Snap Decision: How Digital Transformation Helps Us Get There First

We are engaged in a war of algorithms; a battle fought in cyber space that also plays out across air, land, and sea every day. Digital transformation is the key to winning because it gives us a critical advantage: the ability to execute before the adversary can.

This “decision advantage” comes, in part, from embedding technology into the mission at the service of the warfighter. Technology transformation at the kinetic level, for example, makes efforts at the tip of the spear more successful. Imagine real-time AI-processed reconnaissance information optimizing ordinance activity on-target. Or turning our ships at sea into floating data centers: optimizing communication, battlefield insights, ship defenses, onboard maintenance, and medical care for our wounded warriors.

Today, across the department and in all branches of the U.S. military, IT leaders are looking for solutions to turn their legacy IT footprint into a modern multi-cloud environment.  This transformation will also bring sweeping changes to our workforce.  Tomorrow’s pilot will need to be as good at multi-mode IT systems management as actually flying an aircraft.

Technology transformation with the Department of Defense (DoD) means looking at where computer activity needs to take place. This could include activity in a data center, or on a sensor, drone, mobile device, aircraft, and even an office-based workstation. Where this processing activity, called a ‘workload’ takes place should be optimized for the mission – and not optimized for the convenience of the IT purchasing process. Mission-optimized IT includes Domestic DOD-managed cloud environments and data centers, ad hoc IT networks in forward operating positions with disadvantaged communication, or on the battlefield itself.

In support of this transformation, a multi-cloud approach allows the military to deploy infrastructure that is secure and flexible for mission-critical projects. One such example is a recent Defense Department effort to build out a secure, on-premise cloud solution within its existing data center footprint. Outdated and unsupported legacy IT systems were eating up already-scarce funding and leaving our warfighters and their mission exposed to the adversary.

Dell EMC is honored to have partnered with DoD in this effort, known as the On-Site Managed Services (OMS) program. It provides high-availability, high-performance, mission-critical compute services. This cutting-edge IT transformation program allows the DoD to manage their most sensitive workloads and provide compute and processing wherever the mission requires.

OMS illustrates the point that mission success is all about operation and accessibility, requiring different approaches for each unique workload. With a complex map of challenges and mission-critical considerations, the DoD must continue to approach cloud on a workload-by-workload basis for IT modernization success, appreciating cloud as an operating model.

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Meet the New Members of the Dell EMC PowerEdge Server Portfolio

The launch of five new Dell EMC PowerEdge servers presents fantastic opportunities for your business – see how you can use them to help your customers solve their IT challenges…

Are you up to speed with this month’s launch of the new exciting Dell EMC PowerEdge servers?

The five new servers have all been purpose-designed to help meet organizations’ specific workload needs while also enabling IT Transformation – and there’s something to suit every typical customer segment.

There are three brand new Dell EMC PowerEdge rack servers and two tower options for you to now introduce to your prospects and customers:

◈ PowerEdge R740xd2
◈ PowerEdge R340
◈ PowerEdge R240*
◈ PowerEdge T340*
◈ PowerEdge T140

All these new products are now ready to ship – so it’s time for an end-of-year push to make sure all your customers are aware of their capabilities.

Introducing our new enterprise content server

The new Dell EMC PowerEdge R740xd2 is being marketed as ‘the enterprise content server’.  The R740xd2 offers a high-capacity design that is ideal for organizations with data-intensive workloads like media streaming, messaging and software-defined storage (SDS).

The PowerEdge R740xd2 was developed to enable your customers to:

◈ Respond effectively to data growth;
◈ Simplify management across the data center;
◈ Help ensure uptime and data security.

It offers large internal storage in a 2S/2U rack content server that’s purpose-built to support demanding, data-heavy workloads – everything from streaming media like video surveillance and content delivery networks to Exchange and SDS – all in a high-capacity space-saving design.

Built from the ground up to enable IT Transformation and featuring the latest generation Intel® Xeon® Scalable processors, the Dell EMC PowerEdge R740xd2 was developed to help enterprises compete in today’s fast-moving business environment.

It includes automated intelligence to simplify management and enable rapid deployment of new servers and updates. Automating server administration in this way helps your customers to reduce the time required to manage mid-to-large scale environments.

The PowerEdge R740xd2 helps deliver continuous reliability and uptime with enterprise-class drives and integrated security features – so your customers can use it to fortify their server operations.

In short, this new server is the perfect choice for customers looking for:

◈ Cost-effective, high-capacity storage with two-socket server performance
◈ Automated administration that’s easy to manage with proactive and predictive support options
◈ High availability features (front-serviceable, hot-swappable drives) and built-in security to help protect critical data

Superb new single-socket 1U rack solutions

For organizations seeking single-socket solutions, the two new 1U rack servers now added to the PowerEdge portfolio are great options to start promoting.

The Dell EMC PowerEdge R240 is the perfect choice for budget-conscious small businesses and service providers looking for an affordable and simple-to-use dense server that they can rely on for web hosting and remote tasks. Marketed as ‘compute made easy’, it offers your customers affordability, versatility and simplicity.

Meanwhile, the Dell EMC PowerEdge R340 is an ideal entry-level option for medium-sized businesses that require an efficient, scalable, dense server to address productivity and maximum uptime. Combining efficiency and scalability with automation, it’s designed to accelerate business growth.

Take a look at our new tower options too

The all-new availability of two impressive tower format servers rounds out the expanded PowerEdge portfolio.

The Dell EMC PowerEdge T140 is a great entry-level option for small business owners who need an affordable and simple-to-use server – it’s perfect for file and print management and point of sale activity. This server is specifically designed to support a growing business, making the IT infrastructure easy and worry-free while also keeping data safe and secure.

For growing small or medium businesses with remote employees, the PowerEdge T340 provides high availability and storage – making it the ideal choice for collaboration and sharing needs. It enables your customers to run their operations reliably, manage their IT easily and to scale dynamically, so they can grow their business without limits.**

These exciting new products are all now RTS

The addition of these new servers to the already impressive Dell EMC PowerEdge portfolio presents fantastic opportunities for you and your business.

They’re all now RTS – so make sure you get up to speed and explore all the sales opportunities with customers looking for high-capacity and entry-level options.

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Best Practices for Robust VMware Data Protection in an Ever Growing Data Environment

Everyone has heard the numbers.  There is more and more data and it keeps growing at an ever increasing rate.  According to the latest IDC estimates, the amount of data is expected to grow tenfold by 2025 to 163 zettabytes.  To thrive in today’s economy, organizations must make the most of their data and must also ensure that the data is protected and can be recovered quickly and cost effectively. And, since majority of enterprise workloads run on virtualized environments, with most of those workloads running on VMware, having robust VMware data protection is essential to the success of most organizations.

A number of best practices deployed as part of your data protection strategy can help you achieve this:

1. Automate protection of virtual workloads

With more data and more VMs being spun up at an ever increasing rate, you cannot rely on manual processes to ensure that all your new applications and VMs are protected.  You do not want busy application owners or vAdmins to have to manually create new protection policies or assign new workloads or VMs to existing policies.  And, you certainly do not want the lag time from the creation of a workload to raising a request with a backup or storage admin to configure backups of the workload.

Modern data protection solutions automate protection processes with support for dynamic mapping of vSphere objects to existing protection policies.  This means that your new VMs, based on criteria you define (such as DS cluster, data center, tags, VMname, etc.), are automatically assigned and protected upon creation with no human intervention necessary.

2. Self-service data protection

Your application owners and vAdmins are busy making sure that your business and mission critical applications are up and performing as intended.

They do not want any delays with respect to data protection related tasks (backup policy changes, file and/or VM recoveries, etc.) by going through a backup or infrastructure admin and they certainly do not want to learn or log into another system or UI to do it on their own.  Enabling your application and vAdmins to perform data protection tasks directly from the native vSphere UI they are familiar with can go a long way in making their jobs, with respect to data protection, easier.

Modern data protection solutions provide deep integration with vSpehre to deliver self-service data protection workflows, enabling application owners and vAdmins the freedom to perform the vast majority of data protection related tasks directly from the native and familiar vSphere UI.

3. Distributing data across Software Defined Data Center nodes

Most data protection solutions handle data deduplication and distribution of data at the edge of the SDDC, after the data has been transferred from the source storage to the target backup storage.  This results in extensive network traffic and bandwidth usage.  It can also lead to the requirement of a separate expensive backup network and inefficient use of storage space.

Modern data protection solutions perform deduplication processing within the SDDC before the data is transferred to backup storage.  This allows the solution to scale-out with the SDDC and ensures data processing requirements do not fall behind as the SDDC scales. In addition, an ideal data protection solution should also utilize horizontally scaled out pools of protection storage, which results in more efficient allocation of software defined storage.  The result is less bandwidth usage and less storage capacity consumed for backing up your data.

4. Change block tracking restore capabilities

Change block tracking for backups is very common among today’s data protection solutions.  This means that for each subsequent VM backup, the solution only copies data blocks that have changed since the last backup.  This results in faster backups and less bandwidth consumed.

What is not very common, but important is change block tracking restore.  This allows the solution to track the difference between the current version of the VM and the version you are trying to restore.  It then only restores the changed blocks between the two.  The result is much faster VM restores and much less bandwidth consumed for those restores.  A solution that supports change block tracking restore enables new architectures without compromising recovery time objectives. One such architecture is the ability to backup and restore VMs across wide area networks. A modern data protection solution will have support for change block tracking restores.

5. Performance disaggregated from capacity

There is a trend in data protection solutions towards simplicity in the form of converged appliances that combine data protection software and backup storage, along with all the ancillary compute and networking, in a single converged appliance.  While this trend towards simplicity is admirable, for many data protection solutions, it has come at the expense of capacity and/or performance efficiency.

For many of these simple, converged solutions capacity and processing are linked.  Once you run out of processing power on an appliance – too many VMs to backup, too many backup streams needed to comply with SLAs, etc. – you need another appliance to add more processing even if you did not need the additional storage capacity.  Similarly, if you run out of storage capacity, you need another appliance and end up paying for the additional processing that you did not need. This is a common dilemma of architectures that scale capacity and performance linearly.

A modern data protection solution, whether it is in the traditional HW/SW form factor, SDDC or a converged appliance, disaggregates performance from capacity and allows each to scale independently.  Ideally, the backup processes should be load balanced across your entire SDDC environment and there should be no need to add or pay for additional processing if you need more capacity.

Dell EMC delivers software defined, automated data protection

With Dell EMC Data Protection, you don’t have to compromise on performance, automation, architecture or efficiency for the sake of simplicity.  Our solutions, whether you are deploying our Data Protection software and Data Domain backup storage or our new Integrated Data Protection Appliances, each utilize our software defined data protection architecture to deliver on each of the above best practices.

Dell EMC Data Protection solutions deliver:

◈ Automation of VM protection with dynamic mapping to protection policies

◈ Leading self-service data protection for VMware environments with our native vSphere integration

◈ Minimal bandwidth usage and maximum storage efficiency with our industry leading edge and target deduplication technology that delivers up to 55:1 storage efficiency and up to 98% bandwidth efficiency

◈ Change block restore for lighting fast VM recovery

◈ Disaggregated performance from capacity with distributed virtual proxies that are automatically provisioned, deployed, and load balanced across the SDDC environment

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Simplifying Surveillance in the Age of More

Why an integrated, enterprise approach to IoT surveillance is the way forward

More cameras, more sensors, more intelligence―today’s advanced video surveillance systems do more than ever before to protect people and property, with applications far beyond perimeter monitoring and access control.

However, as a recent IDC white paper points out, putting new surveillance technologies to work quickly gets complex. More devices, more data, and more connections mean more potential security risk and more integration and management challenges.

With widespread digitization, surveillance moves from what was once an essentially self-contained function to one that spans the larger enterprise IT/IoT environment―with implications for infrastructure, security, data management, analytics, operations, software development, and workplace tools.

More “things”

In many ways, video surveillance via the first IP (Internet Protocol) cameras in the mid-90s was the original IoT use case, where digital cameras collected and centralized information about the physical world. Fast-forward twenty plus years to today. The ecosystem of digital IP cameras has extended outward to a web of interconnected “things” in surveillance, including not only more advanced imaging sensors but also other types of IoT sensors capable of detecting and digitizing information about the physical environment ranging from chemical signatures to temperature to pressure to sound to vibration. The growth of this market is continuing its upwards trajectory. By 2021, IDC predicts that annual shipments of fixed IP/network surveillance cameras will exceed 130 million and mobile surveillance cameras (e.g.,  drones, vehicles, body wear) will top 73 million.

A more complete picture

The ability to combine digital video data with other IoT-sensor surveillance data as well as with other data sources (e.g., employee records, building schematics, campus maps) and powerful analytics (e.g., telemetry, facial recognition, machine learning, artificial intelligence) enables a new kind of computer vision. Security officers gain a more immediate, complete, and accurate picture of situations as they unfold. The likelihood of useful machine-recommended responses grows. And investigators gain digital search and analysis tools that make inquiries into past incidents much faster and easier.

More data

One of the biggest challenges is storing, aggregating, analyzing, and protecting the massive amounts of data generated by a greater number of cameras with higher resolution, multiple modalities, and additional IoT sensors. Security departments are turning to IT organizations for expertise in how best to meet the demands of compute performance, storage, and backend analytics as well as with how to comply with the longer retention periods being set by regulatory bodies and institutional policies. New storage technologies and tiered storage approaches are needed to achieve efficiency and resiliency. And many enterprises are looking to hybrid or private cloud storage, especially for archiving video data, for the flexibility and scalability it offers.

More vulnerabilities

Each IP camera and IoT device in the surveillance network is a potential attack vector, making advanced security methods critical—from software-defined network micro-segmentation to edge compute security to over-the-air updates.

More complexities, more opportunities

The buildout of advanced surveillance systems presents significant challenges in terms of hardware, software and network integration, deployment and onboarding of new devices over time, and ongoing management. But rather than addressing these challenges at the solution or even application level, organizations should tackle these challenges using a broader enterprise-wide lens—more specifically, by looking at how the solution can be leveraged to help drive future growth and transformation, including:

◈ Digital transformation: Determine how surveillance data and other enterprise and external data can be leveraged with advanced analytics, machine learning, and AI not just to address safety and security objectives but also to advance other objectives in areas such as product quality, customer experience, and market differentiation.

◈ IT/OT transformation: Achieve new agility and efficiencies through architectural and operational alignment of IT and OT investments.

◈ Workforce transformation: Address changes in roles and responsibilities and provide the right type of display and dashboard tools.

◈ Security transformation: Take a more proactive, built-in software-defined approach to secure enterprise data and systems to better handle the increased number of threat vectors.

A more open, holistic, and integrated approach―from camera to core to cloud

According to IDC, the best approach to deploying advanced surveillance systems and integrating them into the greater IT environment is with an open, integrated, and holistic platform.

As the number one global infrastructure provider for surveillance solutions today, Dell Technologies has done just that with our new Dell Technologies IoT Solution for Surveillance platform. IoT Solution for Surveillance is an end-to-end surveillance platform built on Dell and Intel® technologies―with the customer’s choice of devices, software, and analytics―all validated in one of our three global Surveillance Validation Labs. The open architecture includes designed-in security and scalability that reduces risk, cost, and complexity while providing the flexibility to adapt to future innovations and needs.

Dell Technologies IoT Solution for Surveillance combined with our expert strategic consulting services and backed by the Dell EMC Global Services and Support team equips organizations with the right solutions, skill sets, and services needed to meet their surveillance needs today while preparing for what’s coming tomorrow. If we can be sure of one thing, there will always be more.

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Say Hello to Test Drive for PowerMax, Unity, Isilon and DP4400 – 10 Things to Know!

The VxRail Test Drive™ program has been a big hit. Now, it’s expanding to include the storage and data protection portfolios. Say hello to Test Drive for PowerMax, Unity, Isilon and IDPA DP4400.

The Dell EMC Test Drive program consists of pipeline accelerator events for the Dell EMC Enterprise product portfolio. For partners looking to grow deals (and potentially win them faster), here are 10 things you need to know.

1. Test Drives are designed to increase sales closure rates. Getting a prospect into the Test Drive seat offers a chance to accelerate and close deals.
2. They can potentially lead to higher-value deals. The experience is designed to build familiarity and trust in the product—potentially opening the door to bigger and better deals within an account.
3. They can potentially lower the cost of sale. Test Drives are designed to significantly reduce the time and resources needed to close a typical opportunity by helping to simplify and shorten the sales cycle.
4. It’s a hands-on experience for the prospect. Test Drives are one-day, immersive experiences for your prospects. It lets them “get behind the wheel” of an infrastructure product to better understand their use case and prove viability.
5. These events are for the technical crowd. When you reach out to prospective Test Drive accounts, make sure they can send technical decision makers and/or influencers. The experience is focused on the end user.
6. The ideal time: Consideration and Evaluation stages. Test Drives offer a deeper, practical exploration of a product for prospects that have been researching their options and are nearing a decision.
7. They can happen anywhere in the world. Test Drive events are accessible to just about any prospect. Events can take place at a Dell EMC site, a partner site, or at a prospect’s office—across the globe and available in 10 languages.
8. Up to 16 prospects can attend. You can bring a maximum of 16 prospects to any one Test Drive. Ideally, you’ll have at least eight unique prospects with a maximum of two attendees per company.
9. It’s an event in a box. Leave it to the pros to drive the right curriculum and logistics behind the scenes for your key prospects.
10. It’s all about building confidence. The most important potential outcome of a Test Drive is, in one word, confidence—in the product, in making the right decision and in value of the investment.

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Don’t be Basic – Why You Should Automate IT Starting NOW

Picture this. You’ve arrived at work in the morning, ready to get going on an important strategic initiative you talked about with your boss last week. It’s a project that energizes you and has huge potential to impact the business. Yet somehow, hours later, you still haven’t started it. Email, mundane reports, repetitive everyday tasks, and unexpected fire drills kept you from the work that really matters.

We’ve all been there. IT professionals struggle with this problem just like everyone else. Perhaps even more so. The everyday task to an IT pro carries additional significance. Managing IT infrastructure so that the LOB and customers have a seamless digital experience is paramount. Now that all business is digital, it’s not enough for IT to just “keep the lights on.” They’re expected to contribute to business strategy and drive innovation.

The Benefits of IT Infrastructure Automation

Automation is a key component to freeing up IT staff time, reducing outages, and speeding time to delivery for new apps and services. In short, automation is the key to modernizing IT. Most IT managers know this. Yet, even the most mundane IT management tasks reflect low levels of automation. Forrester research proves it. In a recent study from Forrester, 50% or less of survey respondents say any one of nine server management tasks are more automated than manual. The figure below from Forrester shows the data.

There’s clearly an opportunity to get ahead of competitors by advancing IT infrastructure automation. Despite low levels of IT infrastructure automation currently, the benefits are many. Furthermore, the greatest benefits are experienced by those with high levels of automation AND modern server infrastructure. Forrester calls these organizations “Modernized IT.” Compared to less automated IT organizations with outdated server hardware, Modernized IT experiences:

◈ 1x greater reduction in service outages
◈ 3x greater reduction in operating expenditures
◈ 5x more reduction in IT staff dedicated to routine, repetitive tasks
◈ 3x greater reduction in capital expenditures

Additional benefits of IT infrastructure automation include: faster deployment/delivery of services, faster application updates, faster system stack updates, more efficient IT staffing, improved asset tracking, less time spent on troubleshooting, and reduced infrastructure complexity. In fact the list of benefits from Forrester’s research is even longer! Have I convinced you yet? IT infrastructure automation and modern servers really do pack a one-two punch. And we have the data to prove it.

Another key benefit to automating IT is that it can clear the path for IT to focus on next-generation workloads like Artificial Intelligence. 71% of IT organizations surveyed report that a lack of server automation is a key barrier to implementing AI initiatives. AI is an increasingly important tool, leading to better customer experiences and driving business strategy. To remain competitive and avoid the rise of shadow IT, IT departments need to lead AI initiatives. Not follow. IT infrastructure automation can help you do that.

How Dell EMC can help you Automate

Once you’re ready to modernize IT with automation, the best place to start is automating server management. After all, servers are the foundational element of your data center. With modern PowerEdge servers offering scalable business architecture, integrated security, and intelligent automation, your IT organization is poised for business success. Plus, Dell EMC offers a full portfolio of systems management solutions with a wide range of automation capabilities.

Those simple server management tasks like monitoring, deployment, troubleshooting, and provisioning? We can automate that. For example, with OpenManage Mobile and Quick Sync 2, reduce the time to view server inventory, firmware, and network details by 77%. With the same tools, you can reduce the time spent on troubleshooting by up to 28%. It’s also faster to perform a basic server setup with OpenManage Mobile and Quick Sync 2 (up to 145 fewer steps).

Dell EMC has the tools and the expertise to help you start with the basic and accelerate to the advanced. IT infrastructure automation doesn’t have to be so hard. With Dell EMC it can be simple. It’s time for IT to start focusing on strategic business priorities, not just keeping the lights on.

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3 Secrets to Fast Tracking Your IT Priorities

Small and medium businesses know that the road to success is filled with distractions and roadblocks. According to IDC, the three major IT priorities for small and medium businesses are improving efficiency, improving revenue growth, and reducing expenses. Most small to medium businesses don’t have dedicated IT personnel on hand to tackle these priorities.

You are a business owner and already wear too many hats. And when it comes to IT, that hat is often worn by either you or the most technical individual on your team.

Luckily, you can put your IT hat back on the shelf with the entry-level PowerEdge T140 and PowerEdge T340 tower servers. These servers are specifically built for your small and medium businesses’ everyday needs. Here’s how they help you accomplish your three major IT priorities.

1. Easy efficiency

PowerEdge tower servers are built to process and transmit data quickly. This will enable your everyday business applications to run faster and reduce the amount of interruptions. They simplify team collaboration, giving you peace of mind that you are working on the latest revision. They also save data automatically, reducing the threat of re-work.

PowerEdge towers are ideal for on-site, remote, and branch office use. By managing multiple remote servers via one intuitive platform, you can save a trip across town, states, or even countries, depending on your office locations. Additionally, you can choose to conveniently receive alerts and access hardware remotely anytime and anywhere, saving you time and money.

With the ProDeploy suite of services, you can let Dell EMC do the heavy lifting while you focus on your business. Simply tell Dell EMC what applications you’d like to run, and we’ll configure and deploy the server in your office. Set up as much as 66% faster with our ProDeploy suite of services. Our team is here to answer any questions and help you plan for your future growth.

PowerEdge towers offer automated proactive and predictive support technology. Resolve potential issues with up to 72% less IT effort using ProSupport Plus and SupportAssist. This technology can automatically notify Dell EMC of a potential threat to get a jump start on a solution.

2. Revenue growth made easier

You run critical business applications that enable you to connect with your customers, prospective customers, and your team. The PowerEdge towers are ideal for most business applications such as file and print, point of sale, collaboration/sharing, databases, mail, and messaging.

PowerEdge towers enable business applications to run quickly with powerful computing capability. These tower servers enable multiple team members to work on the same file and print multiple documents efficiently. The servers also enable faster and reliable payment processing with a secure infrastructure. It allows you to collaborate and connect quickly and efficiently with customers and colleagues around the world.

Time is money. As a business, you never want any of your business applications to stop working. PowerEdge servers are reliable and can reduce the risk of downtime with a hot plug drive option. This would enable your server to work while being serviced. This will keep your business operating around the clock, allowing you additional opportunity to drive your business.

3. The easy choice for expense reduction

One of the key IT business priorities is to reduce expenses. Among many important things to consider while reducing expense, IT security is imperative. It’s important to not take IT security for granted given all the recent data breaches. One of the best ways to keep expenses down and customer loyalty up is to avoid a security breach.

The average total cost of a data breach in the United States is $7.9 million. The global average total cost of a data breach increased 6.4% from the previous year to $3.86 million.

With the purpose of protecting our customers, every PowerEdge server come with built-in security. Simply bolting security on after the fact doesn’t work. PowerEdge towers can protect your server from malicious changes with iDRAC9 Enterprise Server Lockdown mode. You can also have peace of mind that your data is backed up automatically.

PowerEdge tower servers can be safer and cheaper than public cloud alternatives. As a matter of fact, Independent research commissioned by Dell EMC uncovered that over 50% of midmarket organizations that have moved a workload from a public cloud service back to on-premise infrastructure cited security and/or cost as a reason for this decision.

Additionally, PowerEdge tower servers help with future expense reduction because they are made to grow with your business over time. As you continue to scale your business with more demanding business applications, more customers, and more employees, your servers’ will also be able to scale with you.

If you are a small business that requires an easy to use and affordable server for everyday business applications like file and print and point of sale, explore the PowerEdge T140 tower server and associated services. If you are a growing business or have remote/branch offices that require reliability and scalability for your everyday business applications like collaboration/sharing and databases, take a look at the PowerEdge T340 tower server and associated services.

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ITaaS can Increase Efficiency and Reduce Cost While also Supporting IT Transformation

Discover how implementing automated IT service delivery can help organizations to realize significant business benefits as they work towards transforming their IT infrastructure.

In the last of a series of blogs inspired by influential research published by industry analyst ESG, we explore the impact that implementing automated IT service delivery can have on an organization’s ability to achieve IT Transformation. 

Of all the ways an organization can modernize and automate its IT infrastructure, opting to adopt an IT as a Service cloud operating model is one of the most effective in terms of making progress towards full IT Transformation.

With IT as a Service (ITaaS), much of the infrastructure provisioning, configuration and change management is automated. This means that line of business end-users and developers are largely able to self-serve and manage on-premises IT resources as and when their needs and workload demands change.

In an organization that’s successfully running ITaaS, management and orchestration software and API workflows combine to automate the delivery of services through hybrid and multi-cloud architectures ­– delivering a user experience that’s timely, responsive, cost transparent and sufficiently agile to fuel innovation.

The advantages of automated IT service delivery

While successfully leveraging automated IT service delivery is a key measurement of broader IT Transformation, it also offers major operational benefits on its own.

New research by industry analyst ESG1 has shown that there’s a positive correlation between running an ITaaS cloud operating model and increased IT and business agility, more streamlined operations, improved end-user satisfaction and – perhaps most importantly – greater business success.

One of the core functions of a cloud operations model is to reduce IT operational ‘friction’ – in everything from defining workload requirements and procuring infrastructure, all the way through to integrating and deploying systems. At organizations running ITaaS, requirements come straight from end-users; they select what they need from an IT-vetted service catalog. The infrastructure to fulfill their ‘orders’ is allocated from the organization’s highly virtualized and automated data center resources. It’s an approach that eliminates meetings, wait times and deployment times – leading to both greater IT agility and improved business agility.

Running ITaaS also removes manual IT-related bottlenecks to service delivery, which yields significant efficiency benefits across an organization. These include IT projects being completed under budget and IT staff being freed up from routine tasks such as deploying, managing, and monitoring infrastructure to focus on higher-value activities such as IT architecting, planning, and application development.

But that’s not all. To top it off, organizations running ITaaS also report higher levels of business success and being more optimistic about their competitive positions compared with companies that are yet to explore the advantages of automated IT service delivery.

How does implementing ITaaS affect IT maturity?

The new research study demonstrates that making the move to automated IT service delivery can play a key role in increasing an organization’s operational agility as well as its ability to achieve full IT Transformation.

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 Transformation2 – and rank them as ‘Legacy’, ‘Emerging’, ‘Evolving’ or ‘Transformed’.

It discovered that ‘Transformed’ companies were nearly 10X more likely to be running ITaaS than ‘Evolving’ organizations (58% versus 6%). Of particular note was the fact that not one of the ‘Emerging’ and ‘Legacy’ organizations surveyed by ESG reported using ITaaS.

These statistics are now detailed in ESG’s Research Insights Brief on the fundamental role that automated IT service delivery plays in IT Transformation1.

ITaaS delivers clear benefits and supports IT Transformation

Overall, the ESG research found that moving to automated IT service delivery delivers significant operational and wider business benefits.

Compared with ‘Legacy’ organizations, the ‘Transformed’ organizations in the study – those companies that are leveraging ITaaS – are typically:

◈ 5X more likely to be ahead of their competitors in time to market (76% versus 14%).

◈ Nearly 15X more likely to report completing application deployments ahead of schedule (44% versus 3%).

◈ 5X more likely to operate an on-site infrastructure that’s as cost-effective (or more so) than the public cloud (71% versus 27%).

◈ 5X more likely to exceed their revenue goals by more than 10%.

◈ Completing 13% more projects ahead of schedule.

Do you have customers and prospects who would be interested in achieving this level of business success and operational efficiency? Of course you do! Take the time to introduce them to the business benefits that automated IT service delivery can bring to their organizations.

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Dell Helps Prepare Texas A&M Students for the Digital Era

To prepare students for a constantly changing, connected world, higher education is creating more personalized and collaborative learning environments. Colleges and universities are in the middle of a significant shift in educational models, delivering both unique learning models and student campus experiences through digital transformation. Students are increasingly taking advantage of technology on demand to meet their own learning needs and chart their own path to workforce readiness.

With the likelihood of a workforce shortages in many industries, we need to be looking for new ways to help build a future-ready workforce. Today’s students–who are digital natives–are the key to solving real world problems. According to a recent Dell Technologies study on Generation Z, 80% of Gen Z (those born after 1996) aspire to work with cutting-edge technology and more than a third are interested in IT careers. Yet, 94% of the Gen Zers are worried about having the right skills and experience. Universities are finding a way to tap the potential of budding innovators and by giving them an opportunity to show off their tech savvy, while also giving students the soft skills to make them more confident as they prepare to enter the workforce.

Specifically, Texas A&M engages students with immersive learning with Aggies Invent, a 48-hour intensive design experience which engages 60+ students in multidiscipline/multi-level teams in hands-on projects that will push their innovation, creativity, and communication skills. The end goal is to provide students the opportunity to acquire skills essential to becoming successful innovation leaders and support them in founding startup companies.  These events are held monthly during the academic year and have different themes. This past weekend, I had the opportunity to participate as a mentor as Dell with Intel and Nvidia supported the Augmented Reality (AR) and Virtual Reality (VR) competition.

Participating students were asked to address challenges using AR and VR solutions, in a wide range of industries including healthcare, first responders, education, military and designers. To reinforce the immersive experience at the event, students were provided with Dell Precision 7730 workstations, VR technology (HTC Vive headsets) and AR technologies including Microsoft Hololens, Magic Leap headsets and Meta headsets. In addition, Dell and supporting sponsors lent their expertise to assist students all weekend long with mentoring and assistance with the technology solutions, product development as well as marketing.

Over the course of 48 hours, students self-organize into teams and selected a challenge that they would like to  solve.  In the first few hours of the competition, the teams identified the specific need to address, developed three different options to solve the challenge and presented to a panel on how their plan will deliver a unique solution to address their challenge. From there the teams worked to develop the concept, produce a 90 second video describing their idea and a final 10 minute presentation in which they presented to the judges.

For me, the most of exciting part of the challenge was the ability to work as a mentor with the student teams.  Students wanted guidance on a number of different activities.  Technical guidance included helping them understand the different uses of AR and VR technology and how to determine which might be the best fit for their solution and what development platforms are being used today for content creation.  As they presented their plans, the Dell team provided feedback on presenting their solution, including Powerpoint and presentation best practices.  It was exciting to see how much the students progressed as a team over the course of 48 hours from their initial concepts to the presentations to the judges.

Each member of the winning team, which created a VR solution to address the fear of speaking in public, received a Dell 5530 Mobile Precision Workstation. The second place team developed an AR solution for improving the experience of purchasing clothes online and the third place team developed a VR application to teach students materials science. The placing teams all received monetary prizes as well.

Today, higher education is at a pivotal moment. College and universities are looking for new ways to provide learning experiences and prepare their students for the future. I am proud to work for an organization that helps higher education with digital transformation through innovative and affordable solutions delivering enhanced learning experiences, improving student outcomes and exploring important research initiatives. Dell is helping universities prepare for students for their digital future.

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Lights, Camera, Action! The new OEM PowerEdge R740xd2 Makes its Debut

When we say that we listen to our customers, it’s not empty marketing hype. In fact, we generally do way more than listen – we follow through. Let me share a great example. A few months ago, a large OEM customer told the team that it needed a customized solution to bridge the gap between compute and storage. Unfortunately, none of our existing products fit the exact bill. We listened, got together all the right people within Dell EMC and effectively designed a brand-new product to meet the customer’s needs.

Responding to customer needs

And so, hot off the press, I’m delighted to present the PowerEdge R740xd2 (LINK), one of my favorite products of all time! What’s so special about the latest addition to our server range? How does it address that customer’s needs and what other customers is this product likely to appeal to?

Data never sleeps

Before I answer, look around! Data is everywhere. In the last few years, more data has been created than in the previous 5,000 years of humanity put together. It’s mind-blowing but apparently we now create more than 2.5 quintillion bytes of data every single day. Get this – every three days, the amount of data we produce is equivalent to the number of grains of sand on planet earth. By 2020, it’s estimated that for every person on earth, 1.7Mb of data will be produced every single second.

Our world continues to transform

We’re all witnesses and players in this dynamic. Just think of our own lives. You don’t have to be old to remember when photos were hard copy and stored in albums that sat on the shelf in your living room. That was the case less than 20 years ago. Compare that to the present. Just think of the huge volume of photos taken now, all day, every day, via mobile phones. Not only has the volume increased dramatically – so too has the resolution. We used to watch DVDs – now it’s HD TV on demand. Instead of being a content consumer, many of us now create our own videos to post on YouTube. Video surveillance used to feature analog cameras – increasingly, the world is using IP digital cameras with different, higher resolutions and various aspect ratios.

A continual loop

The list goes on but you get my point. The way that pictures and video are now being created, managed, distributed and viewed is causing a seismic shift in the industry. 3D rendering and video content creation, including acquisition, transcoding and distribution, are hungry and need huge amounts of server processing power. Multi-device consumption and ultra-high definition are driving increased demand and generating even more data, which, guess what, needs to be stored!

Customer expectations are high

Meanwhile, user experience has taken central stage – we expect delivery to be instantaneous, anywhere, anytime, on any device. The big take-away is these data-heavy workloads demand huge computing power plus vast, vast amounts of storage. Looking ahead, I believe that demand will ramp even higher with trends like AI, 5G networks, 8K, HDR,IPv6 protocols, virtual and augmented reality plus, of course, IoT.

The bridge between compute and storage

The good news is that the PowerEdge R740xd2 has been designed to deal with this data deluge. It’s all about bringing compute closer to storage in order to deliver high performance results. Let me give a flavor of what you can expect.

Up to 364TB of storage

Picture, flexible storage and performance resources in a space-saving 2U rack server. Capacity wise, the PowerEdge R740xd2 can accommodate 24 x 3.5 inch front-serviceable, hot-swappable drives, delivering an amazing 364TB of storage with fast connection and response times. Of course, you can also add flash and 2S performance as your workload requirements evolve.

Eliminate bottlenecks

In terms of power, this little beauty packs a punch, delivering two-socket performance with up to two Intel® Xeon® scalable processors and up to 44 cores. With fast networking options and up to 16 DIMMS of memory, you can kiss bottlenecks goodbye. And of course, a cyber-resilient architecture ensures your data stays safe and available.

Inspired by our OEM customers

To all our OEM partners and customers in the video surveillance and media and entertainment markets – the PowerEdge R740xd2 is for you! During the test phase, OEM customers in these vertical industries told us they loved this product, describing it as “perfect for purpose”, “flexible”, “reliable”, “high quality”, and “rock solid.”

And, of course, from our perspective, the PowerEdge 740xd2 rounds out our already extensive OEM server and storage portfolio, allowing us to address the needs of our video surveillance customers plus enter and disrupt new markets, like media and entertainment.

What’s your reaction? I would love to hear your comments and questions. Remember, we’re listening and will continue to expand our portfolio to allow you get to market faster!

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AI Winter is Not Coming

One of the most popular shows is Game of Thrones. Ever since the first season characters have been warning that Winter is coming. Around this time of year as the leaves change colors, we know that Winter is coming. What about in the technology world is AI Winter coming? I think not.

Since the 1950’s we have had periods of AI Summers and AI Winters. These AI Summers are times of amazing hope of what AI will do for our future. During these phases Enterprise are investing in the technologies powering AI to stay relevant in the market. In the past these AI Summers have typically been followed by an AI Winter where investments in these projects dry up because of lack of ability to execute in the summer phases. For over half a century we have been through 3 phases of AI Winter. However, since around 2000 we have been in the longest AI summer to date and this time there will be no AI Winter. Let’s look at the top 3 reasons why AI Winter is not coming.

Increased Computing Power

The first element preventing another AI Winter is the continuation of Moore’s Law where we have increased the ability to boost compute power. For years we watched as Moore’s Law has allowed for computing processing to double every 2 years and dropping the cost of that computing power for both CPU and GPU. Building and training models with Deep Learning involves large amounts of processing. Now dream projects like driverless cars (ADAS) are finally coming true because the cost to train cars to drive themselves is starting to make financial sense. In the past the investment would have been astronomical to train a car to drive itself. Remember Deep Learning has been around since the 80’s it just the cost to compute wasn’t there for massive data projects. However, the continuation of Moore’s Law is only one component for why AI Winter isn’t coming.

Digital Transformation

The second factor in holding off winter is the digitization of everything. The digital transformation is real and the data that powers it is massive. In fact, IDC predicts that by 2025 the planet will have 163 ZB of data. Mind-blowing numbers but most transaction now takes place in the digital world. For example, last night I ordered pizza from my Mobile Application, then paid for it through an online money transfer. Never once during that process did I speak to a human until the pizza arrived at my door. Every part of this process created a digital footprint of data. The data from simple transactions such as pizza ordering or GPS mapping help Data Scientist and Machine Learning Engineers build models for the next generation of AI applications in the Enterprise. Massive amounts of data ready to train models can now be can captured, accessed, and analyzed to unlock the value of this data will help hold off AI Winter.

Deep Learning Open-source

The final solution to guarding against AI Winter is the advance in Deep Learning and Machine Learning Frameworks. Today’s innovation is accelerated by the advances in the open-source data science world with frameworks like Caffe and Tensorflow. In a previous post we talked about the importance that frameworks like these were built by the world’s largest data companies on the planet and yet they decided to release these into the open-source community. Understanding the real competitive advantages comes in the massive data they have collected over years to train these models. Now these powerful frameworks are part of the open-source community where an army of developers around the globe helping to improve this technology. Open-source Deep Learning and Machine Learning Frameworks will deal the final blow to AI Winter.

How AI Transformation Begins?

Understanding that AI Winter is not coming; how can you accelerate AI innovation? Start by unlocking the value of your Enterprise data by implementing a high performance AI solution that allows for Data Scientist to capitalize on that data. This will accelerate innovation by giving Data Engineers more time back in their day with faster model training and simplified software integration.

Dell EMC has been at the forefront of AI providing the technology that makes tomorrow possible. Working with NVIDIA we have solutions that provide the foundation for successful AI solutions which combine best of breed NVIDIA GPU accelerated compute complemented with high-performance scale-out Isilon storage. As the only venders on the market who offer flexibility and informed choice in this space, we offer Build Your Own options with Isilon and the ultra-dense GPU accelerated PowerEdge C-series, and for organizations that prefer to Buy solutions we have the prepackaged Dell EMC Ready Solutions for AI: Deep Learning with NVIDIA which was launched this past August. Most recently, earlier this month we announced, a new reference architecture for AI featuring the Isilon All-Flash F800 and NVIDIA DGX-1 servers. This delivers a 3rd high-performance AI deployment option that reduces risk and compresses the time needed for training and testing analytical models for multi-petabyte data sets on AI platforms.

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Leadership: A Commitment to Our Customers

Depending on who you ask, leadership means a number of different things. For many (including Merriam Webster), the defining attribute of a leader is simply holding an office or position of leadership. And sure, Dell EMC—#1 in global hyper-converged systems revenue1—is by all accounts a leader. But the true impact of leadership cannot be measured in the absolutes of a chart or balance sheet, rather in the degree to which they empower the people—and businesses—they work with. In this spirit, I am thrilled to share the results of Gartner’s November 2018 Magic Quadrant and companion Critical Capabilities report for Hyper-converged Infrastructure (HCI).

We believe Gartner has recognized Dell EMC for continued HCI leadership, reflecting both our Ability to Execute and Completeness of Vision. To evaluate Dell EMC Critical Capabilities for HCI, Gartner again selected VxRail, our flagship HCI offering. Our overall Critical Capabilities rating for HCI increased over last year’s report. In particular, this year Dell EMC scored higher than any other HCI vendor in the VDI use case, and for the 2nd year in a row, highest in Business-Critical and Cloud use cases.

A recent IDG survey shows that 50% of IT leaders are already running or planning to run business-critical applications on hyper-converged infrastructure, with another 20% considering it2. VxRail is the only fully integrated, pre-configured, and pre-tested HCI appliance on the market powered by VMware vSAN, the industry leading software defined storage solution designed for virtualized business-critical workloads and applications. Powered by the latest generation of Dell EMC PowerEdge servers, VxRail is fully loaded with enterprise data services and configurable to meet any business critical use case—even floating active-active data centers aboard hospital ships (just ask Mercy Ships, a non-profit VxRail customer that provides free lifesaving surgeries to people where medical care is nearly non-existent). VxRail speeds time to value in the core data center (powering applications such as SAP HANA), at the edge, and importantly in the cloud as well.

According to Gartner’s own research, “In 2019, hybrid IT will be the standard. Technical professionals focused on cloud must continue to advance cloud-first strategies, embrace multicloud and maintain on-premises environments”3. As an integrated cloud platform, VxRail offers multiple options to simplify the path to a VMware hybrid cloud environment, including VMware Validated Design (VVD) and, coming soon, VMware Cloud Foundation, with a focus on integration and brokering, which will deliver a seamless customer experience with automated deployment of a VMware SDDC architecture and LCM of the full end-to-end hardware/software stack along with choice of networking.

As the leader of HCI Product Marketing, on behalf of the entire Dell EMC HCI team, I am proud that Gartner has recognized Dell EMC in a continued HCI Leaders position. But more importantly, I am excited about what lies ahead for our customers. Dell EMC and VMware are continuing to increase our level of collaboration on VxRail—and it is our customers that will benefit from these ongoing joint investments. The less time IT spends on administration, routine maintenance, and support, the more time they can dedicate to innovation that drives business value—and ultimately leadership within their industry. Which brings me back to the theme of this blog: leadership. My definition of a leader is someone—or some business—that empowers and creates new leaders. When I speak with VxRail customers, I am consistently inspired by the creative, impactful ways they are leveraging hyper-converged infrastructure to make a difference for their businesses, and the world—from powering the next disruptive innovation to providing free lifesaving surgeries. I can’t wait to see what comes next.

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