The Season of Change: PowerEdge with AMD EPYC Gives You 5 Reasons to be Excited for Fall

Many people have strong associations with the fall season: apple picking, colorful leaves, pumpkin (spice), playoff baseball. These activities invoke our senses to the point where we can feel the crisp air, taste the ball park mustard, and imagine the palette of leaves. The fall season invites you to create some great memories, and here at Dell EMC, we have 5 additional reasons to celebrate: five new PowerEdge servers!

We announced our five new PowerEdge servers with 2nd Gen AMD EPYC processors on September 17th, with our 1-socket servers, the R6515 and R7515, ready for immediate sale. Now that that it is mid-October, two more solutions are ready to go along with some world records. The 2-socket PowerEdge servers, R6525 and C6525, are perfect solutions for data analytics, machine learning, and virtualization. Their optimized design gives businesses one of the most compute-dense servers in the industry. At Dell EMC, we wanted to make sure you enjoyed the season and leveraged these new solutions to handle critical and demanding workloads; think real-time sports analytics or high-performance hurricane modeling.

The PowerEdge server portfolio with 2nd Gen AMD EPYC provides more than just complex analytics workloads. The servers help any company manage their journey through their digital transformation, whether these solutions require software defined storage, virtualization, or high-performance computing (HPC). To build a sustainable competitive advantage, companies must cultivate these foundational capabilities from the ground up.

With the new PowerEdge servers, you can focus more time innovating, making strategic decisions, and creating value for your customers. The five new Dell EMC PowerEdge servers with 2nd Gen AMD EPYC provide world-record performance for whatever solution you are building.

Virtualize and Collaborate

The new Dell EMC 1-socket servers, R6515 and R7515, are designed to increase collaboration and improve cost structure. The R6515 optimizes performance for virtual machine density, SQL, and hyperconverged infrastructure (HCI). Dell EMC built an Azure Stack for HCI Ready Node, so you don’t have to worry about optimizing your configurations. Instead, the R6515 saves time and money by allowing you to focus on collaboration and building applications for your hybrid cloud environment.

The R7515 is an amazing solution for database virtualization, especially for Hadoop and Spark. The R7515 has 8 world records filed for database virtualization; 4 in performance and 4 in price. Think of the time saved with 280% more throughput using MapReduce and a 51% IOPS increase on a vSAN Ready Node. On a 3-node cluster, the improvements in the R7515 translates to ~$269,000 in savings over an HPE DL380 3-node cluster. The R7515 helps create a competitive advantage for internal operations by improving data-backed decisions and significantly reducing the total cost of ownership.

Accelerate Performance

The new Dell EMC 2-socket servers, R6525 and C6525, are dense computing powerhouses, allowing for multiple accelerators. The R6525 increases SAP SD users by 37% with half the rack space of the HPE DL385. Talk about the ultimate ERP and business analytics solution. More users and less rack space are short cuts to TCO advantages and digital transformation. Your data center will have more space to run other workloads, allowing IT to create new innovative solutions. Just imagine the potential customer analytics, business research, and improved operations.

The C6525 was purposefully designed and built for high-performance computing and HPC Ready solutions. The C6525 has records in digital manufacturing as well as weather research and forecasting. Not to mention that the 202% increase in LINPACK GFLOPS ensures your superpowered weather models are also accurate. Again, we built the Ready Solutions to keep your mind on the important things; developing more accurate weather forecasts, constructing better economic projections, and designing a new airplane or car.

Test what these servers can do for you

Fall is the best time to make a change. As others prepare to hibernate during the winter months, you can be busy planning and building for the spring rebirth. Creating a competitive advantage starts with the foundation. The groundwork in digital transformation is the IT infrastructure used to support your workforce and your operations that eventually create value for your customers. Dell EMC PowerEdge servers with 2nd Gen AMD EPYC help our customers manage traditional and emerging workloads, cut deployment times, and boost security. Stay on the cutting edge of the digital transformation by building world class infrastructure.

This fall you could try something new. If you are interested in buying or trying the new servers, please contact your Dell EMC Rep or contact us directly. We also have some availability for remote or on-site trial of our new servers. Our Minerva cluster, 64 nodes of the C6525, creates an innovation sandbox for our HPC customers to test their ideas on the new PowerEdge servers with 2nd Gen AMD EPYC.

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Top 3 Ways Distributors Help Solution Providers in Dell Technologies Partner Program Maximize Profitable Growth

Distribution has transformed from a warehouse model—where supply chain and financial benefits alone reigned supreme—to a value-add model focused on providing complete solutions. Increasingly trusted by solution providers as solution aggregators, distributors are now solving end-customers’ most complex business challenges and building solutions that can scale globally.

Today, Dell Technologies Authorized Distributors help our channel partners build customer solutions that span all four pillars of digital transformation: IT transformation, Workforce transformation, Security transformation, and Application transformation. Distributors extend our ability to seize new and profitable partner opportunities and help us reach the full potential of our channel business.

Additionally, our Authorized Distributors are helping the Dell Technologies Partner Program ecosystem maximize profitable growth in three key ways.

Distributors extend reach and scale sales capacity

First, distribution drives incremental business by providing access to new partners and customers, and by providing sales, marketing, technical, and operational support where we have limited resources. They also offer valuable market and competitive information. So, we’re proud to have our distribution partners helping promote the Dell Technologies brand and portfolio of products around the globe.

Distributors provide expertise, support and flexibility

Second, distributors can provide partners with complementary and value-added services, extended credit lines, and back-end office support. Their highly-valued presales support and expert training, as well as trusted financial support, are making next-generation solutions more accessible and outcome-based solutions easier to deliver for our global partners.

Distributors enhance customer value

Third, distributors allow our channel partners to do more by providing them with on time and global access to our products and solutions. They keep Dell Technologies products stocked and ready to ship, and they help ensure we engage more in multi-vendor solutions.

As our solution providers progress through the Dell Technologies Partner Program, we remind them of the benefits of purchasing through distributors. Partners have the same opportunity to earn benefits—such as approved deal registration and rebates—whether they buy directly from Dell Technologies or through our Authorized Distributors.

Driving growth for mid-tier and net-new partners remains an essential element of our shared success. These key target partners are building a strong sales pipeline with our Authorized Distributors for long-term profitability. And we continue to believe that medium business is a big growth opportunity through distribution.

Dell Technologies has already seen great momentum in 2019. And this is true for our distribution business as well. So, thank you to all our partners, for everything you do to communicate the value of our entire Dell Technologies portfolio… and, ultimately, helping us shape the digital future of our customers worldwide.

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How Your IT Team Can Take Advantage of Predictive Analytics

Is your company aiming to be a leader in the field of predictive analytics? New research suggests it should. ESG research finds that AI-enabled organizations considered to be the “Most Advanced” IT shops are 2.6x more likely to lead the competition in business intelligence and analytics.

Organizations that are categorized as “Most Advanced” use:

1. Modern servers with extensive automation capabilities (i.e., automated updating, monitoring, configuring, provisioning, and issue remediation).
2. Accelerators such as GPUs or FPGAs to support AI workloads.
3. Converged/hyperconverged infrastructure to support AI workloads.

ESG refers to the “Most Advanced” AI-enabled organizations as Stage 3, with the “Least Advanced” being Stage 1. Stage 3 companies are nearly 7x more likely to be market leaders when it comes to the development, deployment, and tuning of AI models, including those used for predictive analytics. In fact, 74% of Stage 3 organizations are developing, deploying, and tuning AI models for predictive analytics in production today. Compare this to only 55% of Stage 1 organizations. Being a leader in the field of predictive analytics means reaping a host of benefits like more accurate business planning, better strategic decision making, and an improved ability to identify and take advantage of trends.

A new eBook from Dell EMC, The Compute Infrastructure Needed for Predictive Analytics, explores the benefits of being an AI-enabled organization. It takes a deep dive into the ideal infrastructure needed to run a predictive analytics/machine learning environment like Spark on Hadoop. As ESG research shows, in order to boost your predictive analytics powers, it helps to have automated servers.

When you replace your aging servers with modern servers that have automation capabilities, you can expect:

◉ 43% faster deployments
◉ 43% higher systems reliability
◉ 38% faster updates of applications
◉ 37% less time spent on routine, manual IT infrastructure management

What does this mean? Modern servers enable your organization to have faster access to insights. Your analytics servers will be up and running lightning fast. Also, you will experience minimal downtime for processing data. All servers recommended for running Hadoop and Spark in the eBook provide compelling automation options. Our premier server management platform, the OpenManage portfolio, offers RESTful APIs. The APIs allow you to script many aspects of your server deployment, maintenance, and provisioning. You can write a script, set it, and forget it. OpenManage Integrations also support the Ansible framework with OpenManage Ansible Modules. These allow IT to automate in a multi-vendor scenario. The modules are delivered as pre-written scripts for fine-tuned automation.

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Dell EMC Data Protection – Accelerating IT Transformation from Edge to Core to Cloud

With more than 140,000 employees serving customers worldwide, Dell Technologies is helping organizations accelerate innovation and make the most of their investments in virtualization. Many times, outdated technology and the need to keep pace with competitors are driving forces for customers to connect with us.

As we head to VMworld Europe, Data Protection is recognized as one of the 5 key pillars in VMware’s multi-cloud strategy (Build, Run, Manage, Connect, Protect). Based on industry success, proven agility and resiliency, Dell EMC Data Protection is a preferred choice to offer best in class data protection solutions with deep integration into the VMware suite of capabilities. Organizations choose Dell EMC and VMware for a multitude of reasons, including a differentiated data protection solution. In the stories that follow, you’ll hear why our customers find Dell EMC to be a reliable, innovative and easy to manage solution for data protection.

Chorley Council

Chorley Council, a local government serving 110,000 residents in the U.K., had outdated technology standing in the way of making vital government services available to citizens anytime. To accelerate its digital transformation, they pursued an end-to-end, cloud-based data protection solution with Dell EMC, VMware and AWS.

“With Dell EMC, VMware and AWS, we’ve completed a significant IT transformation, eliminated our DR site and improved the lives of residents. That adds up to substantial cost savings related to heating, cooling and rent and hopefully makes for a happier society.”

The first step was replacing an aging NetApp environment. Emma Marshall, ICT and Programme Manager, Chorley Council, explains, “We considered HP, Veaam and Rubrik, but Dell EMC Data Protection was the only solution that checked off all the boxes for our digital transformation to enhance government services and lower service delivery costs. Dell EMC was the most cost-effective and scored the highest for availability, quality and ease of use.”

Dell EMC Data Protection solutions provide Chorley with data deduplication, backup, recovery and replication to AWS cloud storage. Chorley uses Dell EMC Data Protection Software, Data Domain Virtual Edition and Data Domain Boost to back up approximately 80 VMware virtual servers and Citrix virtual desktops to on-site Dell EMC Data Domain appliances. Dell EMC Cloud Disaster Recovery (Cloud DR) software replicates Chorley’s backups to AWS.

With increased digital usage, Chorley’s data requirements are expected to double in five years. Marshall reflects, “We’re one of the only local governments in the U.K. to embrace digital, cloud-based transformation. Dell EMC Data Protection provides us with the scalability, reliability and agility to execute this strategy with confidence and meet the evolving needs of our community.”

Read the full Chorley Council Story

RG System

RG System, the software developer of a leading SaaS ITSM solution on the French IT Management market, is part of the French Septeo group, which comprises 12 different and complementary companies providing digital business services. The group represents 850 staff and 10,000 clients and the new RG System office will also serve as a platform for the internationalization of some of the Septeo groups other services into the North American market.

RG System serves three customers: 75% are managed services business (MSBs) using their solution to deliver business continuity to their customer; second is software publisher, ISV, using their solution to deliver business connectivity to their customer; the last one is the integrators, using RG as a value-add to their business model. With a customer-first approach, RG System’s need for business continuity and infrastructure availability, as well as a complex hybrid cloud environment, requires a backup and recovery solution that can manage a complex infrastructure.

Gregory Caldera, CEO of RG System, said, “The most critical challenge for us was that the solution needed to work with our entire environment. The solution needs to be compatible with all solutions in our environment as well as our customer environments and the software needs to be able to back up all types of infrastructures including client or server, physical or virtual, especially VMware.”

And that’s exactly why they chose Dell EMC.

Dell EMC helped RG System reduce backup times by 95%. With their previous solution it took more than 28 days to organize the first backup. With RG Systems and Dell EMC data protection, they reduced this time to 44 hours for the first backup. The daily backup took around eight hours with their previous solution and with Dell EMC, it only takes 25 minutes to organize the daily backup.

Caldera noted, “One of the main advantages to using Dell EMC Data Protection Software with Data Domain hardware is that it provides our customers with a unified interface and one unique solution, along with superior deduplication rates from a powerful solution.”

ACP

ACP is one of the leading IT providers in Germany and Austria, serving companies, authorities and organizations of all sizes. In their experience, IT has changed massively, and organizations are dealing with a trend toward IT transformation and digitization.

The massive growth in data over recent years has been a major concern for ACP and their customers. With increasing data growth, the demands on security and on data protection measures are increasing. As a longtime partner of Dell EMC, ACP has been dealing with enterprise solutions in the storage environment for many years. This includes the data protection solutions, including numerous Data Domain installations and the Data Protection Software portfolio.

Dirk Witje, an ACP board member in Germany, shared, “We now have many customers that we have equipped with a data protection solution from Dell EMC. At the beginning of this year, we equipped one of our larger customers – a pharmaceutical company with 40 locations and 7,000 employees internationally – with the Integrated Data Protection Appliance.”

The Dell EMC Integrated Data Protection Appliance (IDPA) is an easy-to-install converged solution that is cloud-ready and offers complete backup, replication, recovery, deduplication, instant access and restore, all in a single appliance.

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Ansible Automates and Now Let’s Automate Ansible

There is enough buzz in every industry to safely conclude that automation is not only the future but is the present that’s defining the future.

Networks are no different. As one of the most complex and intricate pieces of the infrastructure puzzle, networks benefit from automation enormously. Ansible is a pioneer in network automation – it’s a simple yet extremely powerful automation engine.

Ansible is primarily a configuration management tool that pushes configuration over SSH using playbooks. Playbooks are a collection of YAML files that contains your configuration information. What is YAML? YAML is a data model, that presents data in Key-value pairs. The set of hosts that you execute these playbooks are defined in an inventory file. Modules, roles and Plugins are also part of the playbook, that does the wizardry of converting your data model into actual configurations. Let’s take a pause and BREATHE!

Not simple – but still the most powerful automation tool. The benefits of Ansible always outweigh the effort needed to climb that steep curve.

Here at Dell EMC Networking, we took it up a notch. We climb that steep strenuous curve for you.

Fabric Design Center (FDC) from Dell EMC lets you design your networks at scale and generates Ansible playbooks for the entire fabric. You can auto-generate Ansible playbooks in few clicks – you read that right, Auto-Generate Ansible Playbooks. It’s like self-driving cars but for Ansible playbooks. Like self-driving cars, you can either choose to drive it from source to destination or click few buttons to auto-pilot your ride. You can either design your network, create excel sheets, draw an automation plan, create all your playbook using 20 different modules and roles or you can click to design a fabric and download your playbooks. Now that’s simple – legitimately simple.

Fabric Design Center automates the entire playbook development process for your network fabric. We generate playbooks based on our best practices and it’s thoroughly tested. Fabric Design Center houses more than 35 network switches ranging from 10G, 25G, 100G switches that users can choose from to create a fabric. All playbooks can be downloaded as a ZIP file with an extensive readme to enable customization of playbooks according to your automation needs.

Advance your automation goals with Dell EMC Networking. Design and automate your fabric playbooks in under a minute- All your Fabrics Layer 2 or Layer 3 or BGP-EVPN still under a minute.

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How Partners can Help Promote the Importance of Security for Mid-Market Businesses

Security is one of today’s biggest IT issues – for organizations of all sizes, across all sectors.

Mid-market businesses have many of the same security concerns as larger enterprises – but they don’t always have the same budgets or staff resources. So how do they secure their organizations while also transforming their businesses? And how do they ensure their IT solutions will continue to meet evolving user demands?

The answer lies in our powerful new mid-market proposition – it’s specifically designed to meet these needs… And it can also help you grow your business as a Dell Technologies partner.

Build your own business while helping customers to protect theirs

In our first end-to-end partner campaign solution for mid-market businesses, we’ve brought together a ready-made portfolio of Intel®-powered devices and data center solutions. These not only help organizations to transform their businesses but also provide complete protection, with industry-leading answers to security concerns.

With our modular, Intel-based portfolio, solutions can be designed to suit businesses at every size and stage, and on every budget.

Explore our sales and marketing campaign assets and you’ll realize that our powerful and comprehensive mid-market proposition will help you to:

◉ Grow your business: Generate leads and gain new customers with our fully packaged, trusted, and secure end-to-end solutions, which h
ave been carefully selected to meet your customers’ IT needs.

◉ Be the end-to-end solutions provider: Broaden deals beyond the sale of any one device, infrastructure, or data element, adding value with bespoke design and consultancy.

Become the go-to technology partner for powerful security

As a Dell Technologies partner, you’re ideally positioned to deliver the trusted – and affordable – solutions that medium-sized businesses ask for.

Mid-market organizations face a myriad of threats to their business assets, corporate, and customer data – through physical theft and loss, Denial-of-Service (DoS/DDoS), phishing/pharming, ransomware, malware, data attacks, SQL injection, and more.

With attacks becoming more sophisticated, frequent, and widespread, these organizations increasingly require enterprise-grade protection – but without the added complexity and cost of larger-business solutions. Now is the perfect time to leverage our new Mid-Market campaign to show how you can help enable your customers’ security transformation.

Our end-to-end solutions help ensure ease of implementation and integration, because our pioneering products are explicitly designed to work together. It means you can offer integrated solutions from a single vendor, for additional peace of mind for your customers.

Trusted devices, trusted infrastructure, trusted data

Bear in mind that each mid-market business has its own challenges and understanding each individual customer’s specific IT landscape is critical. Each customer will require a tailored, all-encompassing, end-to-end solution that addresses and meets their evolving IT and user demands.

You can then introduce them to the concept of complete protection for their IT environment with the unseen power of Dell Technologies – and deliver a solution that spans trusted devices, trusted infrastructure, trusted data:

◉ Dependably secure

◉ Easy to install and maintain

◉ Flexible and scalable

◉ All available from a single vendor

◉ Powerful and comprehensive

Get started with our Mid-Market campaign

The best way to start unlocking this potential opportunity is to show prospects how you can help them more easily and efficiently manage the security and data integrity issues that most organizations are grappling with today. This is a common and pressing concern for the majority of medium-sized businesses.

You’re then sure to discover plenty of additional ways in which you can upsell and cross-sell – so you can demonstrate your knowledge and expertise by adding value across the entire IT ecosystem.

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Many Paths, Same Direction – Cloud-Native Adoption With Hyperconverged Infrastructure

Innovation drives amazing changes in society, from self-driving cars to medicine that extends our lives. Innovation doesn’t happen in a bubble, however. It relies on human ingenuity, the right processes in place to remove obstacles, and technology which itself is a result of innovation. Businesses are looking for ways to drive innovation and beat out their competition. Which means going digital and adopting cloud-native applications and agility. In fact, based on our own research, in the next 24 months business adoption of cloud-native will jump to 67%, from 47% today.

If adoption were so easy everyone would do it tomorrow, right? Well, there is a case for learning to walk before running with a staged migration, keeping legacy infrastructure and apps running alongside cloud-native apps. DevOps teams often cite the difficulties in managing the compute, networking, and storage resources of Kubernetes container orchestration in production, not to mention management of infrastructure, workload portability and securing the data wherever it resides. Yet, an overly cautious approach to cloud native might be too slow, and drive developers to find their own K8s dialtone to maintain the project velocity that they require; in this case, the effort to maintain stability creates a shadow IT problem that can lead to trouble later with cost or compliance issues.

The good news is there are many platforms and tools on the market to choose from that support cloud native operations. And more good news – Dell EMC hyperconverged infrastructure supports many of these platforms, with automated lifecycle management, consolidation of compute, storage and virtualization, and easy scalability. Dell EMC has engineered tested and validated HCI for Kubernetes solutions including VMware Cloud Foundation on VxRail, the foundation for the Dell Technologies Cloud Platform, which delivers a simple and direct path to the hybrid cloud with one, complete, automated platform. Automated PKS workload deployment and infrastructure supporting both legacy and cloud-native apps make VCF on VxRail truly transformational to a business. Additionally, businesses can choose from other HCI solutions supporting Pivotal Cloud Foundry with Pivotal Ready Architecture, for Azure Stack Hub with AKS, and Google Anthos on VxFlex.

In addition, an expansive Dell Technologies portfolio provides best-in-class external storage, data protection solutions through PowerProtect for Kubernetes, and Consulting Services to help you at every step in the cloud-native adoption process.

And, for a true cloud experience within your modern data center, we offer Dell Tech on Demand delivering a wide range of flexible payment solutions and value-added services combined with integrated full-stack solutions to manage costs while not limiting your ability to meet changing resource demands of your app development teams.

Come visit us at KubeCon + CloudNativeCon in San Diego to learn how Dell Technologies can help you as a trusted partner and adviser. We remove the complexities associated with infrastructure resource management and help you focus on the high-value initiatives that matter. Together, we can Make IT Real.

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Study Plan for Dell EMC Advanced Analytics Specialist (E20-065) Certification Exam

The Dell EMC Data Scientist Associate (EMCDSA) is a foundational certification that exposes to the basics of big data and data analytics. Topics for this certification include an introduction to data analytics, characteristics of big data, and the role of data scientists. It also included a variety of big data theories and techniques, including linear regression, time-series analysis, and decision trees.

It looks so much easy to pass the exam, but the fact is, it is the most difficult exam to go through. It requires your dedication, hard work, and the most accurate preparation material for getting good ranks in the Dell EMC E20-065 Exam.

Dell EMC Certification prepares the student for the Specialist - Data Scientist, Advanced Analytics (DECS-DS) Certification Exam, and track.

Some Tips for Preparing and Passing the E20-065 Exam:

1. Set a study Goal

The first of the preparations should be to set a goal for the study. Search the topics, search the preparation material that gives a detailed analysis of the topics. Set your aim to study from this preparation material to pass this exam quite comfortably.

2. Identify your weak areas of study

The following step should be to identify the weak areas of study. But how to find this weakness? For this, attempt the E20-065 practice test. After practicing the E20-065 practice test, you can instantly determine your weak areas of study. Highlight those areas and increase the hard work on them.

3. Make a specific time to study

As said earlier E20-065 exam is not an easy exam to go through; it needs a lot of hard work and time for preparation. Set aside daily a persistent time for the study of the EMC E20-065 exam.

4. Get relevant and latest study gear

Get the latest and most updated Dell EMC E20-065 preparation material, which gives you all the important things to go through this E20-065 exam. Because these E20-065 plays the most significant role in your progress and career.

5. Seek help from Experienced Professionals

Seeking help from experienced professionals will help you a lot, as they have the experience of the Dell EMC E20-065 Exam because they had taken this Exam. They will support in the preparation and provides you tips on how to get hands-on Advanced Analytics Specialist Exam for Data Scientists exam at first attempt. They will also help you with what is relevant to the exam and what is not.

6. Keep updated with the latest updates

You must keep yourself updated regarding the Dell EMC E20-065 Exam. Because E20-065 Exam topics keep on updating with time. So, this shows you should have in-depth knowledge of this.

7. Make as much as possible Practice Test

Dell EMC E20-065 preparation is practically incomplete without preparing for the practice test. You will able to understand your real Exam answering speed, your preparation efficiency, and persistence. They will also support you in getting familiar with the real exam scenario.

8. Executive summary

Why is there an increased demand for data scientists? Nearly every company now can collect data, and the amount of data is growing larger and larger. This has led to a higher demand for employees with specific abilities who can effectively organize and analyze this data to glean business insights.

Questionnaires for Dell EMC Certification

1. What are some of the data scientist job roles? 

• Core data scientists, researchers, and big data specialists are the top job titles in the data science field.

2. What abilities are required to be a data scientist? 

• Python, R, and SQL are the top three skills found in data science job listings, according to Glassdoor. Nine out of every 10 data science job postings on Glassdoor need knowledge of at least one of those languages.

3. Which industries have the hottest markets for data scientists?

• Demand for data scientists is expected to grow in the coming years. Some 59% of all data science and analytics job demand currently is in finance and insurance, professional services, and IT industries, according to Dell EMC.

4. What is the average salary of a data scientist?

• The national median base salary for data scientists was $130,000 as of 2019, according to LinkedIn. Glassdoor placed the national median base salary at $120,495 that month. Salaries vary greatly depending on location; the positions with the highest salaries are in San Francisco, San Jose, Seattle, and New York City.

5. What are typical interview questions for a career in data science? 

• Typical interview questions for a data science job may include walking the interviewer through a past project, describing your experience working with teams and communicating to leadership, and completing an exercise.

Benefits of Dell EMC Advanced Analytics Specialist Certification

• Data exploration and data discovery to identify and quantify the characteristic of the data. This is an interactive method to determine which variables and metrics to test in the interactive analytic model development process.

• Data enrichment is the method of creating new higher-order variables that enhance the content and context of the raw data given the problem being addressed.  Data enrichment methods cover log transformations, RFM (recency, frequency, monetary) calculations, indices, share, attributions, and scores.

• Data visualization uses tools and methods to identify patterns, trends, outliers, and correlations that might be helpful in the analytic modeling process; to identify variables and metrics that might be better predictors of business and operational performance.

• Feature engineering, the process of creating new input features for machine learning, is one of the most effective methods to develop predictive models.

Your Career with Dell EMC Proven Professional Certifications

There are many moving parts to a company's data and storage strategy, and Dell EMC's Proven Professional certifications are a great way to work your way into a great job. Dell EMC's certifications are continuously updated and revised with the state-of-the-art storage management content, future-proofing your job skills and knowledge.

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Dell Technologies On Demand – End-to-End Consumption-Based and As-a-Service Solutions for the On-Demand Economy

As I meet with business and IT leaders all over the world, I continually hear they’re looking for new ways to use technology to differentiate their business and gain an advantage. They seek powerful and secure solutions that will satisfy a diverse range of demanding business applications and critical workloads. What’s more, they need to find better ways to drive out inefficiencies and free up time, money and resources to focus on critical strategic initiatives.

Yet, many organizations tell us they’re budget-constrained and unable to shift resources away from daily maintenance to new areas of innovation. They don’t have the capital resources and expertise on hand to achieve key milestones.

The good news is that there are several consumption-based solutions available today that shift technology spending from a capital expenditure to an ongoing operating expense. And there are as-a-service options that free up human resources to focus on innovation. The not-so-good news is that many of these offerings are often limited in scope, or too rigid and restrictive, and create an inconsistent experience on many levels.

So, it’s critical to find the right set of solutions that work – without any of these obstacles.

Introducing Dell Technologies On Demand: Get more choice, flexibility, and predictability

I’m proud to announce Dell Technologies On Demand, delivering consumption-based and as-as service solutions across our entire industry-leading, end-to-end infrastructure portfolio – the broadest on the planet, bar none. Dell Technologies On Demand covers our full spectrum of offerings – including endpoint solutions for the workforce and infrastructure solutions for the data center, which extend to the cloud and out to remote edge locations. No other company can claim to do all this. And better yet, it’s all supported and available right now.

Dell Technologies On Demand delivers a wide range of consumption models that combine flexible payment solutions and value-added services with integrated full-stack solutions tailored for a vast array of popular business applications and use cases. And it’s all based on our innovative end-to-end portfolio of leading technologies, relied upon by so many organizations, all around the world.

This offers our customers freedom of choice in the way they consume technology and budget for IT spending, ultimate flexibility in how workloads are enhanced to meet exact specifications, and peace of mind in the fact that our products are trusted to deliver predictable outcomes.

Driving consistency across diverse environments and technologies

Dell Technologies On Demand builds on our strategy of driving consistent experiences across multiple operating environments and products, as demonstrated by our announcements earlier in the year on Dell Technologies Cloud and Dell Technologies Unified Workspace, each co-engineered with VMware.

With Dell Technologies On Demand, we’re creating a more cohesive economic experience, enabling our customers to apply consistent and predictable payment solutions on our full range of client and infrastructure products and services. This helps our customers simplify budget planning and better manage cash flow, especially when accounting for all IT infrastructure expenditures as a whole.

Bringing together all the essential elements to deliver at scale

Dell Technologies On Demand is ideally suited for the way on-premises infrastructure and services are consumed in today’s on-demand economy. We’re right on the cusp of a massive spike in growth. Gartner indicates that by 2022, “15% of new deployments of on-premises computing will involve pay-per-use pricing, up from less than 1% in 2019.”

Having been a leader in flexible consumption solutions for ten years, we’re ready for this growth. And we’ve brought together all the essential elements to deliver our consumption-based on-premises solutions at scale.

Flexible payment solutions

Dell Technologies On Demand features several consumption models that scale to align spending with usage and optimize financial and technological outcomes. These are available via Dell Financial Services (DFS), a global provider of innovative payment and consumption solutions, and delivered through Dell Technologies and our Global Alliances and Solution Provider partners. These OPEX-structured flexible payment solutions help organizations more predictably budget for IT spending, pay for technology as it is used, take advantage of elastic capacity, and achieve optimal total cost of ownership over the full technology lifecycle.

Value-added services

Dell Technologies On Demand offers a wide range of essential services – from support to deployment to managed services – that can be combined in various ways and paired with the right financial consumption models best suited to satisfy our customers’ unique requirements. What’s more, our outcome-oriented consultative approach means we work closely with business and IT leaders to determine the right path forward that best meets both short-term and long-range objectives. As a result, our customers obtain strategic guidance from our industry and technology specialists and gain proven insights that help them align expenses with business value.

Integrated full-stack solutions

Dell Technologies On Demand delivers optimized workforce and infrastructure solutions with all the advanced capabilities needed to excel under the demands of virtually any application or workload. Our extensive range of technology solutions cover the full infrastructure stack from bottom to top, including compute, storage, networking, and virtualization, in addition to data protection, converged and hyperconverged infrastructure, hybrid/multi-cloud and workforce offerings. This enables technology infrastructure to be optimally configured with the right consumption-based or as-a-service delivery models best suited to satisfy specific usage requirements and growth forecasts.

Leading end-to-end portfolio

And finally, Dell Technologies is recognized as a leading provider of innovative infrastructure and workforce solutions, which is why so many business and IT leaders rely on us as a single-source supplier of end-to-end IT technology solutions and expertise. Our strong leadership position across a broad range of both client and infrastructure offerings demonstrates the extent to which our state-of-the-art products and services are preferred by so many organizations of all sizes, all around the world, to power their strategic initiatives and deliver impactful results.

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Building the First Data Confidence Fabric

I recently worked with a team of Dell Technologies specialists to finish building the first-ever Data Confidence Fabric (DCF for short). Today, Dell Technologies announced that our prototype code will be contributed to the Linux Foundation to seed Project Alvarium.

I’d like to share some of the history behind the seeding of Project Alvarium and how our team at Dell Technologies came to initiate the overall effort.

For several years, the CTO of the Dell Technologies Edge and IoT business unit has been touting a vision of data monetization. However, it’s hard to monetize untrusted Edge and IoT data. As he likes to say, “It’s midnight. Do you know where your data has been?”

Enterprise storage systems have delivered trusted data to applications for a long time. We started our initial investigation wondering if these same trust principles could be applied to Edge and IoT ecosystems. Recent developments in data valuation, distributed ledgers, and data marketplaces facilitated everything coming together.

How was this architecture built at Dell Technologies?

We observed that as Edge and IoT data and applications travel toward each other, they cross multiple boundaries such as networks, trust zones, stakeholders, organizations, firewalls, and geographies. We realized that in order to make this work – no single entity can own the trust – after all, imagine if one company owned the internet. Instead, an open-framework must be created in which trust can be inserted and confidence scores calculated. This would enable applications to not only analyze data but also calculate confidence scores that reflect how credible the data is and it became evident to us that it was time to write some code.

1st Level of Trust

We started with the EdgeX Foundry chair of the Core Working Group, Trevor Conn. Trevor wrote the first-ever Data Confidence Fabric software using Go Lang, the same programming language EdgeX is written in. His Data Confidence Fabric software registered with EdgeX as a client and began processing simulated device data. The initial confidence score for this data was “0” (no trust was inserted).

Dell Technologies then hired three computer science interns from Texas A&M to deploy EdgeX and the Data Confidence Fabric software on a Dell Gateway 3000 with a Trusted Platform Module (TPM) chip. Suffice it to say, the keyboards were smoking hot and the Mountain Dew was flowing freely. The first level of trust insertion used the TPM chip to “sign” simulated data. Then we modified EdgeX to validate the signature by using the TPM’s public key.

2nd Level of Trust

EdgeX was then adjusted to support N-S-E-W authentication by using VMware’s open-source Lightwave technology. The second level of trust insertion occurred when EdgeX rejected all requests for data except for those coming from the Data Confidence Fabric software.

3rd Level of Trust

Dell Boomi software was invoked by the Data Confidence Fabric software to gather provenance and appended this metadata to the sensor reading. This third level of trust insertion gives an application increased confidence in the history of the data.

4th Level of Trust

The Data Confidence Fabric software then stored the data locally using IPFS (an immutable, open-source storage system). This fourth level of trust insertion gives an application confidence that the data/provenance has not been tampered with. It also has the additional benefit of enabling analytics to access data closer to the source.

5th Level of Trust

The Data Confidence Fabric software then registered the data into VMware’s blockchain (based on the open-source Project Concord consensus algorithm). This fifth level of trust insertion contains the pointer to the data, as well as the confidence history/score.

Creating a Trust Score

How was the score calculated? For the sake of demonstration, addition was used to try and shoot for a “Perfect 10”.

Our first Data Confidence Fabric uses a configuration file, but going forward, the industry can create a dynamic framework in which trust insertion components register themselves and are inserted on-the-fly. We believe there is not single DCF, rather each organization decides what works for them and confidence scores are generated by the open algorithms that take different factors into consideration.

This represents a sample of how a score can be created, but going forward, confidence scoring algorithms will be established through vendor-neutral collaboration in Project Alvarium.

I mentioned before that Dell Boomi software played a big role in this Data Confidence Fabric and I wanted to share some thoughts on the project from Dell Boomi’s CTO, Michael J. Morton. According to Michael, “The concept of a trust fabric will increasingly become critical in order to make reliable and non-damaging business decisions due to the ever-increasing volume and velocity of Edge data, as well as the increasing risk of tainted data going undetected. In order to securely collect the metadata that is used in producing confidence scores, the Dell Boomi integration platform-as-a service was used to demonstrate how to accomplish this necessity, as well as a technology option of the loosely-coupled Project Alvarium framework.”

In closing, I’d like to say that coding the first Data Confidence Fabric was a fulfilling experience. We strived to use open source technologies whenever and wherever possible, but we also demonstrated that all vendors can benefit from Project Alvarium in that trust fabrics can be built from a mix of open source and commercial technologies.

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Inventing Cyber Recovery… and Creating a New Category

The ‘Hack of the Century’ at Sony pictures was a wake-up call for everyone, regardless whether you are inside the cybersecurity community or not. The destructive cyberattack was a true shake-up of the system that brought along the opportunity to tackle the underlying problem head on. For me, this was the moment where preparation met opportunity and my entrepreneurial spirit, fostered by the Dell Technologies culture, kicked in.

On Monday, November 24th, 2014 a crushing cyberattack was launched on Sony Pictures. The slow-moving, multi-stage attack exposed sensitive data, erased 3,262 of the company’s 6,797 personal computers, and 837 of its 1,555 servers. Storage and backup systems were also attacked and destroyed. It is believed that the hackers were inside the network for over 6 months before the attack.

A nation-state doesn’t usually attack a private sector corporation. But the attack set the stage for the art of the possible. For some background, ransomware is available as a service complete with localization, tech support, and user forums. Nation states and criminals are collaborating, giving bad actors unprecedented access to sophisticated exploit kits. Ransomware and destructive malware are increasingly targeting the core infrastructure (e.g. the domain controller) and the backup infrastructure.

Cyber Recovery – A New Form of Disaster Recovery

Shortly after the attack our team engaged with customers to analyze the emerging threat vectors and underlying tech components of existing business continuity solutions.

It became clear that that Dell EMC’s leading portfolio and reputation were a solid foundation to develop a solution. It also became clear that the underlying technology components needed to be architected differently to protect from a different type of disaster. This urgency was corroborated by analyst firm Enterprise Strategy Group who found that 9 out of 10 organizations are either using, planning for, testing, or interested in using isolated data protection copies as a preventative measure against cyberattacks.

So how is Cyber Recovery (CR) different than traditional disaster recovery (DR)?

Cyber Recovery Software

Let’s dig in deeper into the path of bringing to life a new solution. Our team got to work on designing a dream version of a cyber recovery solution that would keep our customers safe and increase their odds of being able to recover from a destructive cyberattack. Here is what we came up with:

1. Keep an air-gapped copy removed from the network to minimize the attack surface.

2. A high degree of automation allowing a few privileged administrators to set protection & retention policies.

3. Secure mechanisms to manage the infrastructure in the dark site (aka Cyber Recovery Vault) and to provide continuous reporting to IT and security personnel.

4. Ongoing integrity checks on the protection copies to flag when copies are corrupted or not recoverable.

The incubation phase of the solution was spent settling on an architecture and creating automation scripts to synchronize and protect copies in a dark site (aka Cyber Recovery Vault).

We spent over a year partnering closely with customers to refine the architecture and the workflow of the new Cyber Recovery solution. Along the way, we also needed to solve important challenges around secure management access, secure reporting and anomaly detection on protection copies.

The team’s big moment came in October 2018 when we were able to offer our customers the first fully productized software version, PowerProtect Cyber Recovery 18.1. The software addresses the four key requirements above including a game changing innovation: the ability to analyze protection copies without data movement or re-hydration. This is made possible by an integration between PowerProtect Cyber Recovery and CyberSense (Index Engines).

Since then, we’ve released four versions of the software, each delivering important innovations to keep our customers’ data working for them, even in the case of a cyberattack.

A logical illustration of the Cyber Recovery solution is shown here:

Innovation at Dell Technologies

All of this is only possible with the right culture and an infrastructure to reward innovation. In looking back on how we were able to create this new solution, let me highlight the following three ingredients to success.

Innovation – Dell Technologies fosters innovation in several ways but noteworthy is the ease at which innovators can file patents to protect great ideas. We filed multiple patents related to Cyber Recovery and inventions are showcased driving profound sense of making a meaningful contribution to the future of a given market segment. Cyber Recovery also provided fertile ground for incubating a different approach to software development and then standardize it across other data protection areas.

Winning Together – Creating markets is difficult and brings a high degree of ambiguity. We were close to failing several times. Coming together as ONE team across product owner, scrum master, and developers vs. the often typical ‘us vs. them’ approach allowed us to accelerate development, reduce waste, and remove impediments quicker. The broader team is equally critical. Relentless pursuit of a winning message from marketing and constant feedback from the field specialists opened a path to success. Dell Technologies’ Cyber Solutions Group in Beer Sheva, Israel ensured that our team is always at the cutting edge of cybersecurity making us more relevant in the security community.

Customers and the Art of Active Listening – Winning the very first customer if difficult in and of itself. Keeping a customer can be even harder. Our partnership with Dell Consulting allowed us to understand the customer pain points as well as important corner cases. ‘Game On’ was the first customer to benefit from  our Cyber Recovery solution. Enabled by our agile development approach we could quickly prioritize important areas such as simplifying the installation process and enhancing automation to improve the user experience.

What’s Next and Food for Thought

The area of analytics was briefly covered but opened an entire new dimension worth exploring. Customers tuck away their business continuity copies in the hope to use them for a recovery. But how can they be confident that this data copy is not corrupt? How does their CIO know that the data can be fully recovered after an attack? Sure, a periodic recovery drill is a common approach, but perhaps we can have more automation and mechanisms to ensure that every copy has integrity? What do you think?

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Know Your Role: Getting It Right in the Cloud

It’s hard to remember now, but attitudes to the public cloud have changed massively in a short period of time. When public cloud services first become available around 2006, most organizations were understandably skeptical. The idea of storing data in a remote location made them uncomfortable. They worried about reliability, security, and the loss of direct control over their applications and data.

More than a decade later, customers have come to embrace public cloud. It has moved from a bleeding-edge technology to a fundamental component of nearly every large organization’s IT strategy. These days, organizations are, if anything, too ready to adopt the cloud without careful planning. They don’t always realize that, when it comes to public cloud deployments, the devil is in the details. It is easy to underestimate the amount of time and effort that is still required to optimize and manage their environment.

Start by understanding your responsibilities

When it comes to cloud roles and responsibilities are often not clear to new cloud users. Many customers have a fundamental misunderstanding of who owns what in the public cloud. They either haven’t taken time to understand their responsibilities in detail, or they assume that their cloud provider will handle them. This is incredibly common and often leads to serious complications. This gap in understanding and knowledge is the hidden reason why many cloud deployments fail.

Every public cloud provider offers a “shared responsibility model,” a breakdown of what customers must cover and what is provided by their own services. In my conversations with firms that are already in the public cloud, I’ve often found many are unaware of these shared responsibility models. And even more don’t take the time to understand them fully and their implications.

These models vary a bit from provider to provider, but usually look something like the graphic below.

Sample Shared Responsibility Model

While the major public cloud providers offer advanced and proven infrastructure, the customer carries the burden of configuring and incorporating their solutions to fit their own environment. Often, cloud services require customers to take on significant management activities. Sometimes this flies in the face of expectations with what organizations would expect when buying “as a Service.”

This can get complicated fast, particularly for less technical customers or those lacking a strong overall plan. After all, very few companies go to the cloud with a clear, centralized strategy owned by a single entity. Most organizations have many points of adoption, with individual business units or even small teams adopting cloud-based infrastructure and services, often in very different ways and for very different purposes.

Adding greatly to the confusion is the reality that 93% of customers1 are deployed to multiple clouds. This means they must understand, and act on, multiple shared responsibility models, as well as support divergent operational requirements and control layers.

When you consider these factors, it makes sense that many customers have big gaps in their execution and management approaches caused directly by a failure to understand their responsibilities. Let’s examine the most important and common areas where organizations get into trouble.

Infrastructure

When you deploy your applications on any IaaS offering, you are paying for bare-bones compute, storage, and network access. The way that these resources are configured is your responsibility. So, you carry the burden of architecting a network topology that accounts for routine security challenges such as performing operating system updates and setting up your firewall.

The key problem here is misconfiguration. If you don’t get your firewall set correctly your data may be wide open to the internet. If you don’t structure your cloud services properly, you may introduce business risk from potential downtime or slowdowns. Many customers make simple and avoidable setup errors, such as not running across multiple availability zones, or failing to tap into the structure of the cloud to provide resiliency. Once deployed, they may not be monitoring the performance of their workloads in the cloud, assuming that the cloud provider would signal them if any issues arise.

The bottom line: while cloud extends your infrastructure, it also extends the breadth and range of your configuration and management responsibilities. Getting those right can make a huge difference to lowering your business risk and increasing your efficiency.

Security and Encryption

When a single incident can create permanent harm to your customers or your reputation, you cannot afford to get your security wrong. The potential costs of a breach or failure include direct expenses from downtime and long-term penalties from regulatory punishments and diminished customer trust. Yet enterprises often have glaring blind spots when it comes to their security profile across clouds.

One common issue is encryption. When configured correctly, it should apply to data across all its states – at rest, in use, and in transit. Most customers know to encrypt their data when it is static, on the client side. But surprisingly often, they will allow open data to move across their network and hit their servers. This is usually because they expected that the cloud provider would secure it, misreading their responsibilities and introducing massive business risk.

Another security challenge that is often overlooked is threat detection and response. Many organizations think their cloud provider “owns” this, but it actually falls to the customer. This means taking care of your own network monitoring, tracking threats and analyzing logs. It is up to you to scan proactively for vulnerabilities, or precursor activities like port scanning or brute force attacks, to stop incidents before they happen.

Application Services

To make your business and people effective, you first need to provide your users with applications that work. Setting up your applications services correctly is essential to enable your stakeholders to work reliably and at scale. In the cloud, this burden falls mostly on customers.

You must determine your own identity and access management profile. It is up to you to find the delicate balance between being too open, introducing risk, and too restrictive, sapping productivity and efficiency.

You are also responsible for designing your platform to withstand intense, challenging service levels. Creating a resilient platform that can scale is not always easy. This is a pervasive and expensive problem; according to a recent analysis by Dell EMC and VansonBourne, 41% of enterprises have suffered a downtime event in the last 12 months.

Data

One of the most important shifts that companies can make is to go from a cloud-first to a data-first mentality. When your cloud dictates what you can do with your data, you are limiting your data capital. Therefore, it is critical to understand what cloud providers do and do not provide in terms of data management and protection.

The inability to move data quickly to its most suitable cloud environment is one of the most common challenges I hear from customers. As business requirements, SLAs, IT budgets, and other factors change, customers need the ability to move data — both within a single provider’s infrastructure and across platforms — with minimal friction. Do not expect to inherit easy tools from your cloud provider to do this as its quite a complex process spanning multiple clouds, and few enable it.

Another major customer priority should be in the area of data recovery. Cloud storage services come with some level of redundancy, which provides durability for your data in the event of a systems failure. Do not, however, durability with availability. According to the same VansonBourne study, 63% of organizations doubt their ability to recover quickly from a downtime event.

Unless you take the time to implement a backup and recovery strategy that is aligned with your SLAs, you will likely be waiting to access critical data if cloud infrastructure goes down. To guard against ransomware threats and possible data corruption, you need backups that are both high-quality and readily available.

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