how modern data protection strategies, tools and processes enable and support IT Transformation. 

Modernizing the IT environment is a fundamental step that companies of all sizes must take on their journey towards achieving IT Transformation – and that includes the implementation of modern data protection devices and processes.

Around the world, data continues to grow at a phenomenal pace. There’s an equally rapidly expanding need for mobility and the intrinsic value of data to business is also increasing. So optimum protection is paramount.

As your customers and prospects make the necessary move to modernize their IT environments – and specifically data center technologies – they need to ensure that their data protection strategies, tools and processes also evolve accordingly.

What does a modern data protection approach involve?

In today’s increasingly digitally driven economy, the typical workloads, service levels and consumption models that organizations have to provide vary widely. So a ‘one size fits all’ data protection strategy is unlikely to be appropriate. Instead, a suitably modern and agile data protection solution should be deployed to meet the unique needs of each environment that it protects.

This should include everything from backup and availability to archiving solutions, all of which should be validated against specific workload requirements and the ways they are run or accessed – whether that’s from on-premises physical and virtual environments, via hybrid and public cloud services or endpoint devices.

The impact of modern data protection on IT maturity

A comprehensive data protection strategy is essential to support effective IT Transformation. It has also been shown to play a key role in the ranking of an organization’s IT maturity.

Earlier this year, ESG conducted a survey of 4,000 IT executives from private- and public-sector organizations across 16 countries to evaluate their progress in embracing IT Transformation1 – and rank them as ‘Legacy’, ‘Emerging’, ‘Evolving’ or ‘Transformed’.

In general, organizations that had achieved ‘Transformed’ status were nearly 10X more likely than ‘Legacy’ organizations to have invested in modern data protection solutions to cover a broad range of environments – ranging from cloud to on-premises to endpoints.

The 88% versus 9% response is clearly a stark difference – and those businesses that have made the move to modernize their data protection strategies as well as their IT environments are also benefiting from other significant operational advantages.

Flexible data protection strategies to fit specific needs

In its Research Insights Brief on how modern data protection strategies support and enable IT Transformation2, ESG reports that 85% of ‘Transformed’ IT organizations have at least three unique data protection mechanisms in place to safeguard assets and data – covering the spectrum from archive software to continuous availability technology. In contrast, more than half of ‘Legacy’ organizations have no more than two data protection technologies implemented.

This is partly due to the fact that ‘Transformed’ organizations already have a greater diversity of workloads and the consequent need to protect a broader range of IT environments.

However, these organizations have also embraced self-service data protection. This enables line-of-business owners and application administrators to manage data protection tasks like setting backup policies and recovering data themselves. Empowering users with these tools has the potential to minimize delays between the creation and protection of data and enable faster recovery of data, among other benefits – because it reduces or even eliminates the dependence on IT to provision resources or resolve issues.

The ESG study found that two-thirds of ‘Transformed’ organizations reported extensive availability of self-service data protection capabilities.

Significant operational and wider business benefits

Overall, the ESG research found that modern data protection strategies, tools and processes delivered significant operational and wider business benefits.

Compared with ‘Legacy’ organizations, the ‘Transformed’ organizations in the study:

◈ Were 13X more likely to offer well-established self-service for data protection management.

◈ Were nearly 2X more likely to have exceeded their revenue goals in 2017.

◈ Were able to recover their VMs 31% faster.

◈ Were 14% more likely to hit their recovery targets.

◈ Were 8X more likely to believe they are in a very strong competitive position.

Do you still have customers and prospects in the ‘Legacy’ camp? They clearly need to start to consider what they’re going to do to catch up and remain competitive…

Read and share the full ESG Research Insights Brief >>

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Don’t Age Out: Adopt Modular Servers for Transformational Workloads

In today’s age of digital disruption, one of the greatest challenges that companies face is the need to keep up with evolving technology. Speed and agility are key to a successful IT transformation, and organizations that can handle transformational workloads, such as AI and cloud-native applications, have a significant advantage over those that can’t.

On one end of the spectrum are the innovative companies, with modern data center infrastructure and IT automation in place. On the other end are older businesses with slow, outdated process. A recent ESG study focused on the differences between them describes these two stages as “modernized” and “aging.”

One key difference between the two stages is that aging companies typically prioritize predictability and reliability, while modernized companies prioritize speed and agility. In the past, IT departments were solely focused on traditional workloads like website, email, file, print, etc. They had to keep the basics up and running for the business to function. But the industry is shifting, and companies needs change as they move through their IT transformation. While reliability will always be important, the status quo is no longer enough. Today’s modernized companies must focus on speed and agility, so they can quickly process the enormous amounts of data that these transformational workloads require.

The same ESG study identified another key difference between modernized and aging companies: the use of modular servers in their infrastructure. ESG found that modular servers make up an average of 20% of a modernized company’s total server infrastructure, compared to only 5% in aging companies. That’s a significant difference, and plays a huge role in setting modernized companies apart from their aging counterparts.

How Modular Helps with Transformational Workloads

Because modernized companies favor speed and agility over predictability and reliability, they need to make sure they have modern data center infrastructure in place. New, data-intense workloads such as AI and ML have different hardware requirements. Modular servers can play a critical role here, because they are flexible, agile and easy to manage. Modernized companies understand this need, which is why so many already have a modular compute strategy in place.

How Does Modular Help with Transformational Workloads?

Modular infrastructure combines server, storage and networking – along with unified management software – so that users can easily tailor workloads and expand over time. It can meet the needs of both traditional and transformational workloads by providing the following benefits:

◈ Increased Scalability – Modular servers give you the flexibility to adjust resources to deliver the compute, storage, and network performance needed to accelerate both traditional and transformational workloads. In fact, an ESG study found that 57% of modular server users reported increased scalability benefits to the organization.

◈ Easier Management – Users can automate the management of compute, storage and networking resources with integrated, easy-to-use tools and spend less time on routine maintenance. Modular servers improved manageability for 50% of surveyed IT organizations.

◈ Faster Deployment – Modular infrastructure helps accelerate your time-to-value by quickly deploying traditional and transformational workloads. ESG found that the average benefit was a 35% reduction in deployment time among modernized organizations using modular.

◈ Improved Reliability – Users can adapt and respond with non-disruptive upgrades and minimal downtime. Modernized IT organizations are twice as likely as aging orgs to experience higher reliability with modular compute.

◈ Decreased OPEX – Modular is the original “pay as you grow” model, because it allows you to purchase only what you will use now, then add to it as your needs change. The average reduction in procurement costs by purchasing modular servers (compared to alternatives) was 32% among modernized organizations using modular. 

Once an organization has the right infrastructure in place, it can more easily adopt transformational workloads. These innovative technologies help companies save time, increase productivity, decrease operating costs, and increase revenue. Meanwhile their competitors will be left further and further behind. Aging companies simply can’t offer the same services or customer experiences and ultimately run much less efficiently.

No matter what state of IT transformation your company is in, it’s worth considering whether modular servers can take your business to the next level.

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vSAN Ready Nodes on PowerEdge MX

Dell EMC vSAN Ready Nodes are coming to the new Dell EMC PowerEdge MX architecture. This combination makes a lot of exciting things possible.

The best of two worlds comes together this week as we announce new Dell EMC vSAN Ready Nodes specifically for the Dell EMC PowerEdge MX modular architecture. This combination sweetens the pot for organizations that want to capitalize on the power of vSAN on their terms.

In this post, I will highlight some of the cool things about this combination. But, first, let’s set the stage with a little background.

PowerEdge MX is a new modular infrastructure solution for the modern data center. It was introduced with a sneak peek at Dell Technologies World in early May. PowerEdge MX is designed with Dell EMC’s kinetic infrastructure, which enables IT shops to flexibly configure and optimize their IT infrastructure for new and emerging workloads with plug-and-play simplicity.

PowerEdge MX was designed for the software-defined data center, with customizable modules of compute, storage and networking. VMware vSAN is a core building block for the SDDC. So, when your pair PowerEdge MX with VMware vSAN, you’re ready for a hyper-converged match made in heaven when flexibility, provided by PowerEdge MX’s configurations, is key.

Dell EMC vSAN Ready Nodes make it all even easier for your organization. These pre‑configured and validated building blocks reduce deployment risks, improve storage efficiency, and let you quickly and easily scale storage as needed.

Now let’s get to the news of the day — some of the coolest things about vSAN Ready Nodes in the PowerEdge MX architecture.

Really fast results

The PowerEdge MX architecture keeps storage and compute close together for faster results. In fact, you can get up to 72% better throughput and up to 73% lower latency than HPE Synergy or Cisco UCS.* Need to move VMs? No problem. The Dell EMC PowerEdge MX solution also moves VMs in up to 42% less time than HPE Synergy or Cisco UCS, according to Principled Technologies testing.

Simplified networking

Top-of-rack (ToR) switches are integrated into the MX7000 chassis. This integration simplifies deployment and reduces complexity while offering connectivity to additional infrastructure in the rack. So that is one less thing to worry about. And, even better, you get your ToR switches delivered with significantly less cabling.

SDDC ready in a box

With vSAN Ready Nodes on Dell EMC PowerEdge MX, you’ve got a software-defined ready infrastructure in one flexible chassis. You can put up to eight vSAN Ready Nodes in an MX7000 chassis to create a foundation for a self-sustained VMware Cloud Foundation cluster with right-sized compute, storage and ToR switches. And it’s all in one high-density package. You can put up to six drives in each MX740c compute sled for maximum density. Competing infrastructure offerings from HPE and Cisco have only two drives per compute sled.

Simplified management

When you leverage vSAN Ready Nodes in the PowerEdge MX architecture, you can take advantage of OpenManage integration for VMware vCenter. This virtual appliance can reduce the tools and tasks associated with management and deployment of Dell EMC PowerEdge servers in your virtual environment. This plug-in reduces complexity by natively integrating key management capabilities into the vCenter console, and minimizes risk with streamlined firmware updates, deep visibility into inventory, health and warranty details.

Check it out

All of this cool stuff is only part of the story. For a more detailed look at the capabilities and benefits of vSAN Ready Nodes on Dell EMC PowerEdge MX architecture, visit dellemc.com/servers.  And, if you’re here at VMworld this week in Las Vegas, come see the PowerEdge MX on display for the first time at the Dell Technologies booth #1276 in the expo hall.

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