Today, organizations are busy managing their data and applications in a variety of cloud environments – private, public, and increasingly at the edge. They are also navigating the complexities of large remote workforces. Dell Technologies and VMware introduced the Dell Technologies Cloud Data Center as-a-Service, VMware Cloud on Dell EMC, almost two years ago to combine the benefits of security and performance of on-premises infrastructure with the speed and ease of use of public cloud. VMware Cloud on Dell EMC delivers cloud infrastructure as-a-service to datacenter and edge locations and provides consistent operations between multiple cloud environments. This is made possible by bringing together the VMware Cloud experience on the Dell EMC VxRail hyper converged platform. This solution is co-engineered by Dell Technologies and VMware, with on-going services managed by VMware.
VMware Cloud on Dell EMC has seen several significant enhancements since it first came to market. In our previous release, we announced support for advanced enterprise workloads, enhanced customer experience, and support for Dell Technologies PowerProtect portfolio. As always, we continue to listen to the feedback our customers give us, and consistently seek to bring them greater value. Therefore, I’m excited to share with you the latest capabilities our customers have been asking for. Our newest enhancements focus on enabling Kubernetes deployments, enhancing remote workforces, making it easier to achieve compliance for regulated industries, and more easily manage workload migrations. Here is a list of the newest capabilities available today:
◉ Built for Tanzu Kubernetes Grid: Streamline operations across multi-cloud infrastructure and run Kubernetes distributions that are built on the open-source Kubernetes community. Have greater Kubernetes runtime consistency, simplified operations, enterprise management, and TKG clusters are portable, so they can run on vSphere or multi-cloud environments.
◉ Empower your remote workforce: VMware Cloud on Dell EMC is now certified with VMware Horizon, and is optimized for VDI workloads to deliver enterprise class security and compliance for your remote workforce.
◉ Updated industry certifications: Take your cloud journey with confidence, knowing that the newest updates included with VMware Cloud on Dell EMC support global and vertical industries with ISO, CCPA, EU GDPR, and SOC-2 certifications.
◉ Run data intensive workloads: A new extra-large node gives organizations the power to run even larger workloads thanks to 1.5TBs of memory along with NVMe storage capability.
◉ Enhanced workload management: Greater workload segmentation allows organizations to better optimize CPU and storage resources for each workload. Customers are given greater flexibility and can create up to 8 clusters in a single rack with 3 hosts in each cluster.
◉ Easier workload migration: Moving data from one location to another can be difficult, VMware HCX allows organizations to easily move workloads via their customer portal from legacy infrastructure, or to provide continuity between applications and workloads running in two locations.
Simply put, each of these features will empower organizations to focus on innovation and growth and less on managing their cloud day to day. This latest version of VMware Cloud on Dell EMC is here to benefit your organization by improving your cloud experience and doing it with greater control and peace of mind.
If you want to find a list of the 20 best electric toothbrushes for 2020, you have plenty of options. But where do you go when you want to see a list of the top 10 data warehouse technologies?—probably not your regular social media channels. For those of you who don’t follow database benchmarking news, it’s the Transaction Processing Performance Council (TPC) that provides the most trusted source of independently audited database performance benchmarks. Two of TPC’s primary activities are creating good benchmarks and creating a process for auditing those benchmarks.
Dell Technologies recently achieved the top position on the TPC (tpc.org) leaderboard for the decision support workload benchmark (TPC-H) price/performance results for a 10,000 GB database. This benchmark tests decision support systems that are designed to examine large volumes of data, run highly complex queries, and provide answers to critical business questions. The TPC-H top-ranked system for price/performance was the Dell EMC PowerEdge R940xa server running Microsoft SQL Server 2019 Enterprise Edition with the Windows Server 2019 operating system.
The performance metric reported for TPC-H is the Composite Query-per-Hour Performance Metric (QphH@Size). Most database benchmarks for high-transaction workloads are stated in transactions per second (TPS). The queries-per-hour calculation for the decision support benchmark is the result of the queries being far more complex than most OLTP transactions. The decision support queries include a rich combination of transformation operators and selectivity constraints that generates intense activity on the database server being tested.
When it comes to choosing servers that will perform well with many concurrent decision support requests, the configuration is critically important. In our Dell labs, we worked on a configuration that provided a balance between price and performance. The PowerEdge R940xa server used for this benchmark was configured with four Intel Xeon Platinum 8280L processors supplying 112 cores (224 logical cores with Intel Hyper-Threading) plus 6 TB of memory. Storage for the benchmark system was supplied by ten 1.6 TB Mix Use SAS SSDs capable of 12 Gbps plus four 6.4 TB Mixed Use Express Flash NVMe small form factor 2.5-inch drives. The Dell engineers achieved 1,420,550.7 TPC-H Composite Query-per-Hour (QphH@10,000 GB) with price/performance of $0.67 USD/QphH@10,000 GB. The TPC Benchmark H Full Disclosure Report is available on the TPC website.
Benchmarks that rank database systems using real-world workloads typical of decision support environments provide insights to IT professionals by providing a comparison of both price and performance. Perhaps the most important advantage of considering benchmarks when evaluating technology options is the value added by having an independent analysis of test results. The independent analysis means the benchmark results have integrity and show where a system stands compared with other systems. Anyone can then look at the system configuration in the TPC Full Disclosure Report to understand how the system was configured to achieve a top price/performance result. For IT professionals, the report results mean that PowerEdge R940ax servers are among the top price/performance systems for accelerating decision support and similar systems for a 10 TB SQL Server 2019 database.
SQL Server, along with other RDBMS products from leading vendors, is quite efficient at using memory and solid-state-drive technology. More memory and faster disk drives can usually improve database performance for many types of workloads. With its multiple configuration options, the PowerEdge R940xa can accelerate many databases workloads, such as decision support, online transaction processing, data warehouses, and more.
When it comes to training and inference workloads for machine learning models, performance is king. Faster system performance equates to faster time to results. But how do you objectively measure system ML training and inference performance? In a word, look to MLPerf.
MLPerf is a machine learning benchmark suite from the open source community that sets a new industry standard for benchmarking the performance of ML hardware, software and services. Launched in 2018 to standardize ML benchmarks, MLPerf includes suites for benchmarking both training and inference performance. The training benchmark suite measures how fast systems can train models to a target quality metric. Each training benchmark measures the time required to train a model on the specified dataset to achieve the specified quality target. Details of the datasets, benchmark quality targets and implementation models are displayed in the table below.
At Dell Technologies, we use MLPerf to measure the performance of our servers and storage systems running machine learning and deep learning workloads, particularly those in image classification, object detection, translation, natural language processing (NLP) and reinforcement learning. Like many others in the industry, we leverage how MLPerf provides an objective way to measure and compare the performance of systems, including processors and accelerators.
To that end, we recently submitted benchmarks for the third version of the MLPerf training benchmark (v0.7), which attracted submissions from several new hardware vendors, resulting in results on a diverse set of hardware platforms. We participated in the closed division, which is intended to compare hardware platforms or software frameworks “apples-to-apples.” It requires the use of the same model and optimizer as the reference implementation.
The chart shows the increased participation in the MLPerf benchmarking competition since its start in 2018. The total number of submissions in the closed division doubled (2X) compared to the previous submission round (v0.6) and the number of submitters also increased by 3X compared to the first round (v0.5).
Out of the 130 submissions in the closed division, NVIDIA published the highest number of results, followed by Google and Dell — the Top 3 submitters.
Dell submitted results in 4 benchmarks, using two different ML frameworks (MXNet & PyTorch) and on two different Dell EMC server platforms. Dell was the only vendor to publish on PCIe GPUs, which is the widely used in many Enterprise organizations.
For this exercise, the engineers from the Dell EMC AI Innovation Labs, worked with NVIDIA to benchmark and optimize the performance of the Dell EMC DSS 8440 server with PCIe-based NVIDIA Tesla V100S GPUs and the Dell EMC PowerEdge C4140 server with NVIDIA Tesla V100 SXM2 GPUs and NVLink.
Among other outcomes, we showed that the DSS8440 server achieved particularly good results with the Resnet50 v1.5 and Mask R-CNN benchmarks, and we demonstrated that the PowerEdge C4140 server scales efficiently from one node to four nodes to train the models on 16 V100 GPUs.
The training times for Resnet50 v1.5 and Mask R-CNN are shown in the following figures.
As modern, open and software-driven networks change how cloud providers and enterprises approach the data center, the need to simplify management and increase efficiency across virtual and physical network environments has never been greater.
Dell EMC SmartFabric Director, the industry’s only fabric management platform co-engineered by VMware and Dell Technologies, enables smarter fabrics and end-to-end management by connecting the physical world with the virtual world via an intent-based provisioning model.
With SmartFabric Director 2.0, we take that vision further with the addition of capabilities that bridge the gap between the hardware-defined physical network and the software-defined virtual network in three key areas:
Simplicity: Reduce the steps to deploy a fabric while providing a single point for fabric lifecycle management.
Openness: Support for open standards to maximize flexibility, interoperability and technology investment.
Consistency: Apply a consistent policy and automation framework across physical and virtual environments to reduce complexity while increasing efficiency.
Now, with the introduction of SmartFabric Director 2.0, you have even more capabilities designed to make centralizing management across virtual and physical network infrastructures simpler, more efficient and scalable than ever.
Multiple Overlay Support with BGP EVPN
SmartFabric Director 2.0 introduces BGP EVPN to VXLAN routing and interoperability between multiple vendors’ systems. By decoupling the underlay network (physical topology) from the overlay network (virtual topology), this new capability gives you Layer 2/Layer 3 connectivity between endpoints and across data centers while maintaining a consistent underlay architecture.
Increased Flexibility with Support for Bare Metal Workloads
SmartFabric Director 2.0 adds support for bare metal workloads to enable a combination of virtualized and non-virtualized workloads. Some workloads such as Database Servers are sometimes not virtualized for increased performance and Smart Fabric Director now enables these workloads to interconnect with virtualized infrastructure.
Leverages Latest VMware Releases
SmartFabric Director 2.0 takes advantage of the latest VMware releases, including vSphere 7.0 and NSX-T 3.0. Integration with VMware vSphere enables auto learning of virtual networks and fabric provisioning, including auto-detection of ESXi hosts and LAGs. NSX-T integration auto-provisions the fabric/underlay correctly for the NSX-T overlay and provides support for transport VLAN and Maximum Transmission Unit (MTU) consistency checks.
Increased Scalability
SmartFabric Director 2.0 doubles the number of switches from 32 to 64 for greater scalability and flexibility in data center environments.
New Automation Features and More
Improvements also include enhancements to the backup-restore UI and management features that create a more user-friendly experience. Of course, the new capabilities build upon the existing features, including streaming telemetry from fabric switches for real-time visibility into operational health status.
Explore SmartFabric Director 2.0 at VMworld Online On-Demand
See for yourself how SmartFabric Director 2.0 bridges the gap between the hardware-defined physical network and the software-defined virtual network.
Dell Technologies and VMware are dedicated to delivering tightly integrated products that help our customers get the most value out of their IT infrastructure investments, and today is the latest example of that commitment. In keeping with our 30-day synchronous release commitment, we are announcing integration with the latest VMware HCI software and Tanzu offerings.
VMware Tanzu on Dell EMC VxRail integration is substantial news for customers. There also are plenty of new features in vSAN, vSphere and VMware Cloud Foundation that will benefit VxRail customers, regardless of where they are on their path to adopting Tanzu for Kubernetes orchestration and modern application development.
To help customers accelerate application modernization, VxRail delivers “Kubernetes at Cloud Speed” with multiple, fully integrated HCI infrastructure options to run vSphere with Tanzu. In fact, Dell Technologies is the only HCI vendor offering a fully integrated Tanzu portfolio with reference architecture, cluster, and private cloud offerings – all on VxRail.
Customers can choose the best infrastructure to fit their organizations operating model and level of Kubernetes expertise. Whether customers are looking to develop on a validated Platform-as-a-Service or Container-as-a-Service platform with Tanzu Architecture for VxRail, rapidly get started with a Kubernetes deployment of vSphere with Tanzu on VxRail , or deploy Kubernetes at scale on a turnkey, fully integrated, secure private cloud deployment with VMware Cloud Foundation with Tanzu on VxRail, the Dell Technologies Cloud Platform, running Tanzu on VxRail delivers-
◉ Accelerated adoption: Curated VxRail systems come fully integrated and ready to deploy, automated infrastructure deployment and cloud-like resource pooling, elasticity, agility/speed, and programmability accelerate Kubernetes infrastructure delivery so developers can operate at the pace of today’s digital business.
◉ Kubernetes your way: Choice of infrastructure delivery options with consistent operations that align to your organization’s operating model. Deploy the optimal infrastructure that meets your Kubernetes readiness journey.
◉ Rapid Kubernetes evolution: Lock step support for latest VMware Kubernetes advancements. With VxRail automated full stack lifecycle management and non-disruptive addition of next generation platforms, customers can continuously, confidently and predictably take advantage of evolving Kubernetes technology on fully integrated, automated infrastructure.
VMware Tanzu on Dell EMC VxRail flexible infrastructure options enable businesses to adopt rapidly adopt Kubernetes to keep pace with the speed of business. “VMware Tanzu on VxRail will provide customers with immediate value – delivering an easy to deploy and manage stack that runs both modern and traditional applications,” said Krish Prasad, SVP CPBU and GM vSphere, VMware. “VMware Cloud Foundation with Tanzu on VxRail will deliver significant operational efficiency for running Kubernetes workloads at scale in the data center, Cloud and at the Edge.”
Whether you’re ready to jump into the world of Tanzu, or just looking for the latest innovations in HCI for data center modernization, hybrid cloud adoption, or edge deployments, VxRail has you covered through tight integration with the latest VMware HCI software releases.
With the latest vSAN and vSphere releases, there are a number of advancements in storage efficiency, security and file services. One example of storage efficiency is HCI mesh, which enables storage resource sharing across clusters. This is particularly exciting for our larger VxRail customers who may have spare capacity on one of their many clusters- if they are running low on capacity in one cluster, HCI mesh enables them to utilize spare capacity from another cluster. Customers taking advantage of our VxRail HCI System Software SaaS multi-cluster management with predictive capacity analysis can track capacity usage across all of their clusters and determine how to most effectively take advantage of HCI mesh to optimize workload performance.
Additional update benefits include:
◉ vSAN “Compression only” option for demanding workloads that typically cannot take advantage of deduplication.
◉ Extended file services with windows file sharing through SMB v2.1 and v3. Both types of file shares are now able to use Kerberos based authentication when using Microsoft Active Directory.
◉ New security features include vSAN In-transit Encryption and Secure Disk Wipe.
◉ VMware Cloud Foundation also introduced remote cluster management, enabling VxRail customers to extend VMware Cloud Foundation workload domains to remote locations while maintaining consistent operations and integrated full stack lifecycle management across the hybrid cloud to the edge.
We invite you to register for our VMworld sessions to learn more about how the multiple, fully integrated Tanzu on VxRail infrastructure help accelerate Kubernetes adoption and time to cloud native application development across the core, edge, cloud while ensuring customers can rapidly, confidently and predictably take advantage of evolving Kubernetes technology on fully integrated, automated infrastructure. You can find Dell Technologies at VMWorld online September 29 through October 1.
Data Science technology stables, Big Data consulting outfits, IT education companies, attending universities, business schools, higher education institutions, and state ICT academies – all are adding to the quickly swelling DASCA worldwide network.
Who Are Data Science Certificates Intended For?
Professional certifications exist across various technical fields for people looking to retool their skills and get some good experience. Data science certifications are no different.
They are primarily intended for people who already have computer coding skills or work in businesses or organizations that manage data. Regular certificate enrollees might come from a computer science, database administration, research, statistics, or selling background.
Certification might be used to practice some of the latest tools or techniques of data management, or might be used to obtain the specific expertise required to advance careers or enhance earning potential.
Certification programs are denser and can be made on more of a self-paced schedule. Depending on the data science certification and coursework, the program can be made anywhere from two weeks to two years.
Data science certificates can be less valuable than a master’s degree, which can be appealing to members looking to self-fund the program or employers sending members of their company or organization to get further training.
Data science certifications can be designed around a particular topic area or skillset. Unlike a master’s degree, which needs more breadth, a certificate program can fill in an underdeveloped professional space or train on the latest software or data techniques.
Career Building with a Data Science Certificate
Data science certification programs are designated for working professionals to obtain the skills they require to make the next career move.
The big data field remains to expand rapidly, both in terms of the number of positions and the types of skills and technologies needed to succeed.
Some certifications are also designed to develop particular computer programming or data skills such as analytical methods for data science, R, Python, SQL, data mining, machine learning, information visualization, or database management systems.
A certificate in data science, also recognized as a professional certificate, is a way for professionals to focus their skills and grow their job. Pre-professional or undergraduate-level data science certifications are also being offered these days.
Certifications show that you have a basic understanding of your field's concepts and proficiency. Certificates are usually for professionals with some experience in the field of computer science or business intelligence.
For Continuing Education:
Dell EMC Proven Professional Certification Program:
According to Dell EMC, this program is extensive. Clearing this Dell EMC certification will certify you as a proven professional.
This certification program has many levels like Data Scientist Associate (DCA), Data Scientist Specialist (DCS), Data Scientist Expert (DCE), and Data Scientist Master (DCM).
Cost: $230.
Why Should You Gain A Data Science Certificate?
Some benefits of getting certifications in data science are:
It grows your odds of getting a higher salary. This is because the certifications give tangible proof of your skills to your possible employer.
It provides reliability to your skills and proves your aptitude and dedication to learning.
You acquire relevant skills and techniques in coding, artificial intelligence, deep learning, and machine learning.
Data science certifications cost less than a master’s degree and provide a focused way to a particular skill-set.
How to Choose the Right Data Science Certificate for Your Career Growth?
The big data field is exciting and growing continuously and offering many opportunities for young aspiring IT professionals who are passionate about technology. You might need to undergo specific certification programs and earn certificates to improve your skills and grow a successful Data Science professional.
To ease these emerging professionals, many institutes and universities are giving certificate programs in Data science technology. As the number of these certification programs is vast, taking the right certification for your career growth becomes an incredibly important task.
Know the Various Steps Involved in Taking up Certificates
Knowing how to take the right certificate for your career growth now let us look into some of the steps you require to follow while taking Dell EMC certifications.
1) Choose Which Data Science Certificate You Need to Pursue
Initially, it would be best if you chose which Dell EMC certificate is best suited for you. Do your research correctly and determine which certificate will help you to advance to career to new heights.
2) Get to Know in Detail About the Certificate
Once you decide which certificate you want to take, get to know some essential factors to take up that certification exam. Here, you require to understand some factors such as the prerequisite skills you need to take up the certificate exam, the exam duration, how much it costs, when this exam will be sent, etc.
3) Start Preparing for the Exam
Once you get to understand all the essential information regarding the Data Science exam, begin preparing for it. Take the aid of some of the resources and prepare well for the exams. Some certificate programs provide practice tests that aid you in understanding the exam patterns. Take the aid of such options.
4) Register and Take Your Exam and Receive Your Certificate
Once you have finished your preparation, register with the particular certification exam you require to take. Understand the exam schedule and get ready with everything necessary for taking up the certification exam.
Once you pass the exam and meet all program elements, you will be eligible to receive your certificate. Follow all the steps that are recommended by certificate providers to collect your certificate. This benefits you receive your certificate.
Conclusion
The big data field is updating continuously and asking professionals to discover new technologies and update their understanding. Looking at this growth, many institutes and universities are attempting different Data Science certification programs and providing them a learning path to update their skill set.
Some of the organizations operating in this field are now studying to hire professionals who have achieved Data Science certificate programs from recognized institutes and universities.
The next phase of object evolution: VMware, containers, and Kubernetes
Many customers are looking to deploy object storage to support cloud-native apps without procuring and managing additional storage systems. This is why we have partnered with our colleagues at VMware to connect our leading object storage technology with VMware Cloud Foundation™ with VMware Tanzu™, to truly deliver a cloud operating model at scale. We are excited to announce the launch of ObjectScale Early Access* for select Dell Technologies customers.
VMware is taking the application and infrastructure modernization space by storm. With the release of VMware Cloud Foundation with Tanzu back in April, VMware has achieved the optimum environment for running modern applications within the enterprise. At the core of VMware Cloud Foundation with Tanzu are the latest innovations in VMware vSphere® and VMware vSAN™ which drive collaboration between development and IT operations.
The integration of Kubernetes into vSphere empowers data center operators to manage both virtual machines and Kubernetes clusters within a unified experience, on the same familiar platform they know and love. With an open ecosystem of Kubernetes-based APIs, developers can easily provision infrastructure services on-demand. The introduction of VMware vSAN Data Persistence platform, which is integrated with VMware Cloud Foundation with Tanzu, allows customers to provision persistent cloud-scale object storage for modern stateful applications. Data center operators can also extend Storage Policy-Based Management (SPBM) from VM volumes to container volumes, allowing for a consistent storage management approach for traditional and cloud-native applications including services such as object stores that they depend on.
Introducing ObjectScale
Building on our industry leadership position, we have engineered our object storage platform to take advantage of Kubernetes’ native automated deployment, scaling and management capabilities. This next generation of object storage software will be lighter, faster and deployable on existing ESXi-virtualized infrastructure, all manageable from within the vSphere UI. With rich S3 compatibility and self-service APIs, developers can quickly spin up object storage containers to fuel everything from big data and analytics applications to ephemeral dev/test sandboxes.
Using ObjectScale, any organization can deliver scalable cloud services with the reliability and control of a private cloud infrastructure. ObjectScale enables IT to easily manage globally distributed storage infrastructure under a single namespace with anywhere access to content. It’s also architected with certain design principles, such as a global namespace with eventual consistency, scale-out capabilities, secure multi-tenancy and superior performance for both small and large objects. The platform was built as a completely distributed system following the microservices principle of cloud applications. ObjectScale has a layered architecture, with every function in the system built as an independent layer, making them horizontally scalable across all nodes and enabling high availability. The S3-compatible ObjectScale software, running on VMware nodes with vSAN, forms the underlying cloud storage service, providing protection, geo-replication and data access.
Enterprise object anywhere
ObjectScale will help enterprise organizations embrace microservices and agile CI/CD processes, but it will also enable object storage to be deployed anywhere VMware Cloud Foundation with Tanzu is running, whether in a core data center, at an edge location or even in the cloud. This gives organizations the power to put data close to the applications they support, reducing latency and improving the user experience. In addition, object storage from disparate platforms will be able to cross-replicate for greater access, reliability and redundancy.
What’s next?
This exciting new phase of object storage evolution is only the beginning for VMware and Dell Technologies. There is a reason VMware is a critical partner for ObjectScale, as our close partnership will help organizations everywhere bring new products to market faster and drive innovation across all areas of the business.
“VMware and Dell Technologies are working together to accelerate cloud-native application development across the hybrid cloud”, said Lee Caswell, VP Marketing, CPBU, VMware. “ObjectScale on VMware Cloud Foundation is an important, new part of our cloud native toolset that transforms traditional IT from a cost center to a center of innovation and value.”
ObjectScale Early Access will soon be available to enterprise customers in beta on VMware Cloud Foundation with Tanzu and we encourage you to check out our sessions at VMworld 2020 to learn about what we are doing on the object storage front. We’ve got a lot of innovative functionality on the roadmap and can’t wait to share more. Stay tuned.
In case you missed it
We have been very active here at Dell Technologies the past few months including the launch of PowerScale, the next evolution of scale-out NAS from the industry’s external storage leader and DataIQ, our flagship dataset management software. These new products help enterprise organizations store data at scale and take control of their entire unstructured data environment.
In the last few months, we have seen society’s embrace of technology accelerate dramatically. Automation, Artificial Intelligence, virtual experiences, autonomous vehicles and robotics have all become much more accepted as humanity realized what those technologies could mean to human progress. The global pandemic has also forced corporations to shift business models, redefine education, recast healthcare over distance and fundamentally opened the door to different ways to do almost everything we understood before COVID.
At the same time, the wonders of technology have caused divides—both economic and geographic—that need to be addressed as we look to recover and rebuild. Today, the future of the economy and our communities depends on the ability of business and governments to invest in a long-term digital transformation strategy that includes everyone and everything regardless of their location or prior relationship with modern technology. One of the key elements of making this transformation real is having a pervasive way to reach the entire digital ecosystem. We will be dependent on modern connectivity to connect the clouds to the edges to the people to the devices across society; and at this time the single most important new technology to make that happen is next generation 5G wireless communications technology.
Building 5G on Top of Existing 4G Infrastructure – An Important First Step
Today, 5G is at best an extension of the 4G environment with legacy or traditional technology powering cellular networks for moderately faster speeds. The big four U.S. carriers have each introduced technology that aims to bring 5G connectivity to consumers – essentially adding on 5G equipment to an existing 4G LTE network.
While these early efforts to bolster 4G LTE networks are admirable and demonstrate the appetite for the 5G experience, they are still very early in delivering the high broadband speeds, near zero latency, and high device density promise of 5G. The journey to get there is the challenge, and we have pretty significant hurdles to overcome from a U.S. perspective and will need the full investment of the US innovation ecosystem.
The Race to 5G Dominance Heats up Across the Globe
One of the biggest impediments to 5G infrastructure is the limited marketplace that exists, particularly in the U.S., which lacks at-scale providers of modern 5G equipment used to build these new networks. If we don’t fix that problem, 5G adoption in the U.S. will lag behind other nations and the US technology ecosystem will participate from the outside of this critical technology. The government must find creative ways to attract U.S.-based companies into the 5G ecosystem by sharing risk and creating incentives. With the capital, resources, and talent to build a 5G infrastructure, big tech will be able to increase their participation in 5G at an accelerated rate. We know that when the technology industry of the United States is fully present in a technical ecosystem, amazing innovation happens, and true progress occurs. We have seen this in Cloud, IT, software defined systems, virtualization, security and even in wireless technology many years ago.
This change in the role of the U.S. technical ecosystem is critical. The lack of a robust secure supply chain, U.S. technology, and control over the intellectual property rights of the 5G ecosystem introduces significant strategic, security, economic, and political risk to the communications industry. The impact of these deficiencies goes beyond just mobile connectivity. The U.S. must drive the innovation and standardization of national 5G infrastructure to not only get left behind on the world stage, but also play a major role in the marketplace as it has for nearly every other technological invention. By doing so, we can increase market competitiveness, prevent vendor lock-in, and lower costs at a time when governments globally need to prioritize spending. More importantly, we can set the stage for the next wave of wireless that will far more resemble the cloud and IT ecosystems than traditional telecom systems.
To Stand up a 5G Network in the U.S., We Need a New Model
Until now, major efforts to develop a national 5G network have been segmented, but not for lack of trying. Open Radio Access Network (O-RAN) standard is a great place to start – open is always better than closed when it comes to innovation and standardization. However, with O-RAN, you run the risk of open environments without optimization. If you can’t make the disparate parts work together, you don’t necessarily have an effective open environment.
We need to change how we approach building a 5G infrastructure, starting from the ground up. 5G is not simply an evolution of 4G; it requires massive transformation, a multitude of additional towers and demands new distributed architectures using software-defined networks. Dell Technologies believes the model should mimic how you build a cloud; it’s done with a coalition, an ecosystem, and people who understand how to build modern systems beyond just the specific needs of telecom networks. And that’s where Dell Technologies and others are starting to emerge as potential facilitators to enable that collaboration and integration at scale.
Now is the Time
Building sustainable 5G networks is a massive undertaking, one that requires federal support and investment from American companies. Deploying 5G networks in the coming years requires immediate capital for new infrastructure, devices, and services. It also requires a focus on not just creating demand for 5G but in creating U.Ss sources of supply of the underlying technology. This is an investment in creating new players or pulling adjacent companies into the 5G ecosystem. At the end we must have a wireless ecosystem that includes not just the existing well-respected international players but also fully includes a number of at-scale U.S. technology companies playing primary roles in the future of wireless.
The events of the last six months have changed the way every technologist thinks about innovation. As more and more data are created at the edge, we’ve become a culture reliant on remote access. Permanent expansion of digital healthcare, education, remote work, job training, entrepreneurship, and civic engagement requires accessibility to a high-speed network, and investment in 5G technology infrastructure can make closing the digital divide possible. The US is leading the innovation in almost every aspect of that future except the core technology to connect it all together. That must change as a matter of national interest. Now is the time for us to seize the opportunity to invest in the infrastructure for a digital economy and to ensure the future global competitiveness of our nation.
“Massively disruptive,” “a game changer,” and “will redefine industries” are just some of the phrases used over the last year by market researchers to describe the potential of edge computing. According to Gartner, by the year 2025, 75% of all data will be processed at the edge.
What implications does this have for companies designing solutions today? How have solution builders embraced edge computing now, and how are they shifting their business models to prepare for the expected influx of edge data processing needs in the near future?
Massive opportunity with big data
From working with our OEM customers, I know that faster access to processed data is already opening new business models and driving innovation and opportunity across every industry. The rationale for this shift is clear. Increasingly, both OEMs and end users need to be able to process enormous amounts of data on site, giving them the power to make smarter decisions, faster. By embracing edge computing, these companies are seeing real results in reduced cost, latency and connectivity challenges for both themselves and their customers.
Security solutions, AI platforms and billable services
For example, OEM customers such as BCDVideo are using edge technology to design security solutions for their end users, giving them the ability to process data locally instead of sending it across the network, where it’s more vulnerable. Others, like Kinetica, are designing AI platforms that can collect and analyze the volumes of edge data their customers need to process. OEMs are also developing new revenue streams, introducing new billable services to differentiate themselves from the competition and increase the stickiness of customer accounts.
IT meets OT on the factory floor
It’s probably not a surprise to anyone familiar with the industrial industry, but we’re also seeing the Enterprise Edge evolve with platforms traditionally used in a datacenter now deployed on the factory floor. The production lines, where data is gathered, is also changing. In the past, edge devices would typically have been small PC-type computers. Now, we’re now seeing demand for ruggedized, long life systems that can run heavier workloads, like analytics, machine learning, vision systems and robotics.
The result? OEMs are using edge technology to change how they are designing and manufacturing their own products, which in turn can positively impact their own customers in areas like cost savings and faster turnaround times.
Managing IT infrastructure on the factory floor
OEM customer, Rockwell Automation, is a great example. Rockwell serves a wide range of industries globally from wastewater and consumer packaged goods through to oil and gas. According to Rockwell (registration required), IT and OT convergence represents a challenge for many customers. Despite cyber security risks and the increased reliance on data and network infrastructure to enable manufacturing, there’s a shortage of skills and staff to manage IT infrastructure on the factory floor and optimize operations. Yet, ten minutes downtime can cost over $10k.
In response, Rockwell worked with OEM Solutions to engineer a virtual, turnkey solution, designed on Dell PowerEdge XL servers for their customers, plus a range of managed services that help their customers meet their product schedules.
The world’s first learning steel mill
Industry leader, Big River Steel wanted to optimize operations and reduce waste at its $1.3 billion scrap metal recycling and steel production facility. Using edge compute, servers, storage plus an AI platform designed by our OEM customer, Noodle.ai, on Dell Technologies infrastructure, Big River Steel is now regarded as the world’s first learning steel mill, embedding AI and machine learning into its manufacturing processes.
The result? Big River Steel has insights into all the factors responsible for quality variability and knows the optimal manufacturing input parameters. Importantly, the company has reported up to 50% reduction in steel yield strength variability and up to $10 million in savings.
Market trends
I’ve shared some examples of edge computing but let’s look at the market research data. In a recent VDC survey of over 700 global product development decision makers, 42 percent are already deploying edge computing with 26% planning to do so within the next year. Interestingly, 36% say they’re investing in edge computing, specifically because of customer demand while around 20% of respondents say competitive pressure is driving this evolution.
How does this translate into system deployments? Over 60% of respondents said they are now implementing additional remote monitoring and control within their industrial systems. Thirty-eight percent of organizations are enabling services to improve product lifecycle and inventory management, while 19 percent are introducing new, billable services.
A world of possibilities
What does this mean for the future? I believe the intelligent edge is the glue uniting IT and OT environments – the final piece of the puzzle, if you will. Over the next decade, I predict that every piece of industrial equipment will be fitted with an embedded or connected computer, allowing it to make intelligent decisions on its own. For our OEM customers, there’s huge opportunity to develop edge applications and enable software-defined functionality. We will see new, professional and billable services emerge with usage-based fees. Edge technologies will be all around us performing distributed computing across a multitude of devices in cities, factories, energy plants, and farms.
Invest now in your future business
From an OEM and end customer perspective, increasing edge computing demands will accelerate the need for the right compute, connectivity and storage as well as more flexible hardware and software platforms. 2025 may still seem like the distant future, but the partnership and the technology choices you make now can and will impact the health of your future business.
5G is a transformation journey, not an overnight upgrade. But every journey has important first steps, and today marks another step forward in our journey to bring the capabilities of 5G technology to more people and places.
Our Latitude 9510 device, launched in May, is now the first 5G-capable business PC with Intel vPro on the market. Beginning today with availability in Europe, with plans to expand globally in the coming months, IT administrators can now select an enterprise-grade level, 5G device for their organizations, giving executives and mobile professionals access to ultra-fast 5G speeds and reliable connectivity. The device works on most major European carriers and positions Dell to ramp our 5G innovation work with Orange, while additional mobile carrier partnerships will be announced globally soon.
“It has been our priority to deliver a rich and seamless experience that leverages the power of 5G for our enterprise customers,” said Bart Van Kildonck, Head of Connected Products, Smart Mobility Services, Orange Business Services. “With Dell’s 5G-ready laptop now available, we are primed to further innovate always-connected and secured smart mobility solutions for both global enterprises and the smart knowledge worker of the future.”
While we are still in the early days of 5G, this is an important launch as we look to a future of ultra-fast networks that have the potential to transform industries, organization and people. Why?
Organizations are future proofing now: When the rush to work-from-home kicked off earlier this year, organizations and their IT departments transformed where and how their employees worked almost overnight. As we transition to a work from anywhere world, IT departments don’t want to be caught flat footed. IT admins want to know the devices they are deploying will support their employees 3-5 years from now.
Our internal customer research shows that IT administrators are focused on providing amazing connectivity and collaboration experiences, with 5G being a crucial component in enabling fast, secure and reliable connectivity wherever employees are working. In fact, only four percent of ITDM customers surveyed said they would not need 5G capabilities available on their organization’s premium laptops in 2021. It’s hard to future proof without 5G.
Innovation begets innovation: Trying to imagine the positive impact 5G will have on our society feels endless, but it has spurred much innovation on our device team. Our goal for the Latitude 9510 was to design the ultimate experience for business users, with AI to boost productivity, machined aluminum materials for an ultra-premium look and feel, and 5G to offer the best connectivity options available. Delivering 5G signals through a metallic device was a sizeable challenge. Thin and light systems provide limited options for antenna placement in the system base, especially when a full metallic enclosure is required and antenna isolation from the base’s internal electronics is critical to performance. Many competitors paint magnesium on the device to hide antenna regions or simply increase the borders of the display so antennas can be built around the screen, but we knew there had to be a better way.
Thinking outside the box, our engineers came up with a smart design that cleverly incorporates 5G antennas into the speakers within the system’s base patent. The co-molded plastic trim ring around the speaker looks like an aesthetic design feature, but it provides an advantage by allowing us to pack antennas into the speaker area, so there’s no compromise on being small and having a good connection.
5G is about more than the device in your hand: Our early 5G tests show that Dell Latitude 9510 can provide up to 300% improvement in download speeds over 4G. But there’s more to 5G than speed. The reliability and security it offers mobile executives and professionals over Wi-Fi hotspots will transform productivity during travel. 5G will boost capacity and performance for mobile broadband, provide real-time edge compute capacity, and provide purpose-built connectivity for end devices.
The improved wireless capability of 5G networking will bring new use cases and applications, expanding the array of devices, IoT use cases, and services beyond what is possible today. Think automated surveillance of industrial sites, remote maintenance in factories, remote telesurgery, autonomous driving and 3D manufacturing with collaborating industrial robots. It’s more than the 5G device – it’s about the possibilities 5G can enable.
So, while we celebrate this step, we continue our march onward. We look forward to sharing more on our carrier partnerships and unique use cases soon. For pricing and availability on the 5G-capable Latitude 9510 in Europe, enterprise customers may call their customer sales representative.
Dell EMC and VMware are excited to offer a reference architecture for Cloud Service Providers (CSPs) based on the Dell Technologies Cloud Platform (DTCP) and VMware Cloud Director. This reference architecture is ideal for CSPs looking to offer secure, multi-tenant, private and hybrid cloud services to SMB and enterprise customers.
Dell Technologies Cloud Platform (VMware Cloud Foundation on VxRail) enables CSPs to host virtual data centers for customers needing private and hybrid cloud in a self-service model. Using the reference architecture, CSPs could deploy VMware Cloud Director, a cloud service-delivery platform, on DTCP to assist in operating and managing successful cloud-service businesses.
VMware Cloud Director on Dell Technologies Cloud Platform (DTCP) allows a CSP to reduce engineering, operational, and capital costs by providing a standardized, pre-integrated, but multi-purpose hardware platform model with secure multi-tenancy and customer self-service. This reference design guide simplifies and standardize deployment of VMware Cloud Director on DTCP. This enables the CSP to reduce capital expenditures and better manage just in time provisioning services, resulting in an improved customer experience.
Dell Technologies Cloud Platform delivers a turnkey experience that’s easy to deploy and manage due to the tight integration between VMware Cloud Foundation (VCF) and VxRail. DTCP today can be purchased using traditional CAPEX model or subscription model, an added benefit of the DTCP subscription model is the availability of certain fixed configurations for pre-configured nodes that can be delivered and deployed in as little as 14 days -accelerating CSPs to cloud service offers. Instead of waiting for weeks or months of procurement, relying on adding and hiring technical experts to build new infrastructure, CSPs can promote DTCP as a CSP managed service so their customers can focus on their workloads.
Cloud Service Providers who consume VMware Cloud Foundation using VMware point consumption model only pays for what they consume monthly. This combined with flexible hardware models is a win for Cloud Service Providers and a win for their customers as these savings can be passed on allowing for more competitive pricing and time to market for new services.
CSPs can now delight customers by helping them deploy and scale in days with a consistent cloud service foundation engineered by industry leaders Dell Technologies and VMware. With managed services on DTCP, CSP customers can consume the latest high-performance technology, such as all flash for HCI, without investing in the physical infrastructure, and rest assured that the latest updates are always applied to their cloud environments.
CSPs will accelerate time to market of their multi-tenant solution and drive revenue growth with improved service delivery to end customers with VMware Cloud Director on DTCP. Key differentiators with this reference architecture include:
◉ Securely isolate resources, users, compute, memory, and storage.
◉ Provide tenants self-service application, compute, networking and storage offerings without developing a complicated solution in-house.
◉ Provide key CSP capabilities including charge-back, show-back, telemetry, and reporting for tenant usage.
◉ Support a broad range of workloads; from database and data mining systems to traditional Windows web servers and application servers as well as the latest Kubernetes cluster services and container services.
◉ Reduce the time to deploy and provision customer environments – minutes for virtual data centers. Services can be deployed and configured in seconds.
◉ Tenants can experience reliable and consistent cloud services across on-prem and off-prem instances through a trusted Cloud Service Provider backed by the power of VMware and Dell Technologies.
Here are examples of how partners are benefiting by deploying VMware Cloud Director on DTCP. The bottom line is more dollars to CSP businesses and improved business efficiency & agility.
You may hear organizations talk about the desire to reside in a single cloud. But, in reality, few organizations ever fully achieve that goal. No single technology provider has a monopoly on innovation, and organizational needs are often quite diverse. In fact, competition among these technology companies is what drives innovation. With that in mind, organizations must plan for the reality they’re likely to face: multiple clouds (public and private) as well as new edge locations. Here are four reasons why being in multiple clouds will be your reality:
1. Unique Capabilities Across Each Cloud:
Maintaining workloads in multiple clouds allows customers to leverage the best features from each cloud. While one provider may have a broader set of storage options, another may have better developer tools. One provider may specialize in AI and analytics, while another may boast more industry- or vertical-specific offerings (such as for retail or healthcare). Given this, many organizations will optimize for a best of breed approach instead of going all in with inferior solutions.
2. Risk Mitigation:
Many organizations are also hesitant to rely too heavily on a single cloud provider. If a provider stops investing in — or worse, cancels — the service you value most, what happens then? Diversifying your clouds prevents lock-in and reduces exposure to future risk. As in the saying, “Don’t put all your eggs in one basket,” you should also be wary of putting all your workloads in one cloud. Technology investments are always challenging; picking a platform that can sustain for the next decade is critical to fueling your success. Organizations must be aware that the technology vendor of today may not have the roadmap that adequately addresses tomorrow. They could even wake up one day in direct competition with their vendor or experience a significant service-level event that warrants using multiple cloud vendors.
3. Mergers and Acquisitions
Merging two companies is not as simple as moving a couple of apps and calling it a day. Deals of this nature usually involve substantial technology investments, both for those previously made and those that will follow. The greater number of IT environments involved in the integration, the more complex the deals will be. In these deals, an organization may unintentionally or unexpectedly inherit new cloud environments. But each organization’s core functions cannot be cut out without massive disruption. It is nearly impossible to circumvent an environment with multiple clouds, and a single-cloud environment would require the time-consuming and costly process of moving the workloads of the acquired company onto the existing cloud. The success of mergers and acquisitions deals can be greatly impacted by the IT integration, and implementing multiple clouds can greatly streamline these deals.
4. Shadow IT:
Organizations oftentimes begin their cloud journeys without a centralized strategy. Rather, they are driven to the cloud by lines of business striving to meet an immediate need. This decentralized and siloed planning brought on by shadow IT creates challenges in managing everything. While often viewed as a negative, shadow IT is simply a reality for many organizations. The trick then becomes, as you put your house in order, how to address all those existing investments.
It is essential for organizations to invest in technologies that will best solve their business problems. While the public cloud is effective for many workloads, private clouds and edge environments will see continued investments. As discussed previously, addressing cloud sprawl is essential in maximizing budget and resources. For this reason, many organizations look to hybrid cloud to streamline their multiple clouds. No matter what your current environment looks like, defining a centralized strategy for your organization that accounts for the complexity of multiple environments is critical to your success with cloud.
Digital Transformation in Retail is Acquiring Momentum
With all the exciting changes underway in the retail industry, it appears that retail itself is getting some therapy. The retail industry has been transforming itself for quite a while, beginning with the online commerce trend as brick and mortar stores expanded into an omni-channel strategy. Given the hyper-competitiveness of the industry, retailers continue to strive to differentiate themselves with data-driven strategies for enhanced customer experience, faster & reliable services, and improved operational efficiencies.
Digital transformation has been well underway for the past few years. Most retailers have an online presence and many have expanded their online interfaces beyond e-commerce to offer improved services. Now guests and customers can browse the store inventory, locate their purchase, and accelerate in-store pickups by informing their arrival at stores. Retailers are increasingly relying on data analytics for store operations including product placements, inventory optimizations, and supply-demand forecasting.
These and other digital transformation efforts have already provided positive impact in improving sales and reducing costs. Recent events have caused supply chain disruption due to asymmetrical demand and supply, and shift in customer purchase behavior driven by health and safety. Recent earnings offer a glimpse of the impact of this shift. The earnings of major retailers of general merchandising, home improvements and grocery show record earnings and profits witnessed across the spectrum. Grocery chains show similar strengths. High-end apparels did not fare as well. Here are some common themes that we were able to observe:
◉ E-Commerce is growing fast: Retailers with a strong online presence were quite successful. E-commerce transactions saw tremendous growth, doubling or tripling in some cases. Retailers who were ready with a scalable and capable e-commerce platform were able to grow despite dynamic market conditions.
◉ Buy-Online Pick-up In Store (BOPIS) and “curbside pickup” saw significant increase in demand. Big retailers like Walmart and Target saw their curbside pickup traffic setting record volume registering triple digit growth. This trend is seen across the spectrum including rural chains like tractor supply.
◉ Focus on touch-free commerce: Driven by the health safety needs, retailers are looking into touch-free commerce wherever possible, including social distancing and touch-free commerce. The process for touch-free commerce is rapidly evolving and we’re seeing it beginning at the check-out counters.
Role of the Stores (or the Edge)
Though e-commerce is picking up, brick and mortar stores continue to play an important role. As mentioned, stores are transforming themselves to offer new services like curbside pickup and BOPIS. The changes require improvements to store-side processes including:
◉ Increased inventory visibility with accuracy
◉ Inventory protection (perishable goods)
◉ Order fulfillment at the store
◉ Curbside pickup coordination
◉ Ensuring a consistent customer experience
How Dell Technologies Can Help
Dell Technologies empowers retailers to expedite actionable insights, digitize business processes, and transform their customer experiences by applying the right technology solution for every environment. To help unlock the value of data at the Edge, our broad portfolio delivers consistent infrastructure, consistent operations and intrinsic security paired with experienced support around the world. Here are three additional areas where Dell Technologies is supporting our retail customers in their efforts:
1. Fast growing e-commerce
We can help capacity augmentation to process increased volume of transactions. Dell Technologies has been helping customers transform their existing e-commerce platform into scalable infrastructure for scale and resiliency using our server, virtualization and enterprise application orchestration portfolio.
2. Increase in Curb-side pickup
Customers are looking at ways to improve the curbside pickup process for faster servicing. Dell Technologies, working with our partners, are enabling Computer vision-based solutions for faster processing for curbside pickup service.
3. Increased visibility into inventory
Same day and curbside pickup requires in-store fulfillment. Retailers need to have better insight into their inventory for availability and count to enable the transaction.
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