The Evolving Cybersecurity Threat Landscape

I recently participated on a panel during the Transformation Tune-In virtual event on The Evolving Cyber Threat Landscape, hosted by Dell Technologies and Intel.

Bobby Ford, CISO at Unilever, began by discussing risks emerging from the increase in working from home, “While most of the technology was already in place to allow people to work safely from home – what many organisations didn’t have was line of sight to the distractions that would come with home working. The biggest threat is the ability to remain focused. We ramped up our education and awareness program to make sure everyone was mindful of trying to keep that office-like awareness while working from home.”

Richard Curran, Global Security Officer at Intel, agreed, adding that cybercriminals have moved to exploit this vulnerability and the global focus on the pandemic. “What we have seen from intelligence across the market is that the volume of threats remains constant, but criminals have focused in on an opportunity around COVID-19. From February to May there were 67,000 bogus COVID sites established; made to take advantage of opportunities around phishing and so forth. Also, from speaking to governments in the last few months, there has been a fundamental change in investment from criminals from disruption to espionage. The ability to extract IP from companies. Business leaders need to remain very much aware of the seriousness of the potential impact of threats. Look at your overall base – your IP and your business continuity – and ensure you’re cognizant of what is needed to remain operational to continue to serve your customers every day.”

From security to resilience

As the conversation shifted to strategies for combating emerging threats, Michael Imeson, a Contributing Editor at FT Specialist said:“Businesses have to take a more holistic approach than they have in the past…you have to start moving away from just thinking about cybersecurity and think more about cyber-resilience. How do you respond, recover and learn from that experience?”

Yaniv Harel, GM Cyber Solutions Group at Dell Technologies, agreed that, as companies look to adopt new technologies to gain business advantage, they must take a new cyber-resilience mindset: “Companies must balance technology with the right methodologies, talent and personnel. We are in continuous discussions with CISOs concerned about their strategies to adopt multi-cloud, consolidate their data center, reduce the number of systems that they have, to recover from cyberattacks; and this is before I mention containers, AI, blockchain and so on. We believe in what we call ‘intrinsic security’ – how security is built from the inside, from the base of the organisation and its technology infrastructure. This is how you balance the demands from all of these different priorities.”

Bobby Ford, Unilever, offered advice to security leaders struggling to address many complex technology priorities while ensuring cyber-resilience: “You cannot do everything. You have to have a conversation with the business stakeholders and establish what are you in business to do and how does your organization make money? Once you really understand that, that’s when you start to build your security strategy.”

Product-based mindset

From my perspective, companies must not only think about making security intrinsic to technology infrastructure, but also making security professionals intrinsic to future product development – where previously they have often been left out of the process until the end. One of the trends we’re seeing is the idea of moving from project-based to product-based organizations. Instead of having a network-storage-security, silo-based model, people are breaking down those silos and creating product teams. And instead of security being the “project prevention team,” they’re being incorporated into the product design from the beginning. This means they can think about where that work is going to run and where that data is going to live and wrap security around it.

It has never been more important for organizations to be supported by their technology partners. Richard Curran, Intel, agreed, “We want [organizations] to reach out to their technology partners. We want to understand how we can help them become more secure, and to ensure that the impact to business is mitigated as much as it possibly can be.”

Source: dellemc.com

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New Expanded HCI Options Deliver Flexibility and Choice

Dell EMC Solutions for Microsoft Azure Stack family

Microsoft’s partner conference – Microsoft Inspire – is taking place this week. While it will look a little different this year, we are looking forward to virtually networking and discussing what’s coming in the year ahead. This year, Dell Technologies is announcing several new expanded platform options for the Microsoft Azure Stack portfolio that further simplify and automate management as well as provide flexibility and choice.

For those of you not familiar, Dell Technologies offers two comprehensive Azure Stack solutions: Dell EMC Solutions for Azure Stack HCI and Dell EMC Integrated Systems for Azure Stack Hub. While both of these solutions fall under the Azure Stack portfolio, customers deploy them in very different scenarios. Azure Stack HCI is ideal for businesses looking to refresh, modernize and consolidate their traditional on-premises virtualization platforms, while Azure Stack Hub is ideal for businesses wanting to run Azure on-premises due to regulatory compliance, for disconnected or edge use cases, or to address data sovereignty concerns. Dell Technologies makes ordering, deploying and supporting easy by fully certifying, testing and validating all the components plus providing single source solution level support.

First, what’s new with Dell EMC Solutions for Azure Stack HCI

Refreshed AX nodes with enhanced lifecycle management

Since its early preview, Dell Technologies have added value and driven innovation into Azure Stack HCI. To continue down that differentiated path, today we are announcing the refresh of the Storage Spaces Direct Ready Nodes (S2D RN) to AX nodes as the foundation for Dell EMC’s Azure Stack HCI solution. These new nodes still contain all the goodness from leveraging the industry leading PowerEdge servers as well as Hyper-V, S2D and SDN features but now enable – for the first time – clusters to be seamlessly updated to the Azure Stack HCI solutions catalog using the native OpenManage Integration with Windows Admin Center with zero impact to running workloads. The AX nodes will be available in three flavors – AX-640, AX-740xd and AX-6515 – to meet the needs of various use cases and locations.

Additional choice and flexibility with AMD

We are also announcing, for the first time, a new Dell EMC solution based on AMD EPYC processors for Azure Stack HCI as part of the PowerEdge R6515 platform. These new all-flash AMD 1U single-socket platforms offer dual socket performance making them ideal for general purpose virtualized workloads, VDI and databases. They are available for order now as model number AX-6515 for Azure Stack HCI.

Not to be missed!

As Microsoft Inspire happens this week, look out for the exciting news for what is coming next with Azure Stack HCI and how Dell Technologies will be participating. For those of you attending, our resident Microsoft SME, Michael Wells, will be participating in two Ask the Experts sessions around Azure Stack HCI. The first, Ask the Experts: Intel, Microsoft and OEM Partners Share How to Grow your Business with Hybrid Cloud, hosted by Intel takes place Thursday, July 22nd from 1:15 pm – 1:45 pm ET. The second, Ask the Experts: Discover HCI, hosted by Microsoft, takes place Thursday, July 23rd from 6:45am – 7:15am.

Now on to Dell EMC Integrated Solutions for Azure Stack Hub

GPUs now available to order

Earlier this year we announced, in conjunction with Microsoft, a private preview for GPU-accelerated ML scenarios using NVIDIA GPU’s (V100) and for remote visualization scenarios using AMD GPU’s (Mi25). These new GPU hardware configurations are now available from Dell Technologies with Microsoft software support coming later this summer. In addition to providing customers with increased performance density and workload flexibility, they come fully loaded with automated LCM capabilities and exceptional support.

Extend Azure storage by expanding your on-premises data capacity

Azure Stack Hub is powerful because it enables you to replicate your Azure services on-premises in a consistent manner for a true hybrid cloud experience. However, the amount of data you can extend from Azure has been limited by your Azure Hub configuration. Until now. Now, you can expand the on-premises data storage capacity of Azure Stack Hub by using integration with Dell EMC PowerScale. Dell EMC PowerScale is an optimal storage extension for Azure Stack Hub because it provides a powerful yet simple scale-out storage architecture for massive amounts of unstructured data while dramatically reducing cost and complexity.

Source: dellemc.com

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Driving Recovery and Success in the Automotive Sector

Executives from the automotive sector recently shared their views on how recent events have reshaped the industry and how emerging technologies will offer companies future competitive advantage.

We have seen two years of digital acceleration in two months in the automotive industry. Everything is changing: from the environmental impact, to warranty maintenance, to how we service our customers, to logistics, to how we consider offices and remote working – all of this has accelerated digital strategy.

Recently, I was pleased to join a panel of industry leaders at the Transformation Tune-In virtual event – hosted by Dell Technologies and Nvidia — to discuss this.

Gary Clark, COO Automotive Cloud at Volkswagen, started the discussion by saying that the positive environmental impact of reduced global travel during the pandemic had given a new impetus to the move towards cleaner vehicles. Dubravko Hlede, CIO and IT Manager at Rimac Automobili, discussed the immediate impact on the Croatia-based manufacturer of electric vehicles: “We managed to completely shift our workforce to remote working in a matter of days. Right now, we are in risk mitigation, adapting to change, and the new normal is remote work.”

A new era of connected mobility

As conversation turned to connected vehicles and the emerging technologies creating new opportunities, and challenges, in the sector, Said Tabet, Senior Technologist at Dell Technologies commented: “There are exponential amounts of data that will be created, at the edge particularly. Connected vehicles have end-points at the edge and, behind this, systems are not idle, the data will flow across all of these elements in dynamic and changing ways. We’re really seeing new methodologies and new ways to accelerate adoption through software-defined, cloud-native, edge, AI, simulation, digital twins – all of these are new and now taking center stage.”

Teodoro Lio, MD and Automotive and Mobility Lead in Europe for Accenture, agreed, adding: “The fundamental change over the past ten years is that technology moved from being something in the back-office to being front and center of a business model for automotive and mobility providers, and to become a board-level discussion.”

Why? Technology is critical in three areas:

1. Software in particular is now a key element of the car as a product.

2. The product to service transformation, as we move from a relatively simple business model of selling cars into a mobility world of services, from ownership, to subscription, to rental.

3. Technology is key to engaging with your customers – the relationship between the brand and the consumer is increasingly driven via online channel. Data goes across all three of these areas and is going to break the silos.

Data sharing imperative

Hank Skorny, President of Connected Services at Aptiv, said that in order for companies to truly gain the advantages promised by connected mobility technologies, a new approach to data-sharing is needed: “The ability to share data amongst numerous different providers – in a standardized format, yet with some type of identity and access control security over the top of it – is absolutely critical for this to move forward. There are so many people, even in the manufacturing step, that feed into the production of a vehicle. Without some type of sharing, you’re never going to realize the cost savings and benefits. The same is true in post-production. Once vehicles are in the hands of individuals the question is: how do you get to the point where you share data with the environmental protection people, with cities and counties, with maintenance providers? Standardizing a way for all of this data to be utilized yet protected across the industry is a critical element to success.”

The virtual roundtable ended with live Q&A and a question from the audience as to how traditional automotive OEMs can remain relevant in the face of disruptive entries into the market by technology companies. It was clear that every company on the event’s panel is involved in the development of autonomous cars. We agreed that the future is about bringing together that technology thrust and that the software-defined automotive future is clearly in front of us.

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Smart Factories Open Doors to Future Productivity

Executives from the manufacturing sector share their views on smart factories and the ability of emerging technologies – including AI, edge computing and the industrial internet of things – to create new business opportunities.

During the “Smart Factories” Transformation Tune-In virtual event, hosted by Dell Technologies and Nvidia on Tuesday, June 23rd, a panel of experts came together to discuss changes in manufacturing operations in one of the most challenging years in decades. Russell Duggan-Rees, Digital Manufacturing Chief Technologist for DXC UK kicked it off by saying: “Companies need all the help they can get at this time of increased supply chain challenges and new guidelines around employee safety. Those that are already on the smart factory journey have a significant advantage.”

Stuart Moss, Global IT Innovation Strategist at Rolls-Royce, agreed, “We’ve had elements of smart factory technology for a long time. With recent events, it has been paramount to keep things going, so remote access to keep shop floors active and monitor what is going on has proved invaluable. Despite the downturn, Rolls-Royce has kept manufacturing throughout the process and smart factory technologies allow that. We wouldn’t be able to do it without them.”

Smart manufacturing motivations

Taking the conversation beyond business resilience, Jay Judkowitz, VP Product of Otto Motors – which develops autonomous mobile robots to augment factory processes and free workforces to focus on innovation – said that such technologies can have a transformational effect on productivity and competitiveness.

For Markus Junginger, Partner and Head of Engineering Performance and Strategy at MHP Porsche, changing customer demands are another big motivation for embracing smart factory capabilities: “The automotive industry would love to continue to produce black cars in just one configuration, but mass customization requirements of customers force the incumbent automotive manufacturers to absorb much more complexity. This complexity can only be absorbed by using digitalization, from an end-to-end approach, to create data structures that feed a smart and flexible factory.”

Jerry Chen, Business Development, Machine Learning and Data Science lead at Nvidia, agreed that a data focus is key to successful smart factory operations: “There’s so much data being generated today, not just on the factory floor but in the upstream supply chain. The ability to ingest all that data and make it useful by running complex algorithms, on both streaming and archive data, is really critical.”

Smart factory infrastructure

As Field CTO for Dell Technologies Design Solutions, I regularly work with companies who develop the digital ecosystem that enables such data-handling capabilities at the edge. Dell Technologies Design Solutions offers our customers a suite of capabilities to customise our standard portfolio to address specific deployment requirements for OEM customers.  This may be just the services we offer, or it could be simple re-branding to a customers’ logo, etc., or it may be up to complex physical, mechanical or electrical customisation to address a customer’s unique requirements. These capabilities enable us address the growth in customer requirements for edge infrastructure, by taking IT solutions normally found in core datacentres and optimising them for the edge, which includes, ruggedising, reducing the physical footprint and the services to enabling our customers to deploy and support them regionally, nationally or globally.

This new and growing edge ecosystem is also evolving into two distinct subsets. The Enterprise Edge, including data centre class systems such as servers, storage, HCI and the Industrial Edge, including rugged client systems such as PC’s and Laptops. Bringing this technology right onto the factory floor enables Smart Factory architectures and accelerates AI solutions, by having systems right where the data is created, offering the lowest latency data access.  With the increase in smart systems for optimisation, quality and safety in factories, it is important to store and process data as close as possible to where it is created.

Data is now the lifeblood of smart factories. In the past, data was just a part if the factory’s IT infrastructure, but today it is now definitely part of the factory’s OT infrastructure and this new role is at the heart of Digital Transformation and is enabling successful and sustainable changes in business strategies. My colleague Todd Edmunds, Director of Industrial IoT Strategy and Solution Architecture for Dell Technologies, rounded off the discussion by noting: “If you consider smart factory technologies in total, if all of those are implemented, just think of the efficiencies and how that would change manufacturing from where we are today.”

The key is investing in the right infrastructure to make that happen, knowing that those efficiencies are going to come, and making the business case from that point of view.

Source: Dellemc.com

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Intelligent and Elastic Compute Will Drive Future Edge Innovations

Imagine a framework where devices can share computing resources and services seamlessly with other devices and leverage programmable network capabilities to optimally analyze the data and deliver business outcomes. IoT, social media and new edge deployments enabled by 5G and AI/ML (Artificial Intelligence / Machine Learning) are driving cloud applications to move to distributed edge. Future usage models will require new architectures that enable highly collaborative data processing environment with intelligent and fluid sharing of compute resources and mobility of applications across devices. We believe new architectures and rapid industry innovations are required to enable seamless collaboration and data sharing at the edge.

Current Edge Use Cases and Technology Innovations

Current edge use cases are moving data processing closer to end devices. For example, content distribution moves data from cloud to edge and leverages content delivery networks (CDN)  for caching of content closer to the end users. IoT and social media use cases lead to consuming and generating data at the edge. This data is analyzed at the end devices or an edge-cloud to deliver the right outcome. Edge-cloud may be on-prem, a co-location facility or offered “as-a-Service” by a service provider. The use cases and deployment scenarios vary across industry verticals that includes home automation, ADAS, smart factories, retail, oil and gas, agriculture and enterprises.

Growth in number of IoT devices, cost of data transport and mission critical use cases drove this shift to move processing of data from cloud to edge. The enabling technologies are summarized below.

◉ High-Performance Client Devices: Client devices have CPU cores and hardware acceleration capabilities to process data locally and execute ML inferencing models. New embedded sensors and sensor fusion is driving continuous improvement in intelligence, location and context-aware capabilities. This combined with AI/ML is creating client/edge ready and agile applications.

◉ Network Edge-Cloud: Cloud applications and data processing is moving to network-edge and edge-clouds to process data closer to end devices at lower latency. Improvements in compute performance/watt is enabling increased processing capabilities. Data management control planes have an important role in decision on where optimized data processing will occur.

◉ AI/ML and Accelerators: AI/ML frameworks and low-power hardware accelerators are emerging to enable inferencing at the edge, while compute intensive operations of training are performed at the centralized cloud. These accelerators are embedded in smart end devices and network edge platforms. The trained ML model is delivered at the edge to enable inferencing close to the point of data generation.

◉ 5G Cellular Network: The emerging 5G network enables high speed wireless network pipes and lower latency for diverse workloads, leveraging existing and new spectrum. Virtualization of RAN (vRAN) enables radio processing to shift from custom devices at cell towers to standard x86 servers with hardware accelerators for aggregated RAN processing. It enables performance scaling for large number of micro-cells, seamless mobility and billions of end-devices.

◉ Network Slicing: The growth in number of edge applications and distribution of processing between cloud and edge is driving next level of innovation in network-slicing capabilities. This enables connectivity with guaranteed SLA between an end-device and a backend application. The application may be running at Telco network edge or in the cloud.

◉ Programmable Networks: Programmable networks are emerging to enable seamless mobility of users and re-configuration of network slices. They also enable moving an application seamlessly from cloud to edge, along with the associated networking and security services.

◉ SD-WAN: Software Defined WAN has emerged to enable edge to cloud connections with multiple quality of service options. Data is distributed across these WAN connections to deliver optimal application performance.

◉ Wi-Fi and Cellular Convergence: Requirements around seamless end-user mobility is driving innovation in Wi-Fi and cellular convergence with next generation Wi-Fi and Private-LTE / CBRS (Citizen Broadband Radio Spectrum). New Dell Edge devices with embedded sensors and smart antenna/radio switching are key elements to enabling this seamless experience based on workload applications and usage models.

Dell Technologies is innovating in each of the above areas and collaborating with Telcos, Service Providers and Cloud providers to deliver critical capabilities to end users. The edge and data center infrastructures are designed to scale with smart client devices, high performance PowerEdge servers, Hyper Converged Infrastructure (HCI), and dense GPU Platforms.

Dell Technologies recently announced innovations that highlight these capabilities:

- PowerEdge XE2420 servers offer dense compute and robust security for edge deployments.
- Modular Data Center Micro 415 brings data center to far-reaching and rugged environments.
- Dell EMC iDRAC9 software brings remote access for a uniform, more secure server management experience from the edge to the core to the cloud.
- Dell EMC Streaming Data Platform stores and analyzes edge data.
- Network Slicing Capabilities enable software on client devices to configure network slices all the way from user applications to network edge or cloud for guaranteed performance.

Future Edge Usage Models and Architectural Shifts:

With the dramatic growth in data as well as edge devices, the current edge infrastructure doesn’t scale well for extreme collaboration environments in the future. The next generation usage models around real-time content sharing, gaming, AR/VR, autonomous vehicles, drones and robotics are driving highly collaborative environments where information will be stored, distributed and analyzed across the end devices and the network edge. For example, users watching a game or concert in a stadium want to share locally captured content in real-time with other users. Distributed consumers want to collaborate using online gaming combined with virtual reality (VR) capabilities. This will leverage peer-to-peer communication and embedded AR/VR capabilities in the client devices. Autonomous vehicles, drones and robotics will take the edge information processing and direct device-to-device communication to next level.

The figures below show this evolution from today’s Edge-to-Cloud architecture to future Intelligent & Elastic Compute Architecture.

Current Technology Enablers:

- Hardware acceleration

- 4G → 5G, programmable networks

- SD-WAN

- WI-FI and cellular convergence (5G, CBRS)

Future Technology Enablers:

- AI-enabled elastic compute

- Devices with system on chips modules, micro-AI

- Multi-tenant network slicing

- Decentralized/trusted compute and data fabric

- Intelligent arbitration across peer-to-peer devices

The future architecture will build on the capabilities of current high performance client devices, AI/ML, and network edge, but will also require a new range of innovations to deliver highly intelligent devices, elastic compute environment and decentralized storage infrastructure that adapts to demands of next generation workloads. There are various industry efforts underway to drive these innovations and Dell Technologies is developing solutions for AI-driven Elastic Compute.

◉ Intelligent Client Devices: Highly integrated “system-on-chip” modules are emerging that will serve as the building blocks in client and edge devices including wearables, video surveillance, industrial and automotive systems. These ASICs enable highly intelligent devices with right amount of compute, memory, storage and AI/ML capabilities. System-on-chip modules are integrating micro-AI and micro-Accelerators with software frameworks to enable ease of AI application development. These silicon, power advancements and software frameworks will enable an environment where device capabilities will be treated as virtual. Think of an “elastic model” where devices and network collaborate to deliver the experience requested by an end user, and it leverages collective capabilities across peer devices and network edge.

◉ Decentralized Data Fabric: Storage architecture will become decentralized enabling the end users and edge clouds to contribute storage capacity. The data will be distributed across locations based on geo-awareness, performance, security and regulatory policies (e.g. GDPR).

◉ Multi-tenant and Trusted Compute: Trusted computing frameworks are emerging to enable optimal placement of application execution and associated data. Processor vendors are embedding security features (e.g. Intel SGX, AMD SEV, ARM TrustZones) to create a trusted execution environment for applications in multi-tenant environments.

◉ Data Center Disaggregation and Memory Fabrics: Enterprise infrastructure is evolving to a disaggregated composable architecture where in CPU, memory, IO, accelerators are disaggregated using a memory-based fabric. This enables a software defined infrastructure where in compute nodes are dynamically composed to adapt to the workload needs. Some technology innovations in this area are GenZ and CXL for future memory fabrics, persistent memory (PMEM) for high speed storage and high-bandwidth memory (HBM) for future embedded memory.

◉ vRAN and Dynamic Network Programmability: vRAN (Virtual RAN) and programmable networks will evolve to enable guaranteed SLA on peer-to-peer connections across devices and applications.

◉ AI/ML driven Resource Optimization: The streaming telemetry from client and enterprise infrastructure will leverage distributed analytics for real time reconfiguration of infrastructure and applications.

These technology innovations will enable a grid-like elastic compute environment. The opportunity is to make intelligent use of distributed resources, network transports and mobile connectivity to enable a collaborative environment, where in device capabilities and applications are treated as virtual entities and peer-to-peer architectures enable elastic composition of services. AI/ML will serve as the centralized brain to orchestrate applications across secured and distributed resources. Companies that lead this innovation will succeed in the next generation of AI-driven elastic and decentralized edge. Dell Technologies is driving these innovations across its solution offerings, industry standardization efforts and engaging with partners to both innovate and integrate technologies in Dell platforms.

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Implementing Database-as-a-Service Offering with Microsoft SQL Server

In 1988, Microsoft changed the landscape for database implementations through the introduction of the first release of Microsoft SQL Server. This product enabled businesses of all sizes to have access to robust database features fully integrated into a Microsoft ecosystem.

MS SQL Server has evolved through the years, with the current SQL Server 2019 as the 15th official major version of the product. The modern Microsoft SQL Server rivals, and in many cases exceeds, the capabilities of even the most advanced versions of Oracle, DB2, and other mainstream enterprise class relational database engines. However, many Cloud Service Providers (CSPs) and their customers have been slow to keep up with the latest versions of Microsoft SQL Server – with over 50 percent still running SQL Server 2008 and below (a 12-year-old product!).

For CSPs working with Dell Technologies, there is a massive $3.6B opportunity to help customers with their digital transformation by migrating to the latest version and leveraging some of the next generation capabilities such as AI/ML, Kubernetes, and analytics. When combined with the latest Dell Technologies platforms, such as VxRail, PowerStore, PowerFlex or PowerOne, the benefits of scalability, performance, reduced TCO, and reliability of SQL Server implementations become even easier when implemented through a CSP.

Dell Technologies has a robust relationship with CSPs and continues to work with Microsoft and our partners to design and build solutions specifically to drive enterprise business and support the workloads which the market demands. Dell Technologies provides the optimal platform to host SQL Server 2019, and we are committed to supporting our CSP partners by providing the validated designs necessary to accelerate the adoption and implementation of the latest version of SQL Server.

Through our Database-as-a-Service Validated Design, we provide the blueprint and enablement artifacts to drive rapid implementation of a new Database-as-a-Service offering by a CSP, or an upgrade to the current version. Through this upgrade path, a CSP can address significant market drivers including:

◉ Security: SQL 2019 is much more secure than 2008 and Microsoft no longer sends out security updates leaving customers and the CSP environment vulnerable to malware unless they pay for extended support

◉ Compliance: Failure to keep SQL Server up to date can be a violation of regulatory compliance which can result in fines, penalties and leave the CSP and customer open to litigation in the event of an incident

◉ Aging Platform: Many customers are running SQL on older hardware platforms that can’t full exploit the power of SQL Server 2019

◉ Microsoft Support: Extended Security Updates support plan is very expensive (75%), making a move to SQL 2019 financially attractive

◉ Embrace Hybrid/Private Cloud: For many customers, this architecture is preferred to control costs and improve agility

◉ Lower costs through consolidation: On average, customers will see a 3:1 reduction

Globally, demand for CSP hosted SQL Server through Database-as-a-Service will continue to grow – and CSPs which implement these updated capabilities will benefit from this market opportunity.

Dell Technologies Service Provider and Telco Transformation Team is here to help co-develop and implement a Database-as-a-Service offering with our CSP partners based on this Validated Design and customized for the specific needs of each CSP. This solution includes the essential information and documentation to accelerate Go-To-Market across all customer segments include partner and customer ready materials, battlecards, technical overviews and training.

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VMware vSphere 7 Now Available on Dell EMC PowerEdge

When VMware announced Project Pacific at VMworld last fall, Kit Colbert, Chief Technology Officer of Cloud Platform at VMware, described it as “the biggest evolution of vSphere in easily the last decade.” Now that it’s here, we see that it lives up to the hype. vSphere 7 is truly a game-changer, bringing native support for Kubernetes into vSphere so organizations can run containers and virtual machines on the same platform.

Not to mention, in addition to the new Kubernetes capabilities, vSphere 7 includes many other compelling features to improve administration, resource management, and security.

vSphere 7 is offered in two editions, Standard and Enterprise Plus, while vSphere with Kubernetes is currently available through VMware Cloud Foundation with Tanzu. Whether you are just starting with virtualization, already using containers, or looking to improve utilization of your GPUs, vSphere 7 and Dell EMC PowerEdge can help your organization improve productivity and maximize its potential on your journey the hybrid cloud.

vSphere 7 on PowerEdge Servers

vSphere 7 is now available factory-installed on PowerEdge servers, which means Dell customers can benefit from purchasing their hardware and software customized together. Not only does this provide you with top-level service and support from one single vendor (Dell has over 1,800 VMware-certified support professionals, with virtually all calls handled without escalation to VMware), but running vSphere on PowerEdge means that you can take advantage of our systems management software plug-in, Open Manage Integration for VMware vCenter (OMIVV), which recently added several compelling new features with the launch of version 5.1. Additionally, customers ordering 1 and 2-socket PowerEdge servers can now get vSphere 7 Standard pre-installed and pre-activated, saving up to 40 minutes in deployment time per server.

Simplified Management Using Open Manage Integration for VMware vCenter (OMIVV)

Dell EMC OMIVV is a plug-in that helps bridge the physical and virtual gap by automating and consolidating key PowerEdge server management tasks within VMware vCenter. OMIVV reduces complexity and helps minimize errors for tasks like new ESXi deployments and firmware updates. Using a single OMIVV plug-in, you can manage up to 15 vCenters and 2,000 servers, schedule up to 15 parallel cluster aware firmware updates, and create VMware ESXi deployment jobs in just a few clicks.

The newest release of OMIVV, version 5.1, includes several key enhancements including:

◉ Firmware updates managed from vCenter – Ability to deploy BIOS and firmware updates from within vCenter, including leveraging DRS for cluster-aware updates

◉ Physical and virtual server health in one place – physical server inventory, monitoring, and alerting directly within vCenter

◉ Speed up new server deployment – Templates for easy server configuration and hypervisor deployment on a new system without PXE boot, drop it into a cluster and linking to vCenter Host Profiles

◉ vSphere 7 support with vSphere Lifecycle Manager – OMIVV 5.1 can support new vSphere 7 clusters with vSphere Lifecycle Manager, allowing a consolidated scheduler of ESXi image and drivers updates alongside a firmware baseline; OMIVV 5.1 also still administrates legacy ESXi clusters (6.0 U3 and higher) along with the new 7.0 hosts using the standard firmware update process

What’s New in vSphere 7 on PowerEdge?

There are several new or enhanced features in vSphere 7, including:

VMware Lifecycle Manager: One of the most compelling new features of vSphere 7 is VMware Lifecycle Manager (vLCM), a unified software and firmware lifecycle management scheduled within vCenter. It greatly simplifies the management process, offering one solution to configure, patch, or upgrade ESXi clusters. You can set software and firmware baselines, then easily monitor and schedule updates from within vCenter. The pre-check function allows you to preview updates and look for potential conflicts before starting the update process and reduces pre-upgrade planning time. It’s scalable to even the largest deployments and provides a consistent experience. In addition, VMware added vCenter Server profiles to provide desired state configuration management.

At the current time, most global x86 server manufacturers do not offer vLCM, so this is a key advantage to running vSphere on PowerEdge.

vSphere Lifecycle Manager, one solution to configure, patch, or upgrade ESXi Clusters

To see vLCM in action, check out this 4-minute demo from VMware using vLCM on PowerEdge:

vSphere Trust Authority – Security is always a top priority, whether you’re running in your datacenter or in a cloud. vSphere 7 introduces remote validation for sensitive workloads using vSphere Trust Authority. You can better secure infrastructure, data, and access with a comprehensive, built-in architecture and a simple, policy-driven model. In addition, vSphere 7 provides secure vCenter Server authentication using external Identity Federation.

vSphere Bitfusion – Shortly after the initial vSphere release, VMware  announced vSphere Bitfusion, which leverages accelerators such as GPUs for AI/ML workloads in VMs or containers. This vSphere feature enables users to disaggregate and attach GPU resources to any VMs or containers dynamically based on business needs. The core benefits are the ability to consolidate resources and then increase efficiency through the sharing of GPUs. Bitfusion will be available as an add-on feature to vSphere Enterprise Plus.

Mike Adams, VMware Senior Director Cloud Platform Business Unit, does a great job explaining vSphere and Bitfusion in this lightboard video. We also highlighted Bitfusion in a Crowd Chat event last month: Enabling Real AI with Dell; Learn how Dell Technologies is making AI Real for customers through partnerships with VMware. We are excited to add this partnership, so stay tuned for more updates on PowerEdge and vSphere Bitfusion in the months ahead.

vSphere with Kubernetes

Bridge the gap between Developers and IT

Finally, organizations no longer need to have multiple separate systems for their VMs and containers. vSphere 7 enables the DevOps model with infrastructure access for developers through Kubernetes APIs. vSphere with Kubernetes is currently available only with VMware Cloud Foundation (VCF) 4. VCF consists of two families of services, Tanzu Runtime Service, which allows developers to build applications with freedom using the upstream conformant Kubernetes distributions, and Hybrid Infrastructure Services, which allows developers to manage consistent, compliant and conformant Kubernetes clusters. Powered by innovations in vSphere 7 with Kubernetes, these services enable a self-service experience through Kubernetes APIs.

A True Game-Changer

It’s not often that something new comes along and significantly impacts the way organizations manage their operations. In fact, we can probably all recall examples of products that did NOT live up their hype (when was the last time you drove your Edsel wearing your Google Glass and drinking a New Coke?). But in this case, vSphere 7 truly does create a game changer, establishing vSphere as THE platform for modern applications and delivering Kubernetes at scale. When paired with PowerEdge servers, organizations can customize their infrastructure to improve administration, simplify their resource management, enhance security, increase GPU utilization and manage more easily manage Kubernetes clusters. With the right solutions and partners in place, you can move forward with confidence no matter what stage of the journey you are in.

Source: dellemc.com

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To the Edge and Beyond: Network Function Offload

In the first two blogs in this series we discovered what a programmable fabric is and what it looks like. Now we are ready to dive deeper into programmable fabrics and discover Network Function offload.

Telecom communication service providers need to provision Network Functions (NFs) in their infrastructure in order to run the network.  NFs like a BNG (Broadband Network Gateway) for terminating fixed access subscribers or UPF (User Plane Function) for terminating 5G wireless subscribers. These NFs have been evolving from physical boxes to virtual network functions and their disaggregation is key to being able to truly scale and grow the network.

However, the evolution of NFs to date has been fraught with performance and scaling problems as legacy BNG and UPF vendors looked to quickly virtualize their NFs without taking advantage of newer technologies and architectures. Programmable fabrics is one such technology that could potentially help scale NFs by allowing their user plane portions (the most I/O intensive portion) to be “offloaded” into the network.

Figure 1 – Network Function Offload

CUPS (Control User Plane Separation) is the terminology used to describe the separation of the control plane part of a network function (NF-c) and the user plane portion of the network function (NF-u). This separation of control and user planes allows them to be scaled independently and for the user plane to be pushed down into the programmable forwarding engine of the SmartNIC or Switch (see diagram below). This frees up the server CPU cores from doing mundane packet processing and all the performance and tuning problems that this normally brings in a DPDK environment (i.e. Hugepages, NUMA balancing, CPU pinning, etc).

Stand alone mode: where the NF-c will use the standardized DP interfaces (i.e. P4 Runtime, gNMI and gNOI) to communicate directly to the Data Plane nodes. This is useful in the early stages of a programmable fabric implementation where the coming together of the PFE pipelines into a single data plane node is premature and not practical (i.e. the early implementations are more likely to implement separate BNG, UPF and Fabric Management pipelines on separate SmartNICs and switches).

Figure 2 – Network Function Offload

Fabric Controller mode: where the NF-c will use the standardized Fabric Controller interfaces to configure and manage the NF user plane (NF-u) function in the PFE pipeline in the data plane node. While this is probably the optimal future state it will take clearly defined Fabric Controller interfaces and appropriate policy and collaboration from all NF applications.

Figure 3 – NF-c in Fabric Controller mode

NF-u Pipeline

The user plane portion of the network function (i.e. NF-u) is pushed down into the programmable forwarding engine (i.e. SmartNIC or Switch) into what we call the “pipeline.” The pipeline is basically the set of functions that get applied to each and every packet as it comes into the SmartNIC or Switch. We use a network domain specific programming language called P4 to describe this pipeline.

When NFs need to be added to a single P4 pipeline this can then complicate the pipeline and requires some coordination of access to the individual P4 tables as can be seen in the addition of the BNG functional block to the general fabric pipeline depicted below.

Figure 4 – P4 pipeline

The ONF Stratum project is used to provide the Data Plane Agent (DP-Agent) and provides standardized northbound interfaces (P4 Runtime, gNMI & gNOI) for the NF control plane (i.e. BNG-c) and integrates south bound to the Intel PAC N3000 FPGA SmartNIC.

ONF’s Stratum is also integrated into other switches, with both programmable and fixed pipelines and more will be integrated over time. This then allows the hardware integration to Stratum to be done once and then leveraged by many different NF vendors rather than each vendor needing to do a customer integration to a SmartNIC or Switch. 

Network Function offload is a very interesting use case for Telecommunication providers as it will allow them to truly scale their NFs, while freeing up server CPU cores to do other edge use case processing (IoT aggregation, Augmented Reality, Content Delivery, and so forth). Dell Technologies is committed to helping our customers build out the next generation Telco Edge using open standards where possible like our Open Programmable Service Edge architecture.

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From Response to Recovery: Achieving Clinical and Business Resiliency in Healthcare

Healthcare organizations are rising to meet new patient care and financial realities, including work-from-home capabilities and significantly expanded virtual care options.

As healthcare leaders are reopening facilities for non-urgent clinical services, they are also juggling workforce considerations ranging from employee health, to childcare, to mass transit concerns alongside changing patient expectations. At the same time, healthcare IT teams are evaluating smart options to accelerate digital transformation, supporting new clinical workflows and infrastructure needed to evolve virtual care, remote patient monitoring, and secure patient-provider communications.

Virtual care presents the opportunity for healthcare organizations to expand their reach with a larger set of patients and the ability to offer enhanced services for new business revenue streams, such as virtual specialty consults in new geographies; scaling remote engagements with home-based diagnostics and treatment for patients with chronic diseases; and expanding telehealth to post-acute care.

In speaking to healthcare leaders as they move forward, we are hearing consistent themes across their organizations as they consider upcoming IT investments:

Power On-Demand Operations and Data Protection

Every healthcare provider is focused on how to best improve efficiencies as they work to overcome severe budget pressures that came from cancelled elective surgeries, as well as unexpected labor and protective equipment costs over the last few months. From the IT side, this means continuing with the optimization of EMRs, evaluating network efficiency, and implementing intelligent/automated data storage across edge, core, and cloud environments to help reduce costs.

Health systems are also expanding virtual care, which brings new requirements for data interoperability along with data protection. With healthcare leaders further empowering patients to take a more active role in the management of their care, consumers and clinicians alike will need secure access to growing health data. To provide “secure care,” healthcare organizations need to incorporate solutions that protect people, network, endpoints, data, and recovery.

Reimagine Patient Engagement – Extend Secure, Connected Care

Two-thirds of Americans are more willing to try telehealth today than ever before. They value the flexibility to communicate with care providers at a time that is convenient for them from the comfort of their own home, while reserving in-office visits for patient care episodes that require it.

As providers evolve telehealth services, they must continue to improve interoperability across the care continuum to gain a complete picture of the patient from all sources – EMR, AI, IoT devices, direct patient input, and more – whether the patient is chronically ill or seeking wellness guidance. To enable data aggregation and seamless data access across the healthcare system, providers need the flexibility to turn traditional on-premises infrastructure into a private cloud and to operate across multi-cloud environments. A consistent infrastructure reduces infrastructure costs by 18 percent and security breaches or outages by 30 percent, according to research conducted on behalf of Dell Technologies, VMware, and Intel.

Enable In-the-Moment Innovation

A modern multi-cloud digital infrastructure will help empower clinical teams with agile platforms, secure access, and expanded data interoperability. It will also lay the foundation to deploy emerging technologies for precision diagnostics, clinical genomics, and more – which are needed to transform medical diagnostics and automate patient data analysis so clinicians can dedicate more time to decision-making and treatment.

To take full advantage of cloud offerings, IT departments must first assess their workloads and applications to determine the best cloud model for each. They must also develop a greater understanding of where data is coming from and going to, in order to achieve flexibility and deliver a seamless experience to providers and patients.

Dell Technologies offers a single, integrated strategy that allows healthcare organizations to conduct application portfolio analysis, map dependencies to develop appropriate patterns for application service level agreements and promote automation by adopting Infrastructure as Code (IaC).

Healthcare Leaders’ Next Action Plan

Healthcare leaders must make smart investments to build agility and accelerate the digital transformation needed to support new workflows, models for connected patient care, and radically enhanced business and clinical flexibility.

The progress is certainly not going to be linear. We see pressure on the healthcare system ebb and surge throughout the country. We also see rapid innovation and new opportunities that will transform care, creating a stronger, more innovative, and more resilient healthcare system for the long term.

Dell Technologies is working with customers to foster healthcare organizations’ business and clinical agility, including EMR modernization, advanced medical imaging, virtual health, and security.

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Serving OEMs Through the Channel

As someone who has spent the great majority of my career working for and with the channel, I get very excited discussing how Dell Technologies Design Solutions channel partners can add value to the unique needs of our OEM customers.

We all know that no one person – however talented – can whistle a symphony. It takes a whole orchestra to perform it. In the same way, irrespective of company size, I believe that we all need an ecosystem of partners to bring additional intelligence and skills to the table.

Solving challenges

Our channel partners serve as a great extension to our team, helping us design and deliver the best possible solution for you. While each partner brings different expertise, there is one commonality across the board – we always work with experts we trust, who can help us to solve challenges, speed time to market, and acquire new business for OEMs.

As a tier one infrastructure provider, we have, of course, deep knowledge of over 40 vertical industries coupled with massive supply chain and engineering expertise. However, our partners go even deeper in their vertical expertise, especially when it comes to integration. They can help us get into the nitty gritty to solve your customer challenges.

Differentiating your solution

This is particularly true today. We are seeing a major increase in complexity with the introduction and expansion of 5G, AI, remote working, the build-out of smart cities, and the sheer tsunami of connected, intelligent things. There are also new demands at a vertical level. The end result? The final mile – the last part of customization and solution development – has become increasingly important.

This is both a challenge and an opportunity. Research shows that the more complex that last 20 percent of the solution is, the greater the differentiation you as an OEM enjoy in the market. In that last critical phase, we can help get you to market faster and differentiate your solution from the competition.

Helping you grow

Working with our channel partners, we can blend our processes to help you maximize your total addressable market, meeting your needs on both a regional and global level. For example, we understand it can be difficult to juggle everything simultaneously, managing materials and throughput lead times alongside deployment.

As case in point, one of our OEM customers, who held just five percent of its total addressable market, was struggling to grow due to challenges with a recent acquisition. A channel partner was introduced to help consolidate processes and materials management globally. As a result, the customer became more competitive and agile, quickly doubling its business.

Getting your solution to market faster

In another example, one of our Fortune 500 customers needed help with custom software development as well as a simplified go-to-market and deployment process. Our channel partner not only created the custom software code, but also ensured it was optimized, tested and validated on our Dell Technologies platform.

Importantly, our partner also worked with us to help the customer scale globally and get to market quickly. This included creating an end customer procurement portal plus providing finished goods inventory, global logistics, global support and technical support. In fact, the customer was so impressed with the combined power of Dell Technologies Design Solutions and our channel partner, that the full solution was never put out to bid.

We’ve got you covered

Our channel partners work hand-in-hand with us to address unusual customer requests, streamline recertifications, build and test new proof of concepts, integrate third party components customize testing and manage shipping. In some cases, they carry the cost of inventory and serve as expert boots on the ground, supporting installation and deployment roll outs as well as providing special financing options.

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Extending PC Security While Easing IT Stress with VMware Carbon Black

As many of us settle into remote working routines, IT teams are settling into their new normal of servicing and securing a fleet of devices from afar. With this new way of working comes expanded attack surfaces, making it critical that organizations ensure their workers’ PCs are secure, and this starts below the operating system (OS).

Securing the lowest level of the PC stack – the BIOS – is vital to the overall security of the device, as well as your business, because a compromised BIOS can potentially provide an attacker with access to all data on the endpoint. Attackers are using new types of malware that can reinstall themselves by infiltrating the BIOS, so organizations need a more sophisticated way to not only protect their systems, but confidently verify their workers’ PCs have not been compromised below the OS. They need tools which provide this level of security visibility for every device, regardless of its location.

Dell Technologies is taking security measures a step further for our commercial PCs, which are already the most secure in the industry, by bringing Dell SafeBIOS Off-Host Verification together with VMware Carbon Black Cloud Audit and Remediation. This combination provides IT and security teams access and visibility to the BIOS health of their Dell PCs wherever employees are working.

Organizations using the VMware Carbon Black Cloud Audit and Remediation tool can now easily verify the BIOS status across their fleet of Dell devices from one, easy-to-use console. And, with Dell SafeBIOS Off-Host Verification, the integrity of the BIOS is verified in the cloud, versus on the device itself which is susceptible to local attack. Should the BIOS get corrupted or tampered with, Dell provides the ability for customers to analyze the corrupted BIOS image to understand the nature of the attack and take an appropriate response. This can all be done remotely, making it easy for organizations’ IT teams to keep their devices secure no matter where employees are located.

Dell SafeBIOS is part of the larger Dell Trusted Devices portfolio of solutions that work both below and above the OS to enable a secure foundation for customers’ workforce transformation strategies. For organizations using Dell laptops and VMware Carbon Black Cloud Audit and Remediation, their interface now automatically features the Dell SafeBIOS Off-Host Verification utility.

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The Story Behind Our New Name

What’s in a name? It’s symbolic of course but I think strong, descriptive names allow you to communicate clearly and unambiguously about who you are and what you do. On that note, organizationally, we’ve now combined two unique design groups from Dell Technologies under one umbrella, namely OEM | Embedded & Edge Solutions and Extreme Scale Infrastructure (ESI).

Uniting all of our organizational design capabilities under one team not only streamlines our customer experience, but most importantly means we can serve you, our customers, deliver more value, and make it easier to do business with us. With this combination comes a new name and identity: Dell Technologies Design Solutions. 

Full of meaning

As the global leader of this organization, let me explain why the team chose this name. For us, the word ‘design’ is rich and full of meaning. When we look at the work we do together with our teams and customers, ‘design’ is a verb full of action and purpose. The same word transforms into a noun to capture the unique solution that we deliver together, while ‘designed’ can also be applied as an adjective to better describe the aesthetics or purpose-built activity of design.

It’s also true that the word ‘design’ speaks to the passions in both my professional and personal life. Creativity, innovation, customer experience, delivery – these all intersect with my personal interests in shoes, fashion, music and the design behind beautiful architecture.

Bringing your dreams to life

As our customer, you have a unique idea – your product to bring to market, or your design to accelerate your mission. You want to come up with new and improved ways of doing things with the right technology to help differentiate and increase its potential for success. You want to come up with new and improved ways of doing things, to advance progress, to make the world a better place. You’re passionately committed to bringing that vision to life.

Our job is to elevate that vision and help make it a reality. Design then becomes the emotional connection between what we can do together, the what and the how that makes serving your end user a reality.

Making problems disappear

I know the term ‘solutions’ can sometimes be used flippantly, but for me, it remains an integral part of what we help you deliver. When I hear the word ‘solutions’, I picture pain points disappearing, challenges being addressed, and problems being solved.

However, it’s important to say that we in Design Solutions do not create solutions per se. Rather, we enable you to design interesting and vital solutions for your customers. That’s an important difference. We’re not a solutions provider, but the necessary hardware, software and services infrastructure provider, enabling you to deliver unique and innovative designs.

Our value statement

From our perspective, everything begins and ends with your idea. We co-design and we problem solve. Our shared goal is to differentiate your IP so that your end-customers will intuitively recognize it as the solution they need.

I’ve talked about what’s different but it’s also important to reference what stays the same. While we’ve changed our name, our promise to you remains. As we’re embedded in your product, we know that we influence your revenue as well as the perceptions and health of your brand and products in the marketplace. We take that position of responsibility seriously.

We’re proud to work with you to respond to unique market requirements across nine industries and 40 verticals, allowing us to jointly deliver solutions that diagnose and treat diseases, make factories more efficient, transform communication networks, and reduce energy costs.

Design Solutions

Returning to my opening question, I believe that our new name sums up the essence of who we are and what we do. Offering a boutique set of capabilities, we can deliver amazing value-add products and services through the lens of your customer solutions. After all, the best solution to any problem you face is a transformational one, designed to fit all of your needs.

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Charting an Upward Path

Dell Technologies announces new storage solutions for application developers & manufacturing engineers

At Dell Technologies, we have a passion for technology innovation and designing smart solutions that help Original Equipment Manufacturers (OEMs) excel. If you haven’t incorporated Dell Technologies storage solutions into your design recently, we suggest you take another look as much has changed with innovative new product introductions and new OEM go-to-market options. Not only can our new ground-breaking innovation reduce complexities and increase the value of your data, but they can help you chart an upward path with more ease and agility, providing you with a competitive advantage.

Pushing boundaries at the edge, the core and into the cloud

There is no doubt that the data-driven era is fundamentally changing the way we view IT. Processing data at the edge, real-time decision making, consistent cloud experience, full-stack life-cycle management, AI/ML, simplified operations, are all driving business priorities. Business demands now drive IT and OT. Around 10 percent of enterprise-generated data is created and processed outside a traditional centralized data center or cloud. By 2025, Gartner predicts this figure will reach 75 percent.

That’s why we’ve introduced several new pacesetting technologies that are faster, smaller and easier to manage with lower capacity points and entry pricing. Here are a few highlights:

◉ Introducing the OEM Ready Dell EMC PowerScale and Dell EMC PowerScale OneFS that can be de-branded or rebranded for a customized solution. Seamless scalability where you manage your data not your storage with OneFS. Any data, anywhere with PowerScale in the edge (starting at 11TBs raw), core (scaling to multi-petabytes), or cloud (OneFS for multi-cloud or for Google Cloud) for consistent manageability, flexibility, security and data protection.

◉ For data-intensive workloads at the edge, core, or cloud, Dell EMC PowerStore delivers a data-centric, intelligent and adaptable architecture. Running apps on the appliance with AppsON, faster innovation with a container- based architecture, and built-in machine learning for autonomous operations.

◉ The new ruggedized Dell EMC VxRail D Series extends leading hyperconverged infrastructure (HCI) capabilities beyond the datacenter to space-constrained, remote, and harsh environments without compromising on performance – often found at the edge in oil & gas, telco, transportation and manufacturing / industrial automation.

◉ Choose Dell EMC Unity XT hybrid arrays with de-branded (no Dell branding) or rebranded (your customized branding) hardware, software interface, documentation and packaging.

Managing from afar with insight and confidence

With social distancing and most air travel in limbo, remote installation and management have moved up the priority list for our customers. Our recent announcements make autonomous management significantly easier with automation, AI, and machine learning:

◉ Bring structure to your unstructured data with PowerScale and DataIQ which makes it easy for anyone to find and understand data – allowing you to have data at your fingertips, and for admins to archive files to lower costs over time. Supports HDFS protocol, in-place analytics, and compatibility with leading vendors including Splunk and HortonWorks.

◉ With PowerStore’s built-in machine learning engine for recommended data placements, and the container-based architecture enabling feature portability, standardization and rapid time-to-market for new capabilities, autonomous operations is now a reality.

◉ VxRail ensures you are always operating in a continuously validated state with its full-stack life cycle management. Continuously Validated States provides for extensive, automated, repeatable testing on every firmware and software upgrade and patch ensuring you can upgrade with certainty and significantly improve IT productivity (2,500-plus unique test cases per release, 25,000-plus hours test run time for each major release with over 100 dedicated staff to test and quality assurance).

In addition, our new products are all cloud-enabled for full integration and unified automated management of your data and applications between on-premises and cloud. With our professional cloud services and cloud software, we can help you create a seamless multi-cloud experience for your compute and data, providing maximum agility and performance without compromise.

Together, let’s design your solution on the strength of our technology

As your partner, we bring world-class technologies, bench strength in design, and industry leadership to the table. Innovate faster, build bolder and scale smarter by leveraging our greater than 30 years of industry expertise, dedicated resources, global reach and support.

With financing and cash flow paradigms disrupted by today’s economic challenges, we offer multiple programs and payment plans to help you continue moving your strategic initiatives forward.

As we all grapple with dramatic change and unknowns, Dell Technologies is doubling down and offering new innovative solutions to help you overcome these challenges and come out ahead. At Dell Technologies, your success is our success and we are marshaling our leadership and extensive resources to make that happen.

Source: dellemc.com

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Kubernetes and Data Protection Hits Mainstream with Container Storage Interface (CSI) 1.17

In this blog, we will discuss the growth of containers and how to protect these valuable environments. Kubernetes adoption has rapidly become a part of our daily lives as consumers — usually without our even being aware of it. Kubernetes is at the heart of most digital transformation projects, helping companies large and small to deliver an amazing customer experience.

This technology helps everything along its digital journey, whether ordering a cup of coffee to be picked up, or streaming your favorite video content. There are many examples of how Kubernetes adoption enriched our lives up until a few months ago, and now it has truly become ubiquitous.

In these last few months, many of us might be ordering that coffee, dinner, or groceries, all from our phones or tablets. This is Kubernetes in action. In this respect, Kubernetes is helping us maintain social distancing, while also making it easier for us to navigate our needs. We are all becoming a part of this new paradigm which is helping us to be safe. Enabled by technology, we  are using online freedoms in different ways, and we are even more dependent on availability and speed of access. How these constructs continue to expand and operate is a result of the flexibility that containers provide, and with robust data protection replication options, running new systems from dev/test to production, many organizations are now expanding their online capacity to deal with the volume of online demands.

To understand what lies beneath a flexible environment, let’s start with some background on its evolution. Containers allow abstractions. This gives developers the ability to build software with amazing agility. However, at some point, the environment needs to talk to the storage system, be that external or hyper-converged. In the early days of Kubernetes the environment needed to interface with each storage system differently, similar to how each cellphone manufacturer has its own charger interface; but this is proprietary and unwieldy for those with multiple storage system options.

To address this, the Kubernetes community came up with something called CSI (Container Storage Interface), an interface that enables the environment to talk to all these different storage systems in a uniform way for automating the provisioning, attaching and mounting of block and file storage. In addition, Kubernetes storage interest groups identified snapshot operations as critical functionality for many stateful workloads, as it enables tools to back up the data.

Kubernetes volume snapshot was introduced to navigate this challenge. Kubernetes 1.17 [beta] is now enabled by default and can be part of standard Kubernetes deployments. This feature is becoming widely viable across multiple distributions and, as they gradually adopt the Kubernetes 1.17 version for taking snapshots at the file-level system, this enhances a data protection solution that integrates with the CSI driver. So, this also includes the plain vanilla versions of the Kubernetes distribution, OpenShift, Diamante, Anthos, TKG, and so forth. This is great for many enterprises, which are finally able to extend their enterprise grade data protection solution to Kubernetes environments.

A number of companies are releasing applications in monthly (or even more frequent) builds as part of the DevOps transformation. To accommodate this rapid pace of change, each build check-in includes a combination of application code version, application data schema changes and associated application definition and configuration.

In this rapid pace of change, the probability of failure is high and having a good data protection solution is essential to ensure an equally fast recovery to a stable state. However, most data protection solutions focus primarily on the application data, and these lead to configuration drifts during rollbacks. It is important to protect the associated environment configuration spread across various Kubernetes objects, including ConfigMaps, Secrets, and others. In addition, it is important to have the data protection solutions be available in a self-service mode for DevOps and application owners to manage their own rollbacks and data protection policies for the Kubernetes environments. The IT systems admin would still retain the full access using a common interface that manages the entire infrastructure, including bare metal, virtualized and containerized environments, to help with broader systemic failures.

In summary, Kubernetes environments are being adopted widely across organizations as they move to a microservices, agile and DevOps culture to help with rapid transformations. Organizations recognize that by building these environments with their end users in mind they can provide a better experience. With Kubernetes 1.17 and CSI standards maturing, now is the time for enterprises to adopt them, and look for an enterprise-grade data protection solution to help with protecting these environments.

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