Building the 5G Foundation – Enterprise Private Mobility-as-a-Service

Progressive enterprises are pursuing software-defined solutions with operating models powered by analytics, automation and machine communications to improve productivity, service-levels and cost structures. With hundreds of devices and sensors connecting to a network, wired connections are becoming expensive. At the same time, the mobile networks are not ready for the massive connections and the data associated with these connections coming their way.

Using conventional unlicensed methods such as Wi-Fi to address the coverage and capacity is not necessarily ideal for some mission critical workloads. This is because:

◈ Wi-Fi is designed as a “best effort” service, it cannot deliver the Quality of Service (QoS) to the level most large-scale companies demand.

◈ It requires significant security to be added to the solution – a big concern for healthcare facilities and other mission critical enterprise companies that have the strictest security needs

◈ Wi-Fi has limited mobility and the build out of the network has significant CAPEX and OPEX costs

Citizens Broadband Radio Service (CBRS) will be a key catalyst and enabler for private mobility for two main reasons:

1. Unlike Wi-Fi, it uses a licensed wireless band and LTE technology to enable guaranteed service levels for the enterprise.

2. The Enterprise can choose to deploy CBRS enabled private Mobility-as-a-Service. Many cloud service providers/wireless ISPs are building out a subscription-based model and therefore, the data rate costs are close to zero and the deployment of the service is faster and sometimes less expensive than Wi-Fi.

This is great news since CBRS will increase the adoption of 4G spectrum within the enterprise and paves the way for 5G. Earlier this month, the CBRS Alliance said it had begun work on a new release to merge with the 3GPP specification for 5G deployments.

We are working with Ruckus Networks (now CommScope via acquisition) to enable massive adoption of mobile edge solutions that will be leveraging CBRS bands in 4G today and will become the foundational blocks for 5G within the enterprise. Ruckus Networks has the core components for private mobility on a public cloud infrastructure, which includes the pre-provisioned SIMs, zero-touch provisioning capabilities and self-service tools for the enterprise. The combined strengths of mobile access by Ruckus Networks and secure customer edge infrastructure by Dell Technologies enables the enterprise transformation plan.

Key Requirements for the Enterprise

While there are many important success factors to be considered for enterprise rollouts, the following key requirements are essential to ensure that while 4G is being deployed today, the principles of 5G and its foundational blocks are taken into consideration.

1. The need is for a faster, more reliable network that has low latency and most importantly, is private (secure) so data is not shared across the public network. Wi-Fi isn’t always the most secure service, which can be a concern for any business where it is crucial to keep customers information and data private.

2. The network should be designed for capacity, quality of service and guaranteed service levels.

3. The workloads must reside locally within the enterprise and be orchestrated from a managed service cloud data center.

4. Regardless of consumption model (on-prem, cloud, hybrid) – the operations must be seamless across technology platforms, locations and administrative domains.

Private Mobility-as-a-Service is a Key Enabler for the Enterprise

Some of the key values extended by private Mobility as-a-Service utilizing CBRS bands are as follows.

◈ Enhanced reliability: More reliable than Wi-Fi for business-critical communications, private Mobility-as-a-Service uses CBRS spectrum to guarantee low latency with a managed SLA model.

◈ Flexible licensing model: This solution is a subscription SaaS model where the service orchestration, subscriber provisioning, and dynamic spectrum allocation for the access points are all pre-built into the solution for the enterprise.

◈ Ubiquity: Given the architectural overlap between SD-WAN and private Mobility as-a-Service, the solution can coexist with the broad SD-WAN deployments.

Our Solutions “in action” at DTW

Come see all the capabilities of Enterprise Private Mobility as-a-Service “in action” and meet our experts at the DTW 2019 Event in Las Vegas.

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Dell Technologies World: Exploring Infinite Possibilities

In a world that is rapidly changing, we often find ourselves knowing where we should be, but not always understanding the road to get there. Dell EMC continues to push those explorational boundaries at Dell Technologies World 2019, to bridge that gap towards Real Transformation. Let’s take a sneak peek at the demos, launches and featured solutions the Server & Infrastructure Systems team is bringing to the show.

What’s New?

This year you can expect many advancements within the Dell EMC PowerEdge and OpenManage portfolios. Here are some of the key announcements to look for at Dell Technologies World.

OpenManage FlexSelect – A new pluggable architecture enabling Dell to provide incremental management capabilities through the OpenManage Enterprise console.

OpenManage Enterprise Power Manager – The first plug-in for OpenManage Enterprise extends power management and power monitoring into the OpenManage console.

iDRAC improvements to security – Including TLS enablement for in-band communications and Cipher Suite Selection and HSTS enablement for enhanced communications with the iDRAC.

PowerEdge with Intel® Optane™ DC – With new Intel Optane DC persistent memory, customers can support in-memory databases, virtualization and data analytics workloads on PowerEdge servers.

Expansion of the PowerEdge Portfolio – With new 2nd Generation Intel® Xeon® Scalable processors, PowerEdge customers can better drive their digital transformations with improved performance.

Why Does It Matter?

To be competitive, businesses are constantly looking for ways to move the needle. As organizations grow and transform, they need IT that can grow with them. Dell EMC’s advanced infrastructure includes technologies designed for scalability. The PowerEdge MX platform is just one example that booth #219 will feature at Dell Technologies World. The PowerEdge MX offers a flexible architecture with expandable capabilities to meet the needs of an innovative growing business.

However, real growth and real transformation can bring real concerns. Dell EMC understands the importance of security and consistent management for growing IT infrastructures. At Dell Technologies World, there will also be a host of new products. Our latest offerings are designed for efficient and automated management, as well as enhanced security protection against insidious threats. We are determined to bring total peace of mind throughout your IT transformation journey.

How’s It Fun?

Monster Hunter Task Force Game: It is no surprise that threats to your data center are infinite and beyond your control. Dell EMC provides solutions that help you “kill, slay, destroy” threats to your success. The Dell EMC Server team will be featuring a fun interactive game showcasing how our technologies can eliminate those monsters in your datacenter.

New Belgium Brewing Happy Hour: As you continue your journey, make sure you join us for a toast to the IT successes along the way! We’re partnering with VxRail and VMware to host a New Belgium Brewing Happy Hour at 3:30 Tuesday and Wednesday. Come to booth 219 where we’ll be serving up a variety of New Belgium beer in a limited-edition souvenir glass. Make sure you stop by for a chance to win the daily contest giveaway and check out the New Belgium IT customer presentation live from our booth theater!

These are just a few of the activities, tools, and demos we’re bringing to Dell Technologies World. Our goal is to not only help you prepare for innovation, but manage it effortlessly from the edge to the core to the cloud.

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Pure Storage’s Evergreen Storage Program – A Marketing Solution to Engineering Problems

Pure Storage (“Pure”) makes a lot of noise about their Evergreen Storage program. With bold claims like “never rebuy a TB you’ve purchased, never do a data migration again and never do another forklift upgrade”, but the devil, and more importantly, the customer costs are in the details. We think after reviewing the facts you will come to the same conclusions we have. At its core Evergreen Storage – in our opinion – is a marketing program with features designed to overlook architectural shortcomings by focusing on specific customer benefits, while netting Pure high profit margins and locking in customers!

Why Did Pure Need to Invent the Evergreen Storage Program

Pure continuously markets that Evergreen isn’t just a program it’s also how they engineer their FlashArray product. To keep their FlashArray product design simple to upgrade, while keeping data in place, they had to make some architectural choices that would enable that goal. However, along with those architectural decisions came some inherent limitations that they needed to market and sell around. This is where the Evergreen Storage comes into play

So, what are some of the architectural decisions Pure made a long time ago to enable their ‘evergreen’ storage, for the FlashArray product line, and what are some of the consequences of those decisions?

Architectural Decisions

1. Pure chose to use a dual controller active-passive architecture, which dramatically simplifies their design goal of being able to do Data-In-Place controller upgrades with no down time. They simply upgrade the passive controller first, then make it the active controller so they can upgrade the other controller.

2. To get around some of their inherent performance issues, Pure now uses their own proprietary NVMe flash modules (X50, X70, X90), instead of industry standard flash drives, which means that they now have to do all the flash memory management, which can further affect performance.

Consequences of Those Decisions

1. Performance is bottlenecked by how powerful the one active controller is. Remember, that single active controller must handle all normal controller activity as well as do all the management of their proprietary flash modules. The only way to increase horsepower is by upgrading the controller. Are you starting to see the need for the Evergreen Gold Program now (Free-Every-Three, Upgrade Flex)?

2. Scaling capacity is limited by how much capacity a FlashArray’s single active controller can manage and the amount of flash modules its able to support.

Once you max out the amount of capacity the FlashArray can handle, the only way to scale capacity any higher is by swapping higher capacity flash modules into the system to replace the lower capacity flash modules.

So, how does Pure get around these limitations while trying to make money along the way? Yep, you guessed it, Evergreen Gold and its 3 ‘pay-as-you-grow’ features – Free Every Three, Upgrade Flex and Capacity Consolidation.

What Exactly are Pure’s Evergreen Storage Claims

Let’s break down each Evergreen Gold ‘feature’ and see what it provides, why it’s needed and the hidden costs and issues you won’t hear about from Pure.

Now let’s compare Pure’s Evergreen Gold approach to Dell EMC’s Future Proof approach for the most common customer scenarios.

Find more details on Dell EMC’s full Future Proof customer loyalty program here!

So, what have we learned about Pure’s Evergreen Gold?

Free Every Three: Free Every Three is not ‘free’. We learned that you need to buy Evergreen Gold just to qualify and need to renew Evergreen Gold for another 3 years, 6 years total, to get the ‘free’ controllers. In many ways Free Every Three is really just a form of ‘pre-payment’ for the controllers you may need after 3 years.

Upgrade Flex & Capacity Consolidation: At their essence, both Upgrade Flex and Capacity Consolidation are both REBUY programs. You are buying newer controllers and capacity to replace what you have already purchased. This is the very thing Pure says their Evergreen Storage avoids. Just because Pure claims to provide ‘some’ credit for the replaced controllers and/or capacity doesn’t change the fact it is still a rebuy program.

Our recommendation: do your homework and don’t be afraid to ask Pure some hard questions about their Evergreen Gold subscription…

Questions to Ask Pure

◈ Can you show me exactly how much Evergreen Gold’s Free Every Three will save me versus Evergreen Silver and simply buying new controllers IF I ever need them?

◈ Can you explain how I am not essentially ‘rebuying’ controllers and/or capacity, with trade-in credits, when I use Upgrade Flex or Capacity Consolidation?

◈ Can you explain why I need to purchase more capacity when I use Upgrade Flex to get faster controllers?

◈ Why do I need to purchase a new Evergreen Gold 3 year subscription to use Upgrade Flex?

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Ready Stack: Flexibly Build Your Own Converged Infrastructure

Sometimes, the turnkey approach is the best and fastest approach to modernization. But sometimes, customers need a custom solution that they can build for themselves, or with the support of trusted partners.

That’s why we’ve created Ready Stack – a portfolio of validated designs that enable customers to build their own converged infrastructure data center solutions. It’s great news for them – and great news for you, because you can work with them to design and deploy converged infrastructure on a fast and simple sales cycle.

Your Solution, all from Dell EMC

Ready Stack combines component technologies from a single source –Dell EMC, the leader of the overall Converged Systems segment, with more than 2X the revenue share of its nearest competitors1. All-flash storage, next-generation servers, data protection portfolios, and leading open networking solutions come together to help you reduce complexity and risk, and save time and hassle.

Ready Stack’s validated designs include:

◈ VMware IaaS on PowerEdge MX Servers and PowerMax Storage

◈ Microsoft Hyper-V on PowerEdge 14G Servers and Unity Storage

◈ VMware vSphere on PowerEdge 14G Servers and Unity Storage

By sourcing everything from one vendor, customers can greatly reduce the complexity of purchasing, provisioning, and deployment – which means that with Ready Stack, you’ll be offering a highly attractive proposition with fast time to value.

Partner benefits

Ready Stack industry-leading data center component solutions are designed to make it easier for you to:

◈ Increase sales, increase prospects and deepen customer relationships

◈ Achieve faster time-to-revenue

◈ Target flexible options more accurately to cases

◈ Reduce risk

◈ Improve opportunities to upsell services, which can help increase margins on your deals – including deployment services (with the appropriate accreditation)

◈ Showcase your range of competencies, from servers to storage, from core to cloud, and from workstations to IT transformation

◈ Benefit from incentive and rebate opportunities as part of our Partner Program

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Dell Technologies and Cisco Reaffirm Joint Commitment to Converged Infrastructure with Multi-Year Agreement

There’s industry chatter about what the growing adoption of hyperconverged infrastructure (HCI) might mean for the converged infrastructure (CI) space. As a company that retains its top spot in IDC’s Certified Reference Systems & Integrated Infrastructure Tracker with a 48% share — nearly 1.5X that of any other vendor — and serves thousands of customers who rely on CI, Dell EMC thinks it’s clear CI will remain a popular choice for years to come.

We continue to invest in energizing the CI space, helping customers to modernize and automate for the cloud era on our VxBlock 1000 platform. With this legacy of leadership and innovation, it’s no wonder IDC reports that Dell EMC is the #1 provider of converged systems for the past six years.

Today, we’re announcing the next key milestone in our commitment to CI innovation: the multi-year extension of our longstanding systems integrator agreement with Cisco.

“It’s difficult to overstate Dell EMC’s decade-long commitment to the converged infrastructure market,” said Eric Sheppard, Research Vice President, IDC. “The enormous resources Dell EMC has invested into this market have been directly responsible for driving down data center costs, complexity and risk for the many organizations running the company’s converged infrastructure all around the world. Dell EMC’s continued investments also stand as proof of the company’s commitment to the market and a deep belief in the benefits convergence brings to the datacenter.”

Working Together to Drive CI Innovation and Value

As you may know, Dell EMC (then EMC) and Cisco were the first to market with a CI system when we formed a joint venture with VMware in 2009.

Since then, Cisco has provided networking (Nexus) and compute (UCS) technology for Dell EMC through multiple iterations of VxBlock, while Dell EMC has continued to be a top-tier reseller of Cisco technology. Cisco rounds out the all-in-one VxBlock 1000 technology stack that’s built on powerful Dell EMC storage and data protection, giving businesses a reliable and highly performant platform for VMware cloud operations.

The newly inked agreement entails continued company alignment across multiple organizations: executive, product development, marketing and sales. This means we’ll continue to share product roadmaps and collaborate on strategic development activities, with Cisco investing in a range of Dell EMC sales, marketing and training initiatives to support VxBlock 1000.

Most recently, this joint development introduced Cisco UCS 6454 fabric interconnect support for higher scale, performance and throughput in VxBlock 1000, as well as a broader range of Cisco M5 server options, including the new Performance Optimized UCS C480 M5.

With so many cloud-ready capabilities in VxBlock 1000, we are seamlessly bridging our CI customers to the new multi-cloud landscape.

Customer Benefits from this Powerhouse CI Partnership

The primary factor driving Dell EMC and Cisco’s commitment to working together on CI is the enormous range of benefits it provides each of our customers.

VxBlock 1000 users experience improved assurance and lower operational risk through Dell EMC’s lifecycle management of the included Cisco technologies, which are fully integrated into a single infrastructure stack along with Dell EMC storage and data protection. They also enjoy faster support and time to resolution thanks to Dell EMC’s specialized support staff, who are highly trained and experienced in working with Cisco technologies.

The joint commitment also delivers ongoing, rapid access to fully tested Cisco technology options that are incorporated into VxBlock 1000. Of course, none of these benefits would be worthwhile if our joint projects didn’t also deliver on the promise of CI — with consistently simpler, faster ways to support mission-critical workloads and cloud initiatives.

I know I speak on behalf of Dell Technologies in expressing excitement and appreciation for our continued alliance with Cisco around this highly successful CI business. Our collective investments of engineering, technology and support has resulted in a decade-long leadership position of the CI category bolstered by a long list of innovations built into the VxBlock 1000 platform. It’s a sentiment that we don’t take lightly and is something we’re grateful is also shared by our partners at Cisco.

“Cisco is committed to the partnership with Dell EMC and to jointly delivering innovative solutions for our VxBlock customers. By extending this agreement, we are continuing to provide powerful and integrated technologies with Cisco UCS, Nexus and MDS and delivering on our commitment to innovation for VxBlock.” – Frank Palumbo, SVP, Global Data Center Sales, Cisco

Watch for More VxBlock 1000 News

We’re eager to continue building on our 10-year history of CI system innovation with Cisco and look forward to sharing more milestones with you. Watch for additional joint innovation announcements regarding VxBlock 1000 later this year.

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IDC Vendor Spotlight Underlines IT Modernization Opportunities for Dell EMC Partners

Take advantage of top advice from industry analyst firm IDC on how to best pitch IT modernization to your prospects and customers

Are all of your prospects and customers considering how IT modernization can benefit their business? They should be, because they’re in danger of being left behind if they don’t find a way to remain agile and efficient in today’s fast-moving, digitally driven world.

As a Dell EMC partner, you’re ideally placed to assume the role of trusted advisor, consulting with key stakeholders and offering guidance on the best technology solutions to suit their specific business needs.

IDC identifies clear opportunities for Dell EMC partners

In a new IDC Vendor Spotlight, influential analyst firm IDC noted that “Dell EMC holds the market share leadership across across most of the offerings it considers foundational to IT modernization.”

This leadership position, combined with a comprehensive portfolio of solutions spanning infrastructure from endpoint to data center, makes Dell EMC the ideal technology partner to enable organizations of any size to modernize their IT environment.

The analyst outlines the company’s fully integrated and forward-looking IT modernization strategy and details the substantial opportunities that this presents for Dell EMC partners.

Insider advice on how best to bring strategy to life

The IDC Vendor Spotlight contains plenty of guidance for partners on maximizing the opportunities around modernizing IT.

It states that customers need help in assessing how best to modernize their IT and that they’re looking for expert technology partners to address this need. However, the report also stresses that capturing and realizing the significant opportunities open to partners “requires a deep understanding of customer priorities”.

In particular, the IDC Vendor Spotlight is advising Dell EMC partners to focus on three key requirements:

1. The ability to clearly explain the importance and scope of IT modernization: You need to be able to articulate to customers the benefits of IT modernization and the essential role it plays as a necessary first step and best path towards wider digital transformation.

2. The ability to adopt a consultative, solutions-focused sales approach: Deep understanding of the customer’s environment will enable you to offer trusted advice on IT modernization solutions that will deliver specific business outcomes, not just tick technology boxes.

3. The ability to appeal to and engage with different types of buyers: More and more IT decisions are being made outside of the IT department, so you need to be able to tailor your sales approaches to C-suite level and LOB buyers, as well as traditional IT personas.

Get these three aspects right, IDC says, and you’ll be able to win IT modernization business while also earning long-term customer respect and loyalty.

Partners “well positioned” to become trusted advisors

All of these inherent challenges feed into one of the fundamental points made within the report. This is the assertion by the IDC Vendor Spotlight that partners “play a critical role in helping Dell EMC bring IT modernization to its customers at the scale and pace that customers are demanding it.”

That’s because technology providers need to shift the conversation from generic product features to how a particular solution can meet specific business needs. To succeed, they have to be able to deliver complete, often bespoke, solutions to customers – solutions that create value and meet desired targeted outcomes. And that, of course is dictated by business need, not technology.

This drives many business-led IT purchases into very specific use case scenarios, where each solution is slightly different from the next. The best way to assess, advise on, sell, and ultimately implement these solutions is for technology providers to work with expert partners who are ‘on the ground’ – partners like you.

The IDC Vendor Spotlight emphasizes that Dell EMC partners are “well positioned” to act as trusted advisors who can guide their customers through the complex journey required for IT modernization, from awareness and exploration through to decision-making.

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Adding Lustre Storage to the HPC Equation

For organizations that need extreme scalability in high-performance computing systems, Lustre is often the file system of choice — for a lot of good reasons.

When it comes to high-performance computing applications, there is basically no such thing as too much data storage. Who doesn’t need more storage? Everywhere you look, HPC applications are ballooning in size.

A few examples:

◈ AccuWeather, the world’s largest source of weather forecasts and warnings, responds to more than 30 billion data requests daily.
◈ The wave of medical data washing over the global healthcare industry is expected to swell to 2,314 exabytes by 2020.
◈ If you were to print out a map of a human genome, the stack of paper would be 300 feet high, which is about as tall as the Statue of Liberty.

The years ahead will only bring more of the same. IDC forecasts that by 2025, the global datasphere will grow to 163 zettabytes a year, or a trillion gigabytes. That’s 10 times the 16 ZB of data generated in 2016.

For organizations running data-intensive HPC and AI applications, the implications are pretty clear: Application performance will increasingly depend on extremely scalable, high-performance storage architectures that can keep pace with an ever-growing deluge of data. And this is where Lustre storage really shines.

The Lustre edge

Lustre is a parallel file system built for the challenges of high performance computing. For organizations that require extreme storage scalability without performance degradation, the Lustre file system can be a great solution. It enables the ability to scale storage up and down to suit the needs of the application, while maintaining the performance required for HPC and other data-intensive workloads.

While Lustre has been widely deployed for HPC-driven research workloads in academic settings, it has been making steady inroads into enterprise environments. Lustre has been deployed in thousands of data centers in industries ranging from healthcare and energy to manufacturing and financial services, and it is consistently recognized as the file system of choice for the world’s fastest computers.

Ready Solutions for HPC Lustre Storage

Dell EMC offers a wide range of solutions and supported products for organizations that want to leverage the Lustre file system. These offerings include Dell EMC Ready Solutions for HPC Lustre Storage. This solution is designed for those who want to deploy a fully supported, easy-to-use, high-throughput, scale-out and cost-effective parallel file system storage solution.

Using an intelligent, extensive and intuitive management interface — the Integrated Manager for Lustre  — Dell EMC Ready Solutions simplify deploying, managing and monitoring hardware and file system components. They’re designed to be easy to scale in terms of both capacity and performance, which equates to a convenient path for future growth.

The updated Ready Solutions for HPC Lustre Storage include Dell EMC’s refreshed PowerEdge servers, Dell EMC Networking and high-density Dell EMC PowerVault ME storage to deliver improved capacity, density and performance compared to previous generation storage. In addition, these Ready Solutions are available in additional Lustre sizing options — configurations are available in scalable building blocks for 4-, 8-, 10- and 12-TB of estimated usable storage. And for a complete package, the solution can be delivered with full hardware and software support from Dell EMC and Whamcloud.

A customer story

Swinburne University of Technology in Australia is among the organizations benefiting from Dell EMC HPC Storage with the Lustre file system. This combination of technologies is on the job today in the university’s OzSTAR supercomputer.

OzSTAR is built on Dell EMC PowerEdge servers, a high-speed, low-latency Dell EMC H-Series networking fabric, and Dell EMC Ready Solutions for HPC storage with the Lustre ZFS file system. With all this goodness under the hood, the OzSTAR system delivers a peak performance of 1.2 petaflops.

OzSTAR is primarily used by the Swinburne-based Australian Research Council Centre of Excellence for Gravitational Wave Discovery (OzGrav) to search for gravitational waves and study the extreme physics of black holes and warped space-time. In a single second, OzSTAR can perform 10,000 calculations for every one of the 100 billion stars in our galaxy, according to OzGrav’s director, Professor Matthew Bailes.

Looking ahead, the university expects the OzSTAR supercomputer to be one of the keys to enabling Swinburne’s Data Science Research Institute to tackle new data science challenges, including those involving machine learning, deep learning, database interrogation and data visualization.

The bottom line

The big data explosion, coupled with accelerated technology, has made it possible to make new discoveries, and create AI algorithms for a number of automation use cases. As data sets continue to grow exponentially, it’s vital to have a scalable storage solution. When it’s incorporated into the right architecture, the Lustre file system provides an ideal solution to this need.

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Help Your Customers Focus on Their Data

Dell EMC ECS 3.3 software upgrade helps customers unlock value – and helps you protect your revenue and boost your business

Sometimes – in business as well as in life – we put too much emphasis on the wrong thing.

Technology is a case in point. It can deliver all kinds of benefits in terms of costs, simplicity and accessibility. But technology is only part of the story – what truly counts is the message – and that’s information.

The information challenge

Deriving value from that information can be a real challenge. As we all know, there is a great deal of information, and it’s growing at a breathtaking pace. In addition, a large amount of it is unstructured. Much of it is siloed, too.

For all these reasons and more, it’s hard to harness the data available, and use it as the foundation of the digital business. If you also factor in the data security and compliance considerations, it’s no wonder many organizations are finding the management of, and access to, their information such a burden.

Dell EMC ECS Gen 3.3: Help customers focus on the right thing

Dell EMC’s ECS storage environment is designed to help your customers focus on the right thing. This software-defined, cloud-scale, object storage platform takes advantage of the benefits of the cloud, but also takes it one step further by building IT infrastructure centered around what matters most – their data.

The latest software announcement – Generation 3.3 – delivers significant enhancements, including:

◈ Enterprise-readiness: Improve data protection and compliance mandates in the age of evolving security needs

◈ Improved ROI: Customers get a 12% improvement in storage costs that is up to 59.5% lower TCO than the public cloud

◈ Enhanced data visibility: Make more accurate forecasts and take action on capacity alerts

◈ Faster time-to-insights: Unlock new insights from data faster than ever before

◈ Low-touch migrations: Migrate Atmos deployments to Dell EMC ECS without productivity impacts

The benefits to customers…

Gartner Group lists Dell EMC ECS as a Leader in its Distributed File and Object Storage Magic Quadrant 2017. Dell EMC ECS enables your customers to:

◈ Modernize their infrastructure

◈ Secure their data capital

◈ Lay the foundation for a data-driven business

◈ Accelerate application development

… and the benefits to you

Dell EMC ECS enables you to give your customers an alternative to the public cloud, but on their own premises – which means more control for them, and more revenue protection for you.

It enables you to offer them enterprise-grade object storage that is purpose-built for both traditional and modern applications, with the flexibility to capture, store, protect, and manage unstructured data at a public cloud-like scale.

Lastly, and perhaps most importantly of all, it enables you to help them unlock the value in their data, and build their digital future, while also achieving enterprise-grade security standards, lower and more predictable storage costs, and enhanced visibility into their data assets.

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Mining for Gold in Worldwide Centers of Excellence

With the ever-growing flood of data hitting today’s enterprises, we’re in the midst of a new gold rush. To twist around a line from a Mark Twain character, you might say “there’s gold in them thar hills of data.” But this is true only for those organizations that can put high-performance computing systems, data analytics and artificial intelligence to work to capture nuggets of business value from streams of data.

So how do you get started down this path? Mining value from business data is, arguably, a lot more complicated than panning for gold in mountain streams. To be successful, you need a clear view of your business use cases, the help of experts who have been there and done it successfully, and hands-on experiences with the tools of the trade.

This is where Dell EMC HPC and AI Centers of Excellence enter the picture. These worldwide hubs for innovation and expertise help your organization jumpstart efforts to put the latest technologies to work in order capitalize on data. The centers provide a place where people come together to experience thought leadership, test new technologies, and share research findings and best practices.

People are a big part of the CoE equation. Our HPC and AI Centers of Excellence cultivate local industry partnerships and provide direct input to a wide range of Information Technology creators. Through collaborative efforts, the Centers of Excellence open the door to the vast know‑how and experience in the community, including that of technology developers, service providers and end-users. Even better, the technology companies in the CoE community are eager to incorporate your feedback and needs into their roadmaps.

Let’s get more specific. In Dell EMC HPC and AI Centers of Excellence, you can gain a closer understanding of topics like these:

◈ High speed data analytics that help you discover new ways to process, visualize and predict future needs

◈ AI, machine and deep learning expertise, best practices, testing and tuning on a wide array of the latest technologies to optimize results

◈ Visualization, modeling and simulation of complex data sets using a range of high powered visual computing solutions across multiple locations

◈ Performance analysis, optimization and benchmarking to help you find the right technology for the right application and optimize application performance

◈ System design, implementation and operation together with monitoring and I/O benchmarking to help avoid performance bottlenecks, decrease power and cooling needs, and address reliability and resilience issues

Advancing blockchain research at a CoE

For an example of the groundbreaking work being done at Dell EMC Centers of Excellence, look no further than the San Diego Supercomputer Center. The Center provides HPC computational resources, services and expertise to accelerate AI research and discovery in academia, industry and government. At this CoE, professionals from Dell Technologies are working with staff from SDSC, industry companies and academic partners to run a blockchain research lab called BlockLAB.

In this hands-on research lab, participants are developing strategies to explore and implement the principal technologies and business use cases for blockchains, distributed ledgers, digital transactions and smart contracts. Among other outcomes, this research is expected to yield a state-of-the-art, end-to-end solution based on a VMware© blockchain stack in a hybrid cloud environment that leverages Virtustream Enterprise Cloud.

That’s the kind of leading-edge research that takes place every day at Dell EMC HPC and AI Centers of Excellence around the world — from North America and Europe to Africa, Asia and Australia.

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Server Security: What to Look for in 2019

Following a challenging year for server security, one big question remains: where is the industry headed in 2019? How do we rethink our approach in the wake of Spectre & Meltdown? What are the dangers on the horizon, and what sort of innovation can businesses use to combat them?

What do you think customers will be dealing with this year?

Customers will continue to be plagued by increasing vulnerabilities and security challenges this year. Last year started with Spectre/Meltdown followed by seemingly endless other side-channel issues, sending many companies into a security maelstrom.

Companies are in the midst of digital transformation. For digital transformation, security transformation is essential. There are predictors that indicate ransomware will continue to increase, as well as smarter means of harvesting credentials. Timely infrastructure patch management is a challenge that customers will have to address to decrease their exposure. If consumers don’t have adequate encryption and encryption management, their data is insecure and at high risk for data loss and exfiltration.

These issues will require customers to handle increasing privacy regulations – like the EU’s GDPR, Australia’s new encryption law, and California’s new privacy regulation which goes into effect at the end of this year. Customers will need to determine the best way of balancing risk, while meeting regulations at the same time.

What security innovations do you see coming in 2019?

There will be many. I believe some of the major innovation focus areas will be in supply chain security. Also, I expect we’ll see innovation in encryption and encryption management with data at the edge, not just in the cloud or in the data center. I think there will be enhancements to monitoring and remediation technologies using AI and machine learning (ML) to enhance the security of their systems.  Customers will be looking for innovative and easy ways to stay current with patch management tools. These tools will be key to minimizing the impact to their business, resource allocations, and other business disruptions.

I believe we will see innovations leveraging new technologies like AI, blockchain, and multi-factor authentication across various security solution spaces, including supply chain risk management, advanced threat monitoring solutions, and enhanced access and identity management (AIM). Secure enclaves for better protection of secrets is another emerging solution space.

Is it true that businesses only have to worry about security with their software, and all servers have the same security features?

Absolutely not! It might have been that way in the past, but hardware technology continues to evolve. Of course software must continue to be a critical focus for security, but there is a growing recognition that the hardware infrastructure must be protected as well. Think of it this way – would you buy a house at the beach without checking its foundation? That would not be very smart! Your server is the foundation of your data center, and it should have security built in to confidently build upon.

Security must be designed within the architecture of the server to effectively withstand sophisticated cyber-crime: phishing attacks that harvest credentials, advanced persistent threats (taking control of your firmware), data exfiltration (stealing your data). Server and server supply chain security must be looked at and considered as critical criteria in your purchasing decisions. Whether you are the CIO, the IT manager, or the IT admin, you want to know that you have made the right choice and are protecting your data center and your data from the ground up.

How can a business focus on their growth, and not concentrate most of their resources on security within their data center?

In the current environment, and for the foreseeable future, security will continue to remain top of mind for everyone. If you are moving data to the edge, utilizing AI or ML, or a hybrid cloud customer, you will need a trusted partner to manage resources that implement these new technologies.

I wish I could tell you that you didn’t have to do anything regarding your infrastructure security, but that is unrealistic in the world we live in. You will have to focus on security, but sometimes challenges grow at a faster rate than investments grow. To enable a business to focus on their growth, they need to have trusted infrastructure. Infrastructure within businesses will continue to grow, increasing the likelihood of threats, but with a trusted partner you focus more of your resources on growth, rather than managing threats. This is where Dell EMC can help. We want our customers to be able to focus on their growth and innovations, and let us focus on creating, delivering and managing a security enhanced product for their data center.

As a Dell Fellow, I focus on PowerEdge servers and data centers. I think of how we can keep up with emerging threats, sideline them before they impact our customers. Dell EMC brings a lot to the table as a whole, in client, storage, and servers. Resilience…cyber resilience benefits everyone.

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Data & Deep Learning: Embracing the Art of the Possible

I’m often surprised to find companies that continue to invest in data strategies that fail to respond to their business needs.  They are taking a page from an old playbook and expect it to work in their new, rapidly evolving environments.  They’re trying to forge a new path with an old map, which won’t help them keep pace with competitors, continue to innovate or ultimately grow their businesses. Companies today need to adopt a new mentality when it comes to data analytics. They should work to imagine and embrace the art of the possible. In doing so, they should ask themselves: What can we do now that we couldn’t do before using new technologies and approaches? It could mean the difference between market leadership or future failure.

As a company’s data sets continue to grow in size and vary in nature, the data management systems in place must allow the organizations the flexibility to grow and change with it.  Beyond just the data, company’s also need to be able to execute new techniques to maximize the insights contained within the data, to promote better, faster business decisions, forge new paths forward and create new revenue streams.

One leading technique is Artificial Intelligence (AI) – a concept that has been around since the 1960’s, when AI pioneers began predicting that machines would discern and learn tasks without human intervention. They would quite literally be able to ‘think’ for themselves. Fast forward to 2025 there will be 163 zettabytes of data with an estimated 80% that is no longer human parsable. Those predictions are not just a reality, but also a requirement.  With all of this data spanning every industry, the use cases for AI are endless. But, as you look across those use cases there are a common core of AI techniques applied behind each application.

Take Deep Learning, for example – a branch inside of machine learning. Deep learning differs from traditional algorithms by using neural networks to uncover features and solve problems.  Organizations have quickly adopted Deep Learning because of the ability to get insights from images, video, audio, and free text.  The most common DL methods we come across are:

◈ Image detection, allows you to detect whether or not something is present
◈ Image classification, allows you to classify what type of thing is present
◈ Natural language processing, allows you ask the meaning and intent to words and text
◈ Speech recognition, allows you transform audio across languages into a common form for NLP
◈ Segmentation, allows you to determine to what extent something is present
◈ Prediction, allows you to ask what is the likely outcome
◈ Recommendation, allows you to get suggested outcomes
◈ Machine generated images and video used in the entertainment industry

Figure 1 below gives a snapshot summary of some of these methods and shows how they can be directly applied to a business case with measurable value. When applied individually or combined these methods provide the foundation for the ‘Art of the Possible’, making business applications that were impossible before, finally possible.

Figure 1:  Mapping Data to AI Power Outcomes

While the concepts of AI and Deep Learning still seem untouchable to many, we at Dell EMC are constantly finding new ways to bring AI to the forefront.  We are taking our daily learning and turning it into validated infrastructure solutions that will make AI simpler, faster, and more accessible.   Our family of validated Dell EMC Isilon and NVIDIA based solutions offer flexibility and informed choice by pairing high performance, high bandwidth GPU accelerated compute with high performance, scale-out flash storage.  This puts our customers in the driver’s seat with forgettable scale-out infrastructure that makes nothing seems out of the question.

As an example of the ‘Art of the Possible’, we will be hosting a VIP evening event during the upcoming O’Reilly Conference in New York on April 17. The guest of honor will be Sophia – the humanoid robot who uses a combination of the techniques detailed to interact using human gestures, expressions and language.  This will provide our customers a first-hand look at what is now possible and help them understand how these same technologies can be applied to drive innovation and growth within their own businesses.   Sophia and I will also be featured on the O’Reilly YouTube channel and Sophia will be in the Dell Technologies booth on Wednesday April 17th from 10:30-11:30 AM where we’re going to be raffling off tickets to the evening event.

If you too are interested in learning more about how AI and Deep Learning can benefit your business, please get in touch with me at the show.  We look forward to helping you turn the previously unimaginable into reality.

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Accelerating Insight Using 2nd Generation Intel® Xeon® Scalable Processors with Deep Learning Boost

Artificial Intelligence (AI) techniques are quickly becoming central to businesses’ digital transformation by augmenting, and in many cases supplanting, traditional data analytics techniques. These techniques bring proactive and prescriptive capabilities to a company’s data-driven decision-making process, giving companies that adopt them early a distinct competitive advantage. Those that adopt them late will be left behind.

Intel recognizes that AI methods, most notably machine learning and deep learning, are now critical components of company workloads. To address the need to both train and, arguably more importantly, have AI models make decisions faster, Intel has put these workloads front and center with the new 2nd Generation Intel® Xeon® Scalable processor line.

2nd Generation Intel® Xeon® Scalable Processors

2nd Generation Intel® Xeon® Scalable processors bring a host of new and improved capabilities, including the ability to deploy Intel® Optane™ DC Persistent Memory, improved DRAM speeds, greater processing capability for traditional instruction sets such as single precision FP32, and new processing capability for deep learning workloads with the new Intel® Deep Learning Boost instruction set.

Deep Learning Boost on 2nd Generation Intel® Xeon® Scalable Processors

Deep learning is the process of developing models using artificial neural networks, which consist of many independent processing units, or neurons, connected in a dense graph. Neural networks have demonstrated astonishing ability to identify unknown or unforeseen patterns in all sorts of data and have been applied to domains ranging from image and video recognition and analysis, to audio and language transformation, to time-series data and anomaly detection analysis.

The process of using neural networks for developing cutting-edge models is broken into two phases: training, where existing data is used to teach the neural network how to identify patterns; and inference, where the trained model is exposed to new data and expected to make appropriate decisions. And while the process of training neural networks has been the focus of hardware and software innovation for several years, it is in the inference where businesses are receiving benefit from their AI efforts.

Inference has different hardware requirements than training. Training requires half-precision or single-precision floating point arithmetic and the ability to process many large vectors of similar data simultaneously. Inference has much lower total compute requirements, is focused more heavily on latency (time-to-decision), and can take advantage of lower-precision numerical formats such as 8-bit and 16-bit integers.

The 2nd Generation Intel® Xeon® Scalable processor line focuses primarily on this second (inference) phase with an entirely new capability known as Deep Learning Boost. Intel® Deep Learning Boost brings reduced precision arithmetic (8-bit and 16-bin integers) to Xeon’s 512-bit wide vector units (AVX512). This is a huge capability for reduced precision inference because Deep Learning Boost-enabled Intel® Xeon® processors can simultaneously process 64 8-bit integers (or 32 16-bit integers) in a single hardware instruction! Couple this with the ability to perform fused operations, such as Fused Multiply Add (FMA) on these wide low-precision vectors, and the throughput of the system goes up substantially.

Dell EMC has been benchmarking the realizable performance improvements that Intel® Deep Learning Boost can bring the neural network inference. The figure above shows how much improvement your organization could realize by deploying 2nd Generation Intel® Xeon® Scalable processors with Intel® Deep Learning Boost. While 1st Generation Intel® Xeon® Scalable processors (codenamed “Skylake”) are capable of processing 258 images per second on the ResNet-50 inference benchmark in single-precision (FP32), and 389 image per second in reduced 8-bit integer precision, the new instructions that Deep Learning Boost brings to 2nd Generation Intel® Xeon® Scalable processors can more then triple the throughput in 8-bit integer precision to 1278 images per second!

Why This Matters

What does this mean for your business? Each inference your AI model makes is an insight you didn’t have before, or a workload you’ve automated that removes a barrier to a decision. Each of those insights, each of those removed barriers can translate to a new sale, an additional upsell, or a faster investment decision. That is money in your company’s pockets.

As companies undergo digital transformation, making use of AI – and deep learning specifically – will be critical to keeping your company competitive in a data-driven world. And while training AI models has been the talk of this early stage, the inference is going to be the way in which your business realizes the benefits of AI. Dell EMC PowerEdge servers powered by 2nd Generation Intel® Xeon® Scalable processors with Intel® Deep Learning Boost can help your business realize the full potential of AI through higher performance model inference. And higher performance translates to better business.

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It’s Time for the Media and Entertainment Industry to Virtualize

When it comes to virtualization, the media and entertainment (M&E) industry has lagged other industries. For 30 years, broadcast engineers have relied on bare-metal hardware and hard-coded applications, trusting that these solutions could deliver the performance and predictability required of a broadcast network.

Broadcast engineers have been wary of virtualization. But for M&E, virtualization in private, public or hybrid-cloud environments offers many tangible benefits: streamlined workflows, increased automation, lower cost of ownership, reduced production time and much more. In fact, forward-thinking media companies are now realizing that virtualization is the only way they’ll be able to compete in a new and rapidly evolving digital marketplace.

However, these benefits can only be realized if all components works seamlessly together. To ensure this, Dell Technologies is partnering with many of the world’s leading independent software vendors (ISVs) to test, qualify and prove the functionality of underlying VMware vSphere-based solutions and virtualized configurations.

Advantages of Media Function Virtualization (MFV)

Prior to VMware, broadcast engineers relied on single-operation hardware, which was limited to one job at a time, whether it was playout, transcoding or rendering. With MFV, media companies can execute multiple tasks on a single Dell EMC VxRail hyperconverged node – an integrated system co-engineered by Dell EMC and VMware.

For instance, we have a qualified solution with an ISV that enables us to get 2 – 4 compute tasks, doing either the transcode or the renders on a single VxRail, versus running each job on a separate server. So, what used to take 20 or 30 physical servers is now handled on seven or eight 1U VxRail systems.

VMware vSphere can also create robust automated environments. This enables virtual machines (VMs) to move between clusters and stretch clusters to provide higher availability and reliability. If an environment goes down or is taken offline, the application can seamlessly shift to another storage array or vSphere host without any interruption or impact to the user.

Now, VMware vSphere advances also allow you to run OTT client applications in VMs, as well as host the core video streaming applications for many broadcast and media solutions.

Virtualization’s expanding role

As the industry progresses toward “IP Playout” delivery, the role for virtualization continues to increase. Broadcasters must compete for audience and advertising dollars by quickly offering new services and channels with specialized content.

Easy-to-deploy integrated playout solutions accelerate channel deployment well beyond the capability of traditional installations by offering a flexible, software-based architecture. This enables broadcasters to only pay for what they need and easily add new features as their business evolves.

Add to that the evolution of Dell EMC Isilon scale-out storage solutions, designed for high-performance and advanced production environments, enabling media companies to shape and configure resources to meet the demanding needs of each operation in the workflow.

Time is money

Traditionally, it would take 9-12 months for a customer to get their broadcast workload environment into production. They had to size the equipment, set it up, configure and test it extensively before going on-air.

With Dell Technologies, the configuration is already qualified and tested when the VxRail nodes arrive. VxRail can be up and running in a couple of days once the networking is ready. Once VMware vSphere is configured, the ISVs – who are familiar with the vSphere configurations and images – can load the base VMs that very day.

ISVs have tested and qualified this technology right in their labs, so they’re able to move your operation immediately into workflow customization. This is how environments that used to take 12 months to get running become operational – and collecting revenue – within three months. We’re talking about greatly accelerating revenue from ad sales and everything else that goes along with spinning up a new channel. It also can shorten their technology investment depreciation cycle.

This kind of efficiency has caught the attention of ISVs, some of which are now adopting VMware’s solutions as their underlying technology, with huge OEM potential.

Broadcast challenges

Uncompressed video streams with an IP playout – usually associated with live sports broadcasts – can present a significant challenge for broadcasters, who can’t have dropped frames, jitter or black space, so the requirements are extremely high.

The  ST-2110 standard requires 1.3 Gb/s bandwidth for an uncompressed UHD channel. To get multiple channels playing, we found it imperative to have the ISV engineering department working with our VMware vSphere Alliances & Performance Engineering team. It took a long time to solve these challenges, but we can now get two of these channels running on a single VxRail node.

One of our ISV partners spent nine months working on a hardware solution to solve this problem. They had no success, because it wasn’t a hardware issue – it was a virtualization-engineering feat. They needed a virtualization solution and Dell Technologies’ expertise. When we brought our VMware vSphere performance engineers to the table, our partners were finally able to overcome this issue.

Furthermore, when the next generation VxRail arrives with even more powerful CPUs, we expect to get up to four uncompressed live streams playing without any issue.

Lower total costs

VMware-powered solutions can help media organizations realize significant cost savings. A single VxRail – powered by VMware vSphere and vSAN – can do the work of multiple bare-metal servers. This results in less rack space, less power and a reduction in cooling requirements versus deploying server after server.

Finally, we’re in the early virtualization stages with M&E, but not in other industries where we have employed this solution successfully for years. It took the banking industry, for example, a year or so to understand how well virtualization works. Once they understood the tools and their comfort level increased, the technicians’ work became more meaningful and interesting, and the possibilities of virtualization began to be realized.

That’s where we’re heading with M&E, which is why it’s going to be such an exciting next phase in this industry.

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PowerEdge Plus AMD EPYC Equals Better Server Performance in Half the Density, at Half the Cost

Dell EMC PowerEdge R6415 achieves #1 results on TPCx-HS Benchmarks for 1-TB and 10-TB scale factor

It used to be said that data runs the world. They were wrong!  Data drives insights and insights are what matter. However, getting to these insights is hard, time-consuming and expensive. So much so that companies are turning to trusted hardware vendors to find the right tools and solutions to accomplish this very fundamental task. But figuring out which tools you need to uncover those hidden gems can be a challenge. What do most customers do to evaluate the right platform for their projects? They look to industry-standard benchmarks for guidance.

One such benchmark, TPCx-HS, provides guidance related to big data analytics by stressing both hardware and software stacks, including the execution engine (MapReduce or Apache Spark™) and Hadoop® Filesystem API compatible layers. It provides a vendor-neutral evaluation of both a product’s performance and price-performance ratio, thus helping customers make the right choice for their large cluster, data analysis projects.

The Dell EMC PowerEdge R6415 is a single-socket dense server that offers the right feature set for data analysis, as evidenced by its test results in the TPCx-HS benchmark.

As highlighted above, when compared to the Cisco UCS C240 M5 2U/2 socket servers, the PowerEdge R6415 single socket platform has better price/performance:

◈ 45% better @ 1-TB Scale Factor

◈ 53% better @ 10-TB Scale Factor

Here’s a comparison of the configurations used in this benchmark for the 1TB Scale Factor:

1-TB Scale Factor

The results speak for themselves. The single-socket PowerEdge R6415 is a great solution for Apache Hadoop®-based, big data environments without unnecessary and extra costs. Similarly, this cost-effective server is also ideal for virtualization, scale-out and software-defined storage, bringing high-density computing to the data center.

The PowerEdge R6415 delivers the following high-level key server functionalities:

◈ Lower TCO delivering capabilities often requiring dual socket servers

◈ Over 3x more direct PCIe 3.0 NVMe* for high bandwidth, low latency storage access

◈ High core counts optimized for high performance, multithread architecture workloads

Dell EMC servers help you prepare for innovation in your business and can help you solve your IT challenges.

*Based on Dell Internal Analyses versus comparable Dell EMC PowerEdge R630 configuration.

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Real-World Impact of Smart Surveillance to be Revealed at ISC West

Intelligent, integrated surveillance is helping provide the security vital for a safer, smarter world, — and you can experience it live at the International Security Conference & Exposition on April 10-12, 2019.

With more than 200 billion connected devices forecasted to be in existence by 2020,[1]l it’s no surprise to find that security, surveillance, and IoT solutions are evolving at a pace faster than the ability of most businesses to adapt. Whether due to rapid technological advancements, overly complex and inefficient systems, changing regulatory requirements, or government initiatives, it’s far too easy for organizations to be left behind. The result—failed or faulty surveillance—not only compromises the company or organization’s security investments but also threatens to jeopardize the safety and security of those they’ve committed to protect.

We’re excited about the momentum Dell Technologies is making to solve these real-world challenges for our surveillance customers aligned with our robust partner ecosystem. Just in the past year, we’ve more than doubled our investments in this critical industry as we work toward our vision to create a safer and smarter world from the edge to the data center to multi-cloud.

At ISC West, we’ll be showcasing our edge-core-cloud-enabled surveillance solutions at Booth #17115, including technical demonstrations and theater presentations on our new IoT Solution for Surveillance and IoT Connected Bundles. Built on the world’s leading cloud infrastructure, Dell Technologies designed the IoT Solution for Surveillance to transform and simplify how surveillance technology is delivered to help businesses improve security, better protect their people, and more quickly realize value from their investments. It’s an engineered, pre-integrated solution that combines validated workloads, hardware (cameras, sensors, etc.), and machine intelligence in a single, cohesive system.

Why do we believe so firmly in this foundation-to-roof approach? As Carrie MacGillivray from IDC pointed out, “Organizations are looking to integrated IoT solutions that bring together the storage, security, network, and management and orchestration. Companies need to find a partner that understands these requirements and can help provide the piece parts to build out a holistic solution. Dell Technologies’ holistic portfolio of key IoT solutions and go-to-market options make them a solid partner for your IoT journey.”

Difficulties with system integration, poor performance, and an inability to leverage back end analytics are resulting in failed surveillance implementations for many—not to mention, the underlying technology, from sensors to AI, continues to evolve at a blistering pace. Our goal is to create new solutions that not only simplify these complex environments, but also tailor the entire infrastructure to each business, readying it for what’s to come while reducing risk and improving efficiencies.

From cameras and computers to storage, servers, and the cloud—Dell Technologies has partnered with top names in technology, security, surveillance, software, and hardware to create the number one name in surveillance and IoT solutions, and the most integral and complete end-to-end infrastructure leveraging orchestration, automation, and virtualization.

Our commitment to this standard of essential infrastructure encapsulates every part of the implementation, including continuous support from the industry’s only full-time validation labs with locations across all major regions of the globe. This reach means that we are uniquely positioned, more so than any other company in the industry, to be more responsive to customer opportunities and partner support while scaling validations. These facilities are entirely focused on supporting, testing, validating, and documenting deployment of surveillance systems that reduce and minimize customer risk and liability, while increasing efficiency and performance at every step.

Our goal is to develop safety and security solutions that transform the industry by bridging security, IoT, and IT to help businesses and organizations around the world scale into the future. Here is an example of an organization that is actively leveraging our essential infrastructure:

“At the University of Southern Mississippi’s National Sports Security Laboratory, we are developing trusted practices for IoT and surveillance to support our forward-thinking 2025 initiative,” said Dr. Lou Marciani, director of the National Center for Spectator Sports Safety and Security (NCS4). “Our goal is to enhance better safety to millions of spectators who attend sports and entertainment events. The new IoT Solution for Surveillance is designed specifically to reduce the complexity of building, scaling, and managing these complex venues. We are excited to have the opportunity to test several case studies that might prove to be game changers for security in the future”

No matter where you are in your surveillance strategy, we look forward to seeing you at ISC West, Booth #17115, April 10-12, 2019, where you can learn more about our surveillance solutions to help create a safer and smarter world.

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Keeping up with the Data Deluge: Exploring the Global Data Protection Index

Digital Transformation has been a rallying cry of CXOs over the past few years, and global disruption, due to digitization, has yielded many examples of industry powerhouses becoming a footnote in history. It should come as no surprise then, that a major trend emerged in the most recent Vanson Bourne Global Data Protection Index commissioned by Dell EMC – data is almost unanimously understood to have value and 75 percent of respondents are either already monetizing it or are investing in tools that will help them monetize it in the future.

As data becomes more valuable to an organization, there is a corresponding move to collect more of it and keep it for longer. The concept of Data Capital has become ingrained in every industry, as organizations find that using data to power applications and gain new insights from analytics, sets them apart from the competition. This results in a point of friction, as the creation, acquisition and protection of data are somewhat at odds. Data protection challenges range from financial (affordability of backing it up) to logistical (delivering performance and coverage). These played a significant role in the limited improvement of data protection maturity in companies we surveyed. Simply put, what worked to protect 1.5PB of data a few short years ago, won’t work for the almost 10PB of data respondents averaged in the latest study.

Not surprisingly, such growth has also created a myriad of challenges for organizations with availability and data retention. More than three-quarters (76 percent) of respondents have experienced disruption of some kind in the last 12 months. To make matters worse, these service level events are coming about through all manner of sources, making it nearly impossible to eliminate risk entirely. From infrastructure failures and ransomware attacks to data corruption and user error, or even cloud provider issue, it’s time to realize we cannot eliminate the cause of a service level event. We can, however, mitigate the damage it causes by having an effective data protection strategy and solutions in place.

The stakes are higher than ever

When looking at events that resulted in a disruption, we separated these events into two categories — downtime and data loss. Across these two areas, respondents noted substantial impacts from events.

◈ 41 percent experienced downtime with an average estimated cost of $527,000
◈ 28 percent suffered data loss that resulted in an average estimated loss of $996,000

One of the most surprising results revealed that those who scored higher in the data protection index were more vulnerable to substantial losses in the event of an outage or data loss.

This magnified impact was likely due to the increased importance data plays in their business but shows just how essential it is to get data protection right.

Improving protection in three steps

Subscribe value to data and protect it accordingly – Globally, 81 percent of survey respondents say they treat data differently based on its value. As data continues to grow exponentially, it is essential to leverage a variety of data protection strategies across continuous availability, replication, backup, archives, etc. creating an effective data protection solution that can scale.

Consolidate vendors to lower risk – Across the board, respondents who used multiple vendors increased the likelihood of something going wrong. Organizations with only a single data protection vendor were twice as likely to indicate they had not experienced a disruption in the last 12 months, with 40 percent reporting they had no adverse issues.

Protect more in the cloud – Automatic backup to the cloud was the most frequently included technology as part of a comprehensive data protection strategy with 43 percent of respondents indicating they were using it. This is critical to leverage moving forward, both to defer costs of traditional data protection, as well as to provide coverage within cloud environments themselves.

Wrapping up

Ultimately, the report paints a picture of organizations trying to keep up with the data deluge, it’s increased value to the organization, and new advanced workloads that strain existing data protection solutions. We’ve entered a new age where protecting data has morphed into the need to apply advanced data management strategies to keep it both safe and available at all times. Data Protection can no longer be bolted on as a simple insurance policy, but should be a primary design consideration for any workload that the organization is prioritizing. Over the coming months, we will continue to highlight new technologies and strategies to use in meeting the ever-increasing needs in this space.

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