Massive Storage Innovation Designed for the Data Era

Dell Technologies World 2019 is finally here and I couldn’t be more excited. This event means a lot to me personally. Not only does it provide an opportunity to listen closely to the needs of our customers and partners, it’s our chance to share the latest product updates we’ve designed to address your most pressing technology and business challenges.

One common theme of my conversations over the last year or so, is that we are all living in a world where digital transformation is defining winners and losers, and data has quickly become the most valuable asset for many organizations. Data is fueling new products and services, next-gen business applications, and powerful game-changing technologies such as artificial intelligence and IoT. As this data capital landscape becomes increasingly complex, more attention must be paid to where your data resides, how it is managed and how it is protected. I’m very excited to share the latest Dell EMC storage innovations, designed to unlock and maximize the value of your data capital.

Introducing Dell EMC Unity XT – No Compromise Midrange Storage

Dell EMC Unity originally launched almost three years ago and thousands of customers have embraced this midrange solution for its simplicity, performance, and affordability – in fact, we have now sold over 40,000 systems. This unique system consolidates your data capital across block, file and VMware workloads onto a single solution and has a well-deserved reputation for operational simplicity. CloudIQ adds additional storage monitoring and analytics – putting infrastructure insight in the palm of your hand.

We’re thrilled to announce Dell EMC Unity XT Series, the next-generation of Dell EMC Unity.  We’ve taken this best-in-class solution to a new level including drastically improved performance, greater efficiency, and new capabilities and services designed for a multi-cloud world. With Dell EMC Unity XT, we set out to deliver a storage array without compromise at midrange price points. Some midrange platforms, especially those that are active-passive architectures, struggle with processing data, running data reduction, and data services like replication at the same time without impacting application performance. Others force you to make tradeoffs – like sub-par file capabilities, which limit the value it can provide your business. Dell EMC Unity XT has eliminated these tradeoffs.

Designed for Performance

Compared with the previous generation, Dell EMC Unity XT delivers up to 2x the performance with 75% better response times and supports up to 52% more virtual desktops without any performance impact. Furthermore, it is up to 67% faster than its closest competitor. Dell EMC Unity is NVMe ready, which will accelerate performance even further. These performance improvements mean faster operations, enabling you to improve the level of service you provide to your customers.

Optimized for Efficiency

Dell EMC Unity XT improved its data reduction capabilities, now enabling you to realize up to 5:1 data reduction rate. While that data reduction rate is impressive, the overall system efficiency is just as important, and Dell EMC Unity XT can utilize 85% of its system capacity (from raw to usable capacity). Combining written data reduction guarantees and system utilization rates, Dell EMC Unity XT is now 29% more efficient than the competition Speaking of guarantees, we are excited to now offer a 3:1 data reduction guarantee with no assessment for Dell EMC Unity XT as part of the Future Proof Loyalty Program.

Built for Multi-Cloud

Your data center is most likely evolving towards a model leveraging not just one, but multiple public clouds in conjunction with your on-premises infrastructure. At Dell Technologies, we are focused on providing solutions for your multi-cloud journey – including both the Dell Technologies Cloud and Dell Technologies Cloud enabled infrastructure. Dell EMC Unity XT is a core part of that strategy, as it can be a building block for the Dell Technologies Cloud, as part of a validated design. In addition, you can run Dell EMC Unity XT in a public cloud, seamlessly move data to the cloud and is available as a service via the new Dell EMC Cloud Storage Services.

Dell EMC Unity XT will start shipping later this quarter and will be available in both All-Flash and Hybrid configurations.

PowerMax Innovation from Intel Optane to Containers

Since its introduction last year, Dell EMC PowerMax has delivered breakthrough innovation for data storage. Recently named 2018 enterprise storage product of the year and technology innovator by CRN, PowerMax solves demanding online transactional applications where low latency is critical, and the highest resiliency is paramount. PowerMax is defined by a powerful architecture, simple operation and trusted innovation. Market leaders tend to partner with other market leaders, and Dell EMC and Intel are great examples of this. We have a partnership focused on innovation that spans decades. To that end, we have been working closely with Intel as the lead development partner for the new Dual Port Intel® Optane™ Technology drive – the next generation of media designed for the most demanding enterprise storage environments. Dell EMC PowerMax will be the first true scale-out storage array to ship with Intel Optane DC drives used for persistent storage by year end. With these Storage Class Memory (SCM) drives, PowerMax system latencies will be reduced by up to 50% – pretty impressive for a system that already provides sub 300 microsecond response times. PowerMax’s real-time machine learning engine automated data placement maximizes SCM investment. The modern architecture of PowerMax, with end-to-end NVMe, combined with SCM, maximizes the performance of your mission critical applications and harnesses the untapped value of your data capital.

I’m also excited to announce some ‘outside the box’ innovation with expanded automation and container support. We’ve taken automation even further for VMware customers and now offer integration with a VMware vRealize Orchestrator plug-in. This complete set of workflows, actions and APIs available as a PowerMax plug-in, automates operations and improves agility for VMware users. For non-VMware users, this summer, we are releasing a comprehensive set of Ansible Playbooks which can be used to build, configure and manage heterogeneous environments for the upcoming wave of new IT requirements.

As containers are increasingly leveraged for production applications, persistent storage has become a requirement. To support this, the industry recently finalized a standard API for container orchestration to talk to storage plug-ins – called the Container Storage Interface (CSI). I’m excited to announce that the CSI plug-in for PowerMax is coming this summer. PowerMax – the only platform in the industry that can support everything from Mainframe to Containers – all in one system.

Isilon – Manage the Data Deluge, Not Your Storage System

Industries such as automotive, life sciences, media and entertainment have been experiencing explosive data growth for years. This growth is now expanding across multiple organizations because of the need to drive next-generation workloads such as data analytics and artificial intelligence, as well as cloud native applications. Organizations need to run these workloads on-premises and in the cloud. This data deluge in unstructured data is what Dell EMC Isilon is designed for and why it’s become the industry leading scale-out NAS platform.

I’m excited to announce the latest Isilon software and hardware, designed to ensure you can spend more time unlocking your data capital and less time managing your storage environment.

Designed for Simplicity at Scale

As you’re inundated with more data, you usually can’t add resources to manage the growing environment. Isilon changes this narrative by providing scale out without the headcount. Our latest software release, OneFS 8.2, enables scale up to 252 nodes which means you can manage up to 58 PB, as if it were terabytes, and with a 945 GB/s aggregate throughput per cluster, your workloads can excel.

Architected for Workload Agility

Not only are our customers struggling with data management and growth, they are struggling with data center space and have been looking for an Isilon node with the performance of a hybrid and capacity of an archive node. Which is why I’m excited to announce the Isilon H5600 with 40% better rack density, almost double single stream throughput, 31% better write throughput, double the memory and SSD caching, all in a 4U chassis. This has a massive impact on markets like media and entertainment, since Isilon H5600 will be able to support one 4k uncompressed edit stream per node.

Optimized for Multi-cloud

We love giving our customers flexibility – especially as it comes to extending your data center to the cloud. I am thrilled to announce a few cloud enhancements for Isilon. Our new Dell EMC Cloud Storage Services provides two paths to consume Isilon in a public cloud. We are officially announcing early access to Isilon file data services through Google Cloud Platform (GCP) this summer. This provides a seamless experience to leverage the industry leading scale out NAS system directly through GCP. In addition, Cloud Storage Services provides multi-cloud agility with a direct connection to multiple public clouds – ideal for disaster recovery, analytics and more. This service will allow customers to combine Isilon storage with the public cloud providers agile compute. Finally, we have enhanced Isilon CloudPools software to provide policy-based automated tiering that lets you seamlessly move data from on prem to public cloud – ideal for archiving. We have now expanded support to Alibaba Cloud in addition to existing support for Amazon Web Services (AWS), GCP and Microsoft Azure.

As you can tell, my team has been busy innovating across our entire storage portfolio based on your feedback over the last year.  We’re confident that this investment will enable you to unlock the value of your data capital and help you on your multi-cloud journey. With the significant investments we’ve made to modernize our product portfolio, maximizing the value of your data growth can be easier than ever.

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Why Does Hardware Matter in a Software-Defined Data Center?

Today, organizations with a modernized infrastructure (aka “modernized” firms) are much better positioned to handle emerging technologies than their competitors with aging hardware. Modernized firms can quickly scale to meet changing needs. They understand the importance of flexibility, especially when it comes to handling demanding applications and processing the insane amount of data inundating us from all angles!

The right software-defined data center (SDDC) solutions can help organizations address those heavy demands and accommodate future growth. SDDC breaks down traditional silos and plays a critical role in a firm’s data center transformation. Since all elements in an SDDC are virtualized – servers, storage, and networking – they can easily adapt and decrease the time to deploy new applications.

With all these benefits, it’s no surprise that most organizations see value in SDDC as a long-term strategy. They want to be there, and know they need to be there to succeed long-term. But getting to that point is a journey – and one that must start with the right foundation.

Setting the Record Straight

When it comes to SDDC, one of the biggest misconceptions is that hardware doesn’t really matter. Those of us in hardware don’t take it personally (after all, it is SDDC, not HDDC). But that mindset couldn’t be further from the truth. Having the right hardware doesn’t just matter, it’s critical. Why? For one thing, SDDC runs on hardware. This may seem like a given, but without the right servers in place you can’t do all the other cool stuff that comes along with SDDC. Servers are the foundation of SDDC, and without a solid foundation? Well, we all know what happened to the guy that built his house on the sand…

To provide a little more context, here are 6 Reasons Hardware Matters in an SDDC:

1. Increased Capacity: Because SDDC runs on hardware, performance is constrained by the capacity and limitations of your servers. You’re forced to operate within the boundaries of resources available, and if those resources are limited, your SDDC capabilities will be, too.

2. Faster Deployment: A modern infrastructure helps reduce the time it takes to deploy new applications. Automation tools such as zero touch deployment make life a lot easier for your IT staff. With aging infrastructure, it can take IT organizations days, weeks, or even months to deploy new versions of applications in their data centers. Modernized servers help to drastically reduce this time.

3. Scalability – The right hardware enables you to more easily scale to meet your changing needs. Modernized servers support data growth, because they give you the capability to add additional resources such as memory. You can scale out to meet business demands, avoiding infrastructure “sprawl.”

4. Emerging Workloads – Today’s workloads are more complex than those of the past. Emerging workloads that require large amounts of parallelized computation need modernized servers designed specifically to support them. If your organization uses (or plans to use) predictive analytics, machine learning, or deep learning you need to have the right infrastructure in place. A recent study by Forrester found that 67% of servers purchased in the next year will be used to support emerging technology workloads including IoT, additive manufacturing, computer vision, predictive analytics, and edge computing.

5. Customized Workload Placement – Another benefit to modernized servers is the ability to customize your workload placement based on your specific needs and resources. This means you can run some workloads on-premises (such as data-sensitive applications), while keeping others in the cloud. For example, PowerEdge MX7000, which was designed specifically for SDDC, is a modular, software-defined infrastructure that can assign, move, and scale shared pools of compute, storage, and fabric with greater flexibility and efficiency.

6. Improved IT Staff Productivity – With aging infrastructure, your IT staff likely spends a large chunk of their time managing day-to-day tasks. This doesn’t leave much time to focus on strategy or work on things that will contribute to overall business results. Modernized servers help you automate tasks, making it much easier to deploy, monitor, and maintain, so your staff can add more value in other areas.

The journey to an SDDC can be challenging, and unfortunately the path to get there isn’t clear cut. But if you start with a solid foundation, including the right servers, you’ll be positioned to adapt and grow to meet your changing business needs.

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Conquer the Data Deluge with New Dell EMC Isilon Innovations

Verticals like automotive, life sciences and media and entertainment have been experiencing data growth for years. This growth is now expanding across multiple organizations because of the need to drive next-generation workloads like data analytics and artificial intelligence, as well as cloud native applications. There is also the need to run these workloads on premises or in the cloud. These are all adding to the struggles of data growth.

This is where Dell EMC Isilon excels. As the undisputed leader in the unstructured data market, we continue to simplify unstructured storage and empower our new and existing customers by consistently addressing their needs through innovation. We are excited to deliver on the investments we are making with scale, management, flexibility, performance, and getting the most out of the technology.

At Dell Technologies World we announced a new version of the Dell EMC Isilon OneFS operating system that is continuing to provide the answers to organization’s struggles with data deluge and the impact it has on IT. Isilon OneFS 8.2 enables organizations to grow their Isilon cluster up to 252 nodes, increase performance up to 75% and allows you to continue to manage this under a single namespace. It is simplicity at scale.

Isilon scale-out NAS solutions powered by OneFS 8.2 are an ideal choice for next-generation workloads that require enormous capacity and performance because we reduce the complexity. We enable you to consolidate your data without compromising the business and allow you to focus on the performance that is needed for the workload or the applications. All of this while managing petabytes of data as if you were managing terabytes of data. This is why we are the industry leader in the unstructured data market.

We do this through our single namespace. A file system that grows simply and easily without additional resources. What do I mean by that? Think of a single file system with let’s say, 120 TB of capacity. This may be suitable for your workloads now, but in 6 months, the amount of data increases and you need more space. In minutes, you can simply add another node and you have more space and performance in a single file system. No need for configuration changes. You need more space in 6 more months, the process doesn’t change. The file system grows, and the applications are not impacted. Now continue this up to 58 PB. That is what Isilon OneFS 8.2 brings to the table.

Why is this important to you? When it comes down to it, the business should be focusing on the data, the applications, and the workloads. It should not be focusing on additional configurations, lack of performance, or limiting your scaling capabilities. You should not change how IT works, just because the data is growing. Isilon grows with your workloads and no additional configuration or resources are needed.

With Isilon OneFS 8.2, now supporting up to 252 nodes in a single Isilon cluster – 75% more than the previous limit of 144 nodes, Isilon customers can gain massive scalability in capacity and performance reaching 58 PB capacity per cluster and 945 GB/s aggregate throughput per cluster.

We made a few additional changes around security. We added multi-factor authentication for increased security of the clusters and tighter access control for SSH. We added SyncIQ encryption for protecting data in flight during inter-cluster replication and now data transfers between OneFS clusters are secure. We also implemented HDFS Transport Data Encryption so when you are deploying Hadoop as a platform, you can ensure your data is encrypted at rest and in motion.

And you cannot forget our multi-cloud enhancements. Isilon customers already lower their storage costs by transparently and seamlessly tiering infrequently accessed cold or frozen files to a variety of public and private cloud services. Isilon OneFS 8.2 with CloudPools software, now delivers even more flexibility with support for a range of additional cloud providers (to our previous Amazon AWS, Google Cloud Platform and Microsoft Azure support) including Alibaba Aliyun and Amazon cloud for Federal Commercial Cloud Services (C2S). OneFS 8.2 and CloudPools also help organizations simplify cloud storage and data management with seamless integration with Isilon SnapshotIQ, SmartQuotas and SmartLock software.

But we didn’t stop there, we also introduced Isilon H5600. It is an ideal choice for next-generation workloads that require enormous capacity and performance. With a highly dense and efficient hybrid storage design that combines four Isilon nodes in a single 4U deep chassis, the Isilon H5600 provides massive capacity and throughput performance. It stores up to 800 TB with 80 SATA drives in a single 4U chassis, scales to over 50 PB in a single cluster and delivers up to 8 GB/s throughput per chassis. You can use 40% fewer nodes and rack units to get the same capacity target. Normally when you increase capacity density, you lose performance to achieve the same overall capacity target, but not with Isilon H5600. For example, in media and entertainment, you can now support one 4k uncompressed media stream per node.

Isilon OneFS 8.2 and the Isilon H5600 enable organizations to support demanding workloads with massive capacity and performance along with a highly efficient, dense storage solution to help organizations shrink their data center footprint and lower costs. Even more important, these new Isilon products help our customers advance their Digital Future and manage massive amounts of data, while accelerating the ability of business to unlock the value of their data capital.

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“Where We’re Going, We Still Need Roads…”

Robert Zemeckis and Bob Gale were right about a lot of things in their eagerly anticipated 1989 sequel Back to the Future Part II. Much of the movie was set in then distant future, 2015, where science fiction had merged with our everyday lives in some remarkable ways. The big question is – how many of the predictions actually came to pass?

Against all the odds

We did indeed embrace the practice of video-calling, a notion that not too long ago seemed like it just wouldn’t work, less for technical reasons and more for social ones – who wants to have to comb their hair and look presentable just to ring their mates? Not only has this premonition become almost ubiquitous among friends and families with OTT mobile apps like Skype and WhatsApp, but with the growth of social media stories and live streaming platforms, many of us seem more and more willing to broadcast ourselves to the entire world, sharing our deepest thoughts, opinions and brunch plates to all who care to listen and consume.

When fiction becomes reality

Robert and Bob were also spot on about the evolution of video games. Think of the moment, when Marty McFly is appalled to learn that the “kids of 2015” are only mildly amused by the cutting-edge video arcade game “Wild Gunman”, referring to it as “like a baby’s toy!” When we look at the virtual reality, motion-enabled games being played today, those plastic 6-shooters and 8-bit graphics really do seem a little fundamental – although undoubtedly still a lot of fun!

And the not so accurate predictions

However, some predictions were a little over zealous. Perhaps, the most famous and daring prediction came in the opening sequence, “Where we’re going, we don’t need roads.” This impactful and dramatic statement as the DeLorean shoots off into the sky reminds me of some claims and rhetoric I hear regularly in the Tech industry along the lines of, “Hardware is just a necessary evil, it’s a software defined world and that’s that.”

We need software and hardware

I’m not going to argue that the present and future of our industry is not significantly defined by software. The benefits of modern Cloud Architecture, Virtualization, Containerization and advances in Management/Orchestration are certainly not going away. Indeed, they will be the technologies that will support the next generation of software innovators and OEMs to bring products to new markets at a scale and velocity, previously unheard of.

However, despite this, the hardware elements of the solutions that we put together continues to be critical. In fact, I believe that hardware infrastructure is becoming more and more important– effectively, enabling the software “DeLoreans” to move faster, more securely, more efficiently and into new areas of our world. In my view, there has never been a more exciting time to be involved in hardware solutions.

At the Edge

After all, Edge computing means that we have computing resources, applications and data-analytics closer to the point of data generation than ever before. For me, “Edge” translates into decentralized as “not in the core datacenter.” It is represented by computing in cell towers, retail outlets and power substations. Edge means harsh conditions, small spaces, limited power and cooling. Edge equates to physical security, smart remote management and modularity.

Bringing light to the darker corners

These considerations surely give rise to important software considerations, but at its very core (pun intended), Edge computing demands continued innovation in hardware design to bring new light to the darker corners of the network. Without this innovation, we will be unable to realize the dreams that inspire the software visionaries to write the future.

Domain specific hardware architectures

On that note, domain specific hardware architectures are already enabling massively accelerated performance for software functions that require specific types of computational mathematics. Picture FPGA based accelerators from companies like Intel and Xilinx, validated in Dell Technologies Servers that can accelerate low-precision floating point calculations with extremely low latency.

Likewise, for activities like machine learning model training, GPUs such as NVIDIA’s V100 offer huge performance gains versus more traditional, less parallel architectures. Accelerating Machine Learning algorithms is becoming an increasingly competitive market, with new purpose-built hardware architectures being designed that are optimized for the convolutional mathematics used within. Smart NICs are offloading network functions to optimize IO while purpose-specific silicon is enabling new root-of-trust functionality for securing applications at a hardware level. And, let’s not forget cryptographic security, where keys are being stored and generated on hardware subsystems.

The holistic view

In short, your software can be amazing, but if the hardware platform is sub-optimal, it can be hobbled into something slow, insecure and unreliable. Looking holistically at the whole solution, across both hardware and software, is the key to delivering truly amazing products. If you’re trivializing either element, when developing your go-to-market strategy for your product, you will fall short of excellence.

The good news is that we have decades of experience in designing products both from a hardware and software perspective that enable innovators across multiple industries to leverage the best emerging technology for their applications. Why? Because even when we finally get our hoverboards – we still need somewhere to put our feet!

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New Paths to Microsoft Hybrid Cloud with Dell EMC

Today, Microsoft is hosting its annual Windows Server Summit – a virtual event that we encourage you to join wherever you may be!  One of the major themes is “Innovations in Microsoft Hybrid Strategy: a deep dive into Microsoft’s hyper-converged technologies and how to add hybrid services from Azure.”

As one of Microsoft’s biggest partners, Dell EMC has collaborated with Microsoft to develop hybrid solutions for years. Our Azure-dedicated portfolio today includes support for both Azure Stack and Azure Stack HCI.  Azure Stack, an extension of Azure on-premises that can run on Dell EMC hyperconverged engineered systems, allows users to consistently build and run cloud applications anywhere across the Azure ecosystem, using the Azure Portal with Azure IaaS and PaaS services. With Azure Stack HCI, a BYO on-prem private cloud solution, users can run virtualized workloads in a familiar and flexible way – but with the efficiency of Dell EMC hyperconverged infrastructure – and connect to Azure public for hybrid scenarios such as cloud backup and cloud-based monitoring.

These two different offerings provide our joint customers with the ability to choose how they achieve a hybrid cloud environment in Azure that addresses their unique goals. Today we’re pleased to announce that Dell EMC has expanded our Azure Stack HCI portfolio with Storage Spaces Direct Ready Nodes supporting Windows Server 2019.

This new offering leverages the Windows Server Datacenter license to provide software defined storage, using Hyper-V virtualization down to the storage level.  These multi-node clusters provide cost effective volumes with high performance and low latency, using common management tools.  In addition to our previous 15 use case-driven configurations under WSSD, Dell EMC has added:

◈ Windows Server 2019 to all 15 configurations, offering more choice and expandability

◈ Our newly released storage dense PowerEdge R740xd2 as a new chassis platform, allowing for more demanding workloads

◈ QuickStart – a 4 node, 2 switch configuration that’s an easy to order and deploy, end-to-end high availability solution

◈ Dell EMC PowerSwitch 25GbE networking to increase throughput

◈ A new upgrade service, taking customers from existing Storage Spaces Direct Ready Node architectures to Windows Server 2019 with continued support entitlement

◈ Integrated and unified systems management with the OpenManage Integration 7.1.1 for Microsoft System Center Virtual Machine Manager that simplifies cluster creation and maintenance tasks

2019 has also been a big year for Dell EMC Cloud for Microsoft Azure Stack as we’ve released several additions to our platform:

◈ In March, we announced Dell EMC’s Tactical Azure Stack to bring Azure-based services from the cloud to the edge. This ruggedized version of Azure Stack provides an Azure-consistent cloud in a harsh, mobile, or forward-deployed environment.

◈ Today, we’re announcing Azure Stack is now available on our PowerEdge R840 platform. As an all-flash system, it is a four-socket server validated and tested for Microsoft’s hybrid cloud solution.  Designed and configured to support high performance and data-intensive workloads in Azure Stack environments, the R840 enables customers to leverage the maximum levels of computing resources and SSD capacity available in a 2U footprint.

◈ We’re also excited to announce we now offer a metered usage consumption model for Azure Stack infrastructure, with Flex on Demand from Dell Financial Services. This measured service capability aligns with the OPEX type consumption model that customers desire.

Dell EMC has a long history of co-engineering with Microsoft and these new enhancements further strengthen our joint portfolio across hyperconverged infrastructure and hybrid cloud solutions. By working together to deliver innovative services faster and more frequently, we can become a real partner of change for our customers in this Digital Transformation era.

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Dell EMC Cloud Snapshot Manager – Seamless Data Protection Across Multiple Clouds for Backup and Disaster Recovery

With more and more enterprises adopting a multi-cloud strategy, it is important that you have a solution that can protect data across multiple clouds. The explosive growth of data and public cloud computing is changing the way enterprises look at their backup strategy and policies. Snapshots are an efficient and cost-effective way to protect workloads in the cloud.

Dell EMC Cloud Snapshot Manager

Dell EMC Cloud Snapshot Manager is a SaaS solution that makes it easy to protect workloads in public cloud environments – without requiring any installation or infrastructure. Customers can discover, orchestrate and automate the protection of workloads across multiple clouds based on policies for seamless backup and disaster recovery. Dell EMC breaks cloud silos, allowing customers to use one tool for the protection of workloads across multiple clouds. Designed for any size cloud infrastructure, CSM scales as your organization and data grows. The automatic assignment of resources to protection policies based on tags is essential to achieve auto-scaling in the cloud with the peace of mind that your resources are protected.

Why Cloud Snapshot Manager?

CSM is designed from the ground up for any size cloud infrastructure and scales as your organization and data grows. There are many benefits of CSM:

◈ Automated cloud data protection from one pane of glass, breaking cloud silos

◈ Protection, compliance, and disaster recovery of public cloud workloads

◈ Multi-tenancy capabilities enabling multiple accounts and users

◈ Automatic deletion of snapshots per retention policies for cost savings

◈ Application consistent framework in AWS and Azure for consistent restores

◈ Email reports for visibility into the health and overall status of your CSM environment

◈ Discovery of existing snapshots in AWS for better control over snapshot sprawl

What’s new in Cloud Snapshot Manager?

Enhancements to our service this quarter include:

Expanded AWS DBaaS protection

◈ Aurora

◈ Redshift

◈ DynamoDB

Security

◈ Support for Federated Identification with SAML

Group restores

◈ Expedite the recovery of all the VM’s in a protection plan to a point in time via group restores

Enhanced reporting automation

◈ Emailing of any report based on scheduled cadence

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Are You Running Windows Server 2008 or SQL Server 2008?

Windows Servers 2008 support ends on January 14, 2020. If you are running this version of the Windows operating system, here’s what you need to be thinking about now.

1. Is it time to move?

Server upgrades are moving. No one looks forward to moving, but in almost every occasion, the end result is worth it. If your IT organization is like most, you try to combine as many IT upgrades or refreshes as possible to lessen the upheaval necessary to modernize your IT infrastructure. In IT, most refreshes are driven by an application upgrade, an OS refresh or an architecture change.

Over the last six months, Microsoft has announced the EOS (end of support) of SQL Server 2008 and Windows Server 2008. We prepared an eBook on upgrading Windows Servers 2008 to help you understand how much time is left and what you need to be considering now. The EOS announcement is important. One detail that stands out is that Microsoft will no longer provide security updates on either SQL Server 2008 or Windows Server 2008. You could be introducing a huge security risk by simply continuing to run software past EOS.

Now is the perfect time to modernize your infrastructure and applications.

◈ Ensure your applications and infrastructure are secure
◈ Add advanced analytics and get the most out of your data
◈ Consolidate and simplify infrastructure and operations

2. Should I upgrade infrastructure and applications at the same time?

Outside of application, OS, and hypervisor refreshes, IT departments have also been evaluating software-defined storage (SDS), hyper-converged infrastructure (HCI) and software-defined data centers (SDDC). Now may be the perfect time to combine multiple projects and modernize your data center with SDS with Microsoft SQL Server 2017 or 2019 and Windows Server 2019.

The question many IT departments wrestle with is whether they should just refresh the software or if they should upgrade the hardware, too. There are times when the hardware the EOS software is running on is so out-of-date that an upgrade of just the software won’t work. Those are the no-brainer situations, but there are other times when it’s not so clear-cut. Consider this:

Moore’s law continues to play out by doubling processing power every 18 months. Servers and their key resources (compute, memory and storage), as well as applications keep finding new ways to leverage technology gains. The combination of PowerEdge, SQL Server and Windows Server produced 12X more IOPS in a vSAN cluster[1], 20.8X faster queries and reduced configuration time by 99%[2] compared to running on older servers

Performance is an obvious benefit and Dell EMC OpenManage is a powerful portfolio to simplify, automate and optimize IT. Did you know, PowerEdge servers also significantly increase security with features to lock down server configurations, secure firmware updates, and simplify the retirement/repurpose of a server with Secure Erase?

Only you can decide whether to upgrade the hardware as you upgrade the operating system. You have to ensure that the hardware can reliably and adequately support the new version of Microsoft Windows Server and/or SQL Server.

3. How can I right-size my infrastructure?

Properly sizing a new infrastructure is more challenging than ever. We all know server consolidation is a given – you will not need as many servers to run the same amount of workloads. The extent in which you are consolidating and the new server configuration requirements are important concerns to address. In addition, if you are moving to a hyper-converged or software-defined storage architecture, more questions will need to be answered  You can take the guesswork out of properly sizing an environment using Live Optics.

Live Optics is an online software (nothing to install) that gathers workload characteristics and resource utilization to give you all the information you need to size an infrastructure based on your needs. It often eliminates overdesign and provisioning from not understanding what resources are truly being used.

4. How do I know I am making the right decisions?

Now is the perfect time to refresh an aging infrastructure while refreshing to a newer version of Windows Server or SQL Servers. Using Live Optics, you can ensure your refresh maximizes your infrastructure resources and optimizes your socket and core-based licensing. Don’t overlook the savings you can reap from licensing. Typically, you can consolidate servers on a 5:1 basis delivering significant licensing savings.

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Announcing Dell EMC Innovations in Data Protection and Data Management

I joined Jeff Clarke on stage at Dell Technologies World to announce major innovations in our data protection portfolio. As we have maintained no. 1 positions in the Purpose-Built Backup Appliance Market and the Data Replication and Protection Software Market, we have been hard at work continuing to innovate without compromise. Dell EMC is powering up our portfolio with the introduction of our next-generation data management software platform and first multi-dimensional data management appliance.

The fact that Digital Transformation is disrupting every industry is unavoidable – and our customers all make it clear that the explosion of data has been hard to manage. Organizations are facing unprecedented complexity and inefficiency, making it difficult to derive business value from their data. Businesses are consuming IT resources differently, and the need for a powerful, efficient and trusted solution to protect data assets is clear.

Protecting data’s value isn’t about locking it away; it’s about providing superior risk reduction for workloads and enabling data reuse. With those goals in mind, we’ve built a platform to help organizations not only retain and manage essential data, but also keep the digital business running.

With the all-new Dell EMC PowerProtect Software platform and the multi-dimensional Dell EMC PowerProtect X400 appliance, we are helping mid-size and enterprise organizations transform their data protection strategy and prepare for the future of business.

PowerProtect Software is a software-defined platform that gives IT staff confidence that their data is protected and available. PowerProtect Software offers efficient data management capabilities across ever-changing IT environments, leveraging the latest evolution of our trusted protection storage architecture. With the flexibility to consume via software or via an integrated appliance, PowerProtect Software provides data protection, replication and reuse, and can be simply deployed on any standard hardware.

PowerProtect Software empowers the entire IT team – allowing data owners to perform backup and recovery operations from their native applications, while at the same time providing central oversight and governance to ensure compliance. We believe this balanced approach to self-service for admins combined with central IT governance is a key element of any team’s data management strategy.

Of course, the PowerProtect Software platform is built with multi-cloud organizations in mind. The platform is multi-cloud optimized, enabling long-term retention via cloud tiering and soon cloud disaster recovery. PowerProtect Software can send data directly to the cloud with no cost, allowing customers to maximize their investment and expand capacity further.

Additionally, PowerProtect Software utilizes SaaS-based management to easily monitor, analyze and troubleshoot distributed environments from anywhere. PowerProtect Software and the PowerProtect X400 appliance enable IT to meet objectives more effectively with evolving operational intelligence.

As with any purchase, we want to make sure the investment is one that prepares our customers for the future. PowerProtect Software leverages a modern, services-based architecture to ensure the ease of deployment, scaling and upgrading that all our customers desire.

Future IT demands are difficult to predict precisely – I have noted how the explosion of data has been hard for organizations to track. Consequently, we developed our new integrated data management appliance to be multi-dimensional.

PowerProtect X400 scales out with linear performance and capacity increases and delivers scale-up, grow-in-place capacity expansion. This allows the appliance to grow with the organization as its IT demands change. As additional scale-out cubes are added to bring more performance and capacity, the X400 uses load balancing enabled with machine learning to deliver optimal deduplication and performance.

Further flexibility comes from the option of hybrid or – for the first time – all flash. In fact, PowerProtect X400 is the industry’s first All-Flash Integrated Purpose-Built Backup Appliance. Providing all-flash as an option ensures that every organization can find the level of performance they need, preparing today’s largest organizations to meet the SLOs of tomorrow.

After using PowerProtect X400 in his environment, our customer Brian Linden, director of IT with Melanson Heath, shared this perspective: “Adding complexity to our data center right now is not an option. The PowerProtect X400 appliance was easy to deploy and configure. Within minutes we protected our virtual machines. The tight integration with VMware and Instant Access allows our IT staff to quickly deploy production VM images for test and development. As a result, we are able to speed up the process for initiating test and development of production applications, making our data center staff more efficient.”

Our continued focus on integration has been key to our leadership in data protection appliances, which makes PowerProtect X400 a natural addition to our portfolio as our first integrated data management appliance.

While we’ve been developing the PowerProtect X400, we’ve also been focused on extending our Integrated Data Protection Appliance (IDPA) portfolio, including last year’s DP4400. Today, we also announced an 8TB capacity option for the IDPA DP4400, furthering IDPA’s momentum and market acceleration. According to the latest market data from IDC, both IDPA revenue and unit shipments have grown by more than 10x from 2017 to 2018.

This announcement cements Dell EMC’s commitment to the IDPA platform and conviction that no business is too small for world-class data protection. Now, smaller customers and locations can obtain all the enterprise-level data protection features and functionality of the IDPA family, including simple deployment, easy management, high performance, widest application coverage and cloud extensibility with native cloud tier and cloud DR capabilities, in a smaller capacity appliance. And, as the customer’s needs expand, the new 8-24TB model can easily expand to 96TB with an optional hardware kit that will be available later this year.

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Enhanced BIOS Verification Protects PC Firmware Against Sophisticated Threats

As commonplace threats are being thwarted more frequently, cyber criminals are looking for more advanced ways to gain the critical information. As a result, targeted attacks against PC firmware has become an area of concern. In these instances, protecting the PC BIOS, the lowest level of the PC stack, is critical to an organization’s security posture. If an attacker gains access to the BIOS, they can compromise all of a device’s endpoint security capabilities, as well as an organization’s entire network. This type of attack is highly technical and when executed, very damaging.

With the growing frequency of BIOS-specific attacks, and new malware variants possessing the ability to reinstall themselves within the BIOS, organizations need a more sophisticated way to not only protect their systems, but confidently verify that their systems have not been compromised.

Answering that call, Dell Technologies is enhancing its Dell SafeBIOS offering with a new utility for off-host BIOS verification and integrations with CrowdStrike, Secureworks and VMware Workspace ONE for off-host BIOS verification with their tools. Off-host verification offers superior protection as on-host-only approaches are susceptible to local attack. The Dell off-host BIOS verification provides additional security to complement the on-host protection.

Dell’s unique post-boot BIOS verification technology for its commercial PCs gives IT the assurance that employees’ BIOS have not been altered. Should the BIOS get corrupted or tampered with, Dell provides customers flexible reimaging options so that the contaminated BIOS can be analyzed to understand the nature of the attack.

This capability is available as a standalone tool from Dell Support, and is integrated with VMware Workspace ONE, Secureworks and CrowdStrike. VMware Workspace ONE provides IT management with new visibility of BIOS status for unified endpoint management. Customers can leverage Secureworks threat intelligence to not only identify compromises, but provide analysis and remediation. With the CrowdStrike integration, security operations have a more complete view of endpoint risk. Rather than relying on generic BIOS measurements, partners can ensure integrity when performing BIOS checks through their tools and interfaces without having to deploy additional software or access separate consoles. These combined capabilities provide the ability to more quickly identify and remediate potential risks.

Dell SafeBIOS is part of the larger Dell Trusted Security portfolio including:

◈ Trusted Devices: With tools like SafeBIOS, Dell enables a secure foundation for customers’ workforce transformation strategies on the world’s most secure commercial PCs. In addition, SafeID protects end user credentials delivering fast, multi-factor authentication you’ve come to expect from the world’s most secure PC portfolio.

◈ Trusted Data: Dell constantly monitors and protects the endpoint ecosystem with Dell SafeGuard and Response, while giving IT confidence that data is secure even while end users collaborate freely with Dell SafeData.

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Power Up Your Network, from Edge to Core to Cloud

Another Dell Technologies World is upon us! With it comes the opportunity for us to share the power of our portfolio with customers, partners, media and analysts from around the world. And when it comes to the network, power truly is the name of the game.

Why? Data, and massive amounts of it. As all data center managers know, staying ahead of the traffic demands—and doing it cost-effectively—is a business-critical imperative. It’s also more of a challenge than ever before, particularly as organizations become increasingly reliant on multi/hybrid cloud operations to put data where it needs to be, when it needs to be there, to achieve desired business outcomes.

In line with those demands, today Dell EMC Networking is announcing the Dell EMC PowerSwitch brand for our family of Open Networking switches. We’re powering up customers’ network environments with their choice of OS software, integrated fabric automation with OS10 SmartFabric Services and tight integration with VMware NSX, on industry-leading Dell EMC Networking hardware. Our PowerSwitch portfolio helps customers break free of vendor lock-in and proprietary, monolithic architectures that simply don’t deliver the level of flexibility, cost-effectiveness and scale that’s needed in a multi-cloud world.

We’re also pleased to welcome the two newest members of the PowerSwitch family—the Dell EMC PowerSwitch S5212F-ON, the first in the industry to offer 12x25GbE ports, and the S5224F-ON with 24x25GbE ports. These switches are designed for demanding hyper-converged and software-defined storage environments. The powerful 25GbE ports offer increased performance, lower CAPEX and OPEX, and a future-proof path to 100GbE. These low-density switches deliver 2.5x the performance over existing 10GbE solutions—and in the case of the S5212, deliver that power in half the size!

Both switches support the Open Networking Install Environment (ONIE), which gives customers the choice of running Dell EMC Networking OS10 Enterprise Edition software with integrated SmartFabric Services or approved third-party operating systems.

Choice, flexibility, investment protection, technology that’s designed for today and the future—that’s the power of Open Networking and it’s why we pioneered the disaggregation of networking hardware and software five years ago, disrupting traditional networking. It’s why last year our Networking business grew 2x the market, according to Dell’Oro. It’s why customers look to Dell EMC Networking to transform their IT to deliver the business outcomes they need in this era of data. And it’s why Dell EMC was recognized in 2019 by Gartner Peer Insights with a Customers’ Choice distinction for Data Center networking.

Living on the Edge

We are also transforming IT at the edge. To help customers modernize and evolve their WANs to handle the demanding requirements of a new, hybrid-cloud world, we are announcing the new Dell EMC SD-WAN Edge powered by VMware. This integrated platform dramatically improves the SD-WAN customer experience by providing a validated and bundled solution that offers a better-together experience completely unique to Dell Technologies.

With VMware’s leadership in the 2018 Gartner Magic Quadrant for WAN Edge Infrastructure, and Dell EMC’s innovative uCPE hardware, enterprises and service providers will be able to scale their WAN infrastructures more quickly and cost-effectively while reducing complexity.

The Dell EMC SD-WAN Edge powered by VMware, available this summer, will offer the flexibility of subscription options and the ease of a single support number to call. Customers will also be able to take advantage of new SD-WAN consulting services.

The Power of Open Networking

At the edge, core or cloud, this is what Open Networking is all about – giving customers the freedom to choose the right solution for their use cases, the ability to break costly vendor lock-in and the power to keep up with the demand for data in order to drive your business into the future. And we go beyond the hardware and software to help you transform by offering industry-leading global services and support, a world-class sustainable supply chain and a commitment to driving human progress in everything we do. That’s the power of Dell Technologies.

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Making the Intelligent Enterprise Real with Dell Technologies and SAP

The 2019 SAPPHIRE NOW theme, “Bringing the Intelligent Enterprise to Life” combined with a more detailed event description “this event delivers a practical path for companies to become an intelligent enterprise driving meaningful business outcomes that delight customers and support organization growth” is a perfect encapsulation of what Dell Technologies delivers for customers taking this journey with SAP.

My comments reflect only a small, but important, discussion of the key areas where Dell Technologies can drive technology, performance and financial value for customers operating SAP landscapes today or those interested in the transformational value of SAP landscapes. To get the entire experience, please visit us at @DellTech booth #2230.

The first step in the journey is reducing TCO and simplifying IT for SAP landscapes.

Historically, IT has run SAP production and non-production systems on siloed infrastructure, whether by design — to protect production performance — or ad hoc as new projects get added. The result is well understood – higher TCO with strained IT budgets and valuable resources allocated to spending time maintaining, monitoring and managing SAP system landscapes.

Dell EMC solutions provide a modern infrastructure foundation designed to invigorate legacy SAP ERP with reduced cost and ready to power the Intelligent Enterprise with S/4 HANA.

An emerging area of great interest for simplifying IT operations is running SAP HANA on software defined infrastructure.

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

VxFlex creates a server-based SAN by combining virtualization software, known as VxFlex OS, with Dell EMC PowerEdge servers and unified management to deliver flexible, scalable performance, and capacity on demand for SAP HANA.

Dell EMC VxFlex HCI System for SAP HANA

The SAP HANA certification encompasses the HCI architecture with VMware vSphere hypervisor and VxFlex OS software defined storage. The certification supports VxFlex systems configured with Intel Xeon SP (Skylake) CPU based PowerEdge servers, including the dual-socket R640 and R740xd and the four-socket R840.

Now let’s take a turn and look at the business – it is all about fueling innovation with intelligence and visibility to actionable data.

Emerging data-driven use cases mean combining SAP HANA business data with external big data, machine learning and AI to fuel intelligent application and business processes. This results in a proliferation of data being aggregated, pipelined, managed and stored from the edge to the core.

Realizing a comprehensive IT framework to orchestrate data management across distributed complex IT landscapes on scale-out secure infrastructure is a key foundation, Dell EMC has partnered with SAP for one of the broadest portfolios of SAP certified infrastructure for SAP HANA and SAP Leonardo IoT.

For managing diverse data sources and applications at the “core”

We know that SAP HANA and SAP S/4HANA  is foundational for intelligent enterprise applications at the core (check certified infrastructure here), but not all data is stored in SAP HANA. What about big data located outside SAP HANA?

Dell EMC and SAP have you covered;

◈ SAP Data Hub provides governance and orchestration for data refinement and enrichment by pipelining complex data operations.
◈ For storing IoT and big data outside SAP HANA, Dell EMC Isilon scale-out network-attached storage (NAS) provides a secure scale-out platform to build a data lake and persist enterprise files of all sizes that scale from terabytes to petabytes in a single cluster.

What about accelerating decision making at the edge?

Not all IoT data will be processed at the core data center in SAP HANA. IoT edge computing will include SAP applications and use cases supporting decisions that need to be made locally with smaller subsets of aggregated data being transmitted to the core.

Dell Technologies and SAP have you covered;

◈ SAP Edge Services extends the Intelligent Enterprise to the Edge with capabilities for uninterrupted high-performance business processes, optimized data processing – locally or at the digital core, and real-time decision-making and agile responses.

◈ Dell Technologies sharply reduces time to value with decreased TCO of these Edge capabilities through pre-installation on our SAP certified Edge gateways, bundled with VMware Pulse management for optimized operations.

IT Framework to Orchestrate Data Management

So now that we have introduced Dell EMC’s IT foundation from the edge to the core, the next step in this journey is deploying compelling use cases with our partners!

One of most recent use case studies was develop in cooperation with Camelot ITLab (booth #444) and Intel (booth #1700), showing how blockchain technology is solving a huge challenge in the consumer goods industry: constantly keeping compliant with legally required labeling of regulated compounds, while leveraging a complex, global supply chain.

Again, this was a small sample of the value that Dell Technologies can bring to customers on their SAP journey.  Join us at @ DellTech Booth 2230 to see a theatre session with Dell EMC Global System Integrator (GSI) partners for Energy & Utilities, Retail and Energy Management.  Also check out the Dell EMC portfolio of solutions, meet with our experts and see just how Dell Technologies and SAP are “Bringing the Intelligent Enterprise to Life.”

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An Enterprise SSD Fairytale: Finding the Solution That’s Just Right

One of my favorite childhood fairytales was Goldilocks and the Three Bears. We can all relate to Goldilocks in the pursuit of finding just the right fit, especially when it comes to choosing between enterprise SSDs.

It can be difficult to make the right choice when confronted with too many options, or too few options. When choosing your Dell EMC PowerEdge server enterprise SSD, it is important to find just the right amount of performance, latency, and reliability, at the right price. You want enough performance for your specific applications but may not need the top tier performance option either. You may have tried a few different storage options in pursuit of finding the one that is just right. Dell EMC supports you in the pursuit of finding the right storage fit and has recently added options for those of you that are in between enterprise SSDs.

If you have a legacy system with SAS and SATA, there’s an option that is just right for you. As technology advances, you may find certain SATA SSDs won’t be able to properly handle your storage performance needs. At the same time, you may feel SAS SSDs provide outstanding performance, but you can’t justify the added price for your needs. Sound familiar?

Dell EMC PowerEdge servers now offer value SAS SSD options. Value SAS is a new class of SAS SSD that leverages the PowerEdge SAS server infrastructure to deliver better performance, latency, and reliability than SATA SSDs, at a comparable price. Value SAS allows you to maximize your Dell EMC PowerEdge server utilization. These drives are lower cost and have lower performance than standard SAS SSDs, positioning their performance characteristics between SATA and standard SAS. Value SAS is an easy replacement for SATA SSDs and provide greater value for most enterprise applications.

Additionally, there is an option that may be just right for those who have PowerEdge servers equipped for NVMe. Have you ever found yourself settling for SATA SSDs that don’t quite fulfill your storage performance requirements, because you couldn’t justify the price of purchasing Enterprise NVMe? Do you seek a higher performance storage device for a decent price?

If you need a solution that requires high read input/output operations per second (IOPs), low latency and enterprise-class storage reliability and serviceability, the Dell EMC PowerEdge Express Flash NVMe Datacenter Read Intensive PCIe SSD is the right choice for you. The Express Flash NVMe PCIe SSD delivers very good performance and endurance in demanding read intensive environments, such as Media Streaming, VOD, Web Apps and Front-End Web Servers. Built with server-grade, 3D Triple-level cell (3D TLC) NAND, the low-latency PowerEdge Express Flash NVMe Datacenter Read Intensive PCIe SSD provides an exceptional price point with good IOPs, throughput performance, and exceptional reliability and serviceability. Engineered for read intensive workloads, this SSD provides just the right balance of read performance with endurance at the right price.

Goldilocks didn’t settle, she chose the option that was just right for her. Visit Dell EMC PowerEdge Servers to choose the PowerEdge server and enterprise SSD that is just right for you.

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Redefining Data Protection

In a world where digital transformation determines winners and losers, businesses continue to create increasingly larger volumes of data, and by way of doing so, have evolved to the point where every organization is now a technology company. Further, it is a time where the most significant source of differentiation an organization has is the data that it keeps.

To fully unlock the value of data capital, attention must be paid to where data resides, how it is managed, and how it’s protected. Ultimately, modernizing IT to accelerate data-driven decisions and drive business outcomes is critical to an organization’s success.

Getting data protection correct in this context isn’t always straightforward or easy. There’s complexity associated with protecting data spread across the globe and on numerous platforms, including multiple clouds. Data platforms have become specialized to address specific workloads, further fragmenting the data landscape. Add in the weight of massive data growth – at a rate of 569% since 2016 – and the value of retaining more data for longer periods, plus the persistent concern about disruptive events, and this creates challenges that can only be solved with a data protection solution that spans the entire data footprint.

It is in this world that we must redefine data protection.

Protecting data isn’t only about keeping it safe, but also about ensuring it remains continuously available. Data protection technologies can be used in new ways to accelerate migrations, power DevOps activities, simplify compliance and regulatory requirements, and facilitate the preservation of data for long-term monetization. Data protection can no longer only be considered an insurance policy; it must evolve to be a leverageable service that can help drive business outcomes. Data protection must transition to data management.

Transforming Data into Value

The specific definition and application of “data management” depends on an organization’s goals for acquiring, validating, storing, protecting and processing their data. In many cases, data is captured without a pre-determined use case to leverage it. Access to the right data, at the right time, and being able to extract the right insight from it can be a strategic advantage for the enterprise.

With this objective in mind, how does an organization identify the “right” data management solution? At Dell EMC, we believe that the decision lies with the data.

For more on Dell EMC’s perspective about the evolution from data protection to data management, hear what Rama Kolappan (VP, Product Management) had to say when he sat down for a CUBE Conversation in Palo Alto, CA.

Rama Kolappan shares the Dell EMC perspective at theCUBE Studios

Effectively, data is at the center of the data management universe, and hence every aspect of a data management solution. Attention must be given to every possible data source, target, service level objective, location, use case, consumption model and business model. Let’s unpack each of these considerations, or more fittingly, requirements:

◈ Any Source: A solution must be able to capture data regardless of the application, hypervisor, database, filesystem, sensor or device that generates the data. Despite obvious differences in data formats and API’s, the goal of the data management solution is to be the universal conversationalist.

◈ Any Target: The solution also needs to aggregate, deduplicate and store the captured data to the protection storage target of choice. The target device could be an integrated storage appliance, a commodity hardware-based platform, cloud object storage or a combination of storage targets. Regardless of the choice storage targets, the user should have a common set of data services and a common mechanism for accessing the data from and across multiple target platforms.

◈ Any SLO: Placing data as the central focus means understanding the value of data and being able to support any Service Level Objective, which is often defined by Recovery Point Objective (RPO), and Recovery Time Objective (RTO). As the value of the data increases, the tolerance for data loss and data unavailability decreases, eventually arriving at a requirement for no data loss and instantaneous recovery.

◈ Any Location: Data can be generated and stored anywhere – from billions of devices and sensors in a variety of locations, to traditional enterprise and modern consumer applications residing on-premises and in cloud environments. An effective data management solution should be able to operate in in any environment – for both capturing and storing data – as well as to seamlessly span across environments, providing frictionless data mobility while ensuring the right data is available in the right location.

◈ Any Use Case: A data management solution should support use cases beyond traditional data protection. Instead of allowing secondary data to remain idle, only to be recalled in the event of data loss or data unavailability, the solution strives to extract value from data by making it available for additional use cases. A data management solution can quickly provision low-overhead copies for dev / test, simulation and analytics workloads. It also provides a single system of record for all the data to support compliance and GDPR use cases with visibility into the type and nature of the data for classification and analytical purposes.

◈ Any Access Method: An effective data management solution isn’t limited to traditional methods of data access and consumption. It can restore the entire data set (or a subset) to a different location or make it accessible in place by spinning up the entire application stack. It can also collaborate with the application to restore the appropriate granularity of data (table, emails, files, users, records) directly in the application dataset. Additionally, it provides rich API functionality for third-party integration and dynamically add capabilities not natively provided by the data management solution.

◈ Any Consumption Model: A data management solution should be delivered through multiple consumption models – an integrated multi-dimensional appliance, a software-only solution which can direct data streams to target protection storage (PBBA, commodity storage or cloud object storage), or as SaaS. Regardless of the method of consumption, the capabilities, data services and the management interface should remain unchanged. And, a common data format, independent from the underlying storage media, should enable frictionless data mobility across all these consumption models.

◈ Any Business Model : Capabilities of a data management solution should be acquired through an all-inclusive perpetual license or through an a la carte menu of individual capabilities. Similarly, the flexible, business model can be capacity based (either front-end or back-end) or CPU based when deploying a software-only solution.

At Dell EMC, we are constantly speaking with our customers about their strategies for modernizing IT. Certainly, the list above symbolizes a significant number of factors for organizations to consider. Remember that organizations invest tremendous amounts of money and effort in creating data, and the availability of that data for use as a leverageable asset represents differentiated business value. Maximizing the return on that investment requires rethinking data protection, including transitioning to a data management solution.

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