“Cloud-like” – Is Your Data Center Ready for the Plunge?

Cloud is just about everywhere and in most companies’ strategies. However, getting and moving to cloud doesn’t always happen as quickly as we hope. The larger your infrastructure is, the more detail is required to plan and migrate while minimizing disruptions to daily operations.

But is cloud, specifically public cloud, the best approach for every need, every application, and every company? Or is “cloud-like” a better route?

As IT administrators evaluate their cloud options, they may find a number of criteria to support moving to public cloud. They may also find some aspects that are not so favorable. Security, data ownership or data lock-in, flexibility, choice of platforms, available applications, and so forth -– these are some of the key aspects to consider when moving from an on-premises environment, and which may prevent you from fully migrating certain applications, data, and policies to public cloud. But you still want all of the benefits that come with cloud.

Enter “Cloud-like”

A cloud-like approach could mean evaluating different options to obtain public cloud benefits – such as scalability, economics, flexibility, manageability – but without some of the risks or downsides you have discovered about public cloud for your business, infrastructure and workforce. Perhaps your IT organization knows that running certain workloads with on-premises servers will always provide faster results than cloud instances. Maybe IT also believes that maintaining the data close to compute/servers and not incurring data transfer costs or lock-in will reduce latencies and budgets over the long term. Or it could be that IT really wants to secure data and meet in-region compliance requirements for data privacy, for example, without risking data migration to or in the cloud. Unique scenarios indicate a cloud-like approach could benefit IT as they engage in hybrid IT models.

Let’s evaluate servers in a cloud-like approach. To leverage servers in this scenario, a consumption component must be considered to deliver cloud-like economics. This can include approaches like metered consumption or pay-as-you-go, without embarking on buying servers. This approach would also mimic cloud, paying for CPU cycles when needed.

Another aspect is how to ensure servers can scale in performance to tackle real-time burst demands for processing data. An expanded capacity (“bursting”) option could be useful.

And with servers and data on-premises, businesses can experience cloud-like flexibility while reducing risk of outage or breaches while keeping latency low.

Dell Technologies Flexible Consumption for Dell EMC PowerEdge servers enables cloud-like aspects as described prior. This solution from Dell Financing Services can enable you to get the technology you need today to drive business outcomes and predict your IT spend. One of the Flexible consumption solutions include Flex on Demand, which helps you address business requirements with payments that scale up or down to match your usage.*

Deliver a similar, “cloud-like” experience on-premise

Not only does Flex on Demand provide a consumption model which is cloud-like while giving you the servers you want with all the bells-and-whistles and full management by Dell, but Flex on Demand also helps IT scenarios such as:

◉ Datacenter extension – whether consolidating colocation or hosted operations back into the domain to reduce costs or seeking to support additional workloads for a set period of time (months to years), IT can readily reduce external factors and maintain full control over operations without management overhead.

◉ Secured, fully independent environments – ideal for in-region or country requirements to support global privacy, security, compliance standards, servers in a Flexible Consumption program are fully isolated but fully manageable to support global business needs

◉ Mixed workloads and mixed volatility – real-time, demanding, volatile and retail applications often push servers to maximum operations for a short time before settling back to a normal cycle. A dedicated Flex on Demand approach separates this strain from your infrastructure, and provides the right-sized server choices for your workloads, allowing for these bursts of activity as they appear.

With Flex on Demand, IT has an additional consumption approach to obtaining the best PowerEdge servers for their applications, and in a cloud-like economics fashion.

Now you have more choices to select the best compute nodes for your business needs. AMD-based PowerEdge servers with Flex on Demand provide new configurations for deployments including web front-ends, cloud hosting servers, and other high-demand, high-transaction environments. Furthermore, Flex on Demand is also available for Dell vSAN ready nodes, further extending the value of cloud-like consumption into your operations model. Learn more about PowerEdge servers and Flex on Demand here.

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Find Your Edge with Dell Technologies

While it is early in its growth, Edge computing will shake the foundations of IT in a manner we’ve not seen since the advent of cloud computing.

Edge computing is certainly not new. Businesses have been deploying technology outside of their traditional data centers for many years. For example, oil and gas companies have been using sophisticated sensors and meters in remote locations for operations. Manufacturers do the same on their factory floors. However, several converging technological trends, such as 5G, smart devices and high-speed connectivity, are now accelerating technology changes at the Edge across a wide spectrum of industries.

Edge computing will shake the foundations of IT in a manner we’ve not seen since the advent of cloud computing.

How will this change things? While today only 10 percent of data is generated outside of a data center, industry analysts predict that 75 percent of enterprise data will be processed outside a traditional centralized data center or cloud by 2025. Applications, too, are moving to the Edge. Analysts say we can expect an 800 percent increase in the number of applications at the Edge by 2024.

These key trends should be sparking two big questions in every organization:

1. What investments are needed to deliver the infrastructure that can handle this rapid growth in data?

2. What kind of value and opportunities can we extract or discover in this data?

Unique challenges at the Edge

To answer either of these two critical questions successfully, one needs to consider a unique set of challenges that businesses encounter at the Edge as they determine how to:

◉ Overcome a fragmented technology landscape to create a complete Edge solution that meets business requirements

◉ Ensure the infrastructure at the Edge functions reliably under multiple physical and environmental constraints, which might include large temperature gradients, dust, moisture and physical shock

◉ Manage and operate heterogenous systems deployed at a massive scale that are remotely and widely distributed

◉ Ensure that Operations Technology (OT) teams and processes can work seamlessly and efficiently alongside traditional IT

◉ Engage rapid, reliable services and support for a multitude of devices and locations

◉ Secure, physically and logically, remote devices from malicious actors

More importantly, to maximize the benefits of an Edge solution,  where data workloads need to be managed and analyzed in real-time, it needs to be seamlessly connected to private and public clouds. All these cross-functional, cross-domain activities increase the complexity of deploying at the Edge. This complexity can be addressed by bringing cloud capabilities and flexibility to the edge with a hybrid cloud approach.

The Dell Technologies Edge approach

For many years, we at Dell Technologies have helped numerous organizations address and overcome challenges presented by systems at the Edge. In this work, we bring our customers and partners a clear perspective on Edge computing.

We define Edge as the intersection of physical and digital domains where data is generated, collected and processed to create new value. We do not consider computing at the Edge as a separate and discrete solution. Instead, we leverage the deep IT experience of designing and deploying private and public cloud environments to build capabilities at the Edge, while reducing the complexity of managing data and application services across these domains.

To that end, we successfully deploy systems at the Edge by providing:

◉ Infrastructure that is optimized for the Edge (dimensional, physical, connectivity, etc.)

◉ Software-defined data networks that provide flexible connectivity across domains

◉ Consistent management and operations from the Edge to the hybrid cloud

◉ The ability to support demanding, cloud-native applications

◉ A comprehensive industry-leading ecosystem, including VMware, to support unique requirements

◉ A reliable support services and global supply chain to help ensure no disruptions to operations

◉ And an intrinsic security approach that robustly protects every layer across all domains

We have helped thousands of organizations modernize their infrastructure and deploy essential Edge solutions critical to their businesses. We have built the technology stack to simplify systems at the Edge while providing the capability to extract value and deep insights from data at the Edge.

To further the cause, we are investing in the seamless integration of the IT infrastructure and management at the Edge with private and public clouds, along with the advancement of the technologies, services and consumption models for Edge computing.

Why Edge matters

Let’s take a step back and look at the big picture. A successful deployment at the Edge presents a significant opportunity for companies to gain a competitive advantage. As data grows and more advanced analytics and AI applications are run at the Edge, exciting possibilities arise for businesses to:

◉ Expedite actionable insights from data

◉ Accelerate the digitization of key business processes

◉ Refine and redefine the customer experience

And we’re not stopping there. We believe it’s our mission to drive new and innovative technology that will free our customers from the current constraints and complexities at the Edge. We are also focused on helping customers to better use their information generated at the Edge innovate for their businesses.

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Gartner Magic Quadrant Leader – Five Years in a Row

Dell Technologies Named a Leader for Distributed File Systems and Object Storage

Thanks to you, our valued customers, partners and employees, we did it again! For the fifth year in a row, Gartner named Dell Technologies a Leader in its 2020 Magic Quadrant for Distributed File Systems and Object Storage – a Leader every year since the commencement of this report.

According to the Gartner report, “Vendors in the Leaders quadrant have the highest scores for their Ability to Execute and Completeness of Vision.” Dell Technologies is positioned highest and furthest for its ability to execute and completeness of vision in the 2020 Leaders’ quadrant for Distributed File Systems and Object Storage.

Dell EMC PowerScale, which includes our Isilon nodes, and ECS were evaluated for the Gartner report. Here are 5 reasons why we believe our portfolio of unstructured data solutions continues to shine:

◉ Insights-driven customers who have entrusted our distributed file and object storage solutions to support their business outcomes.

◉ Channel partners who add value in positioning our technology as part of their mission to serve their customers.

◉ Technology partners that enhance our base offerings – whether it be for enhanced security, auditing, or industry specific vertical integration, we cover a lot of ground.

◉ Sales teams who work with our customers to assess data usage and show how our unstructured data solutions can optimize their storage infrastructure and provide the best performance at lower costs.

◉ Engineers and product management teams who continue to deliver new innovate capabilities for our Dell EMC unstructured data solutions that provide simplicity at any scale, the ability to handle any date anywhere, intelligent insights – from the edge, to the core, to the cloud.

The Dell Technologies team is honored to once again be recognized as a Leader in the Gartner Magic Quadrant for Distributed File Systems and Object Storage. We believe this recognition – as well as our January 2020 Gartner Peer Insights Customers’ Choice recognition for these very same categories – is a testament to our commitment to provide customers with powerful technologies that allow them to tap into the potential within their unstructured data and use this data to drive better business outcomes, solve some of the world’s biggest challenges and improve lives. We couldn’t have done it without our customers, channel and technology partners, and our engineers, sales and product management teams – a sincere thank you to all of you and a high five for helping us to deliver incredible results year after year in the distributed file and object storage category!

Tackling exponential data growth with software defined storage  

According to Gartner, “By 2024, large enterprises will triple their unstructured data stored as file or object storage on-premises, at the edge or in the public cloud, compared to 2020.” Gartner also noted that, “By 2024, 50% of the global unstructured data storage capacity will be deployed as software-defined storage (SDS) on-premises or in the public cloud, up from less than 20% in 2020.”

So, what does this mean for your organization? As your organization’s data continues to grow year-over-year, your complexity challenges also continue to rise as data increasingly spreads out across edge and core data centers and clouds. Software-defined storage (SDS) helps address these challenges by giving organizations greater control of their data and flexibility to deploy applications at the core, the cloud, or the edge; and continuously optimizes the environment.

Our new release of software defined Dell EMC PowerScale OneFS 9.1 is designed to deliver all the flexibility advantages of SDS while eliminating the need for the extra cost, time and personnel cycles required to validate whether storage hardware and the SDS software are going to work together correctly. Dell EMC DataIQ, included with PowerScale and ECS, delivers unique insights into data usage and storage system health, and provides users with self-service capabilities to move data on-demand

A complimentary copy of the 2020 Gartner Magic Quadrant for Distributed File Systems and Object Storage is available here. If you missed Dell Technologies World Digital Experience 2020, you can watch the replays of sessions on our unstructured data solutions here:

• Unlock the Potential of Unstructured Data with Dell EMC PowerScale
• Enterprise-Grade, High-Performance Object Storage: Dell EMC ECS
• Cloud Storage for the Data Decade
• AI Architectures: Platform considerations from Proof-of-Concepts to Large Scale Deployments
• theCube conversation: How to Handle Your File, Object, and Streaming Data
• theCube conversation: EarthCam Visualizes the World with Billions of Images with Dell EMC PowerScale

Source: delltechnologies.com

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And the Most Innovative Application of AI Goes to…

Last month, Dell Technologies was the recipient of the FutureNet award for Most Innovative Application of AI to enhance Customer Experience, in recognition of a solution deployed by Dell Technologies and ISV partner Cardinality at O2 (Telefonica U.K.).

Network Customer Experience Solution

The solution, which O2 calls Network Customer Experience (NCX), uses machine learning to evaluate patterns in massive volumes of network data and then assign an “NCX score” to every subscriber on O2’s network. The NCX score, in turn, is used by multiple departments within O2 to inform decisions around various business priorities including customer churn reduction, network quality of service improvements, device upgrades and service upsell.

The most exciting aspect of the NCX solution is how it helps O2 achieve the “Holy Grail” of telecom data analytics, which is to correlate network events directly with the experience of individual subscribers. With the ability to stream over 15B real-time events per day, Dell Technologies SP Analytics with Cardinality feeds over 300 network metrics (also known as network KPIs) into its machine learning algorithm. The algorithm, in turn, evaluates the KPIs based on their relative impact on customer satisfaction to generate an individualized NCX score for each active subscriber. O2 spent many months surveying its customers to weight the relative importance of network KPIs and then used the survey results to train the algorithm. The result is that O2 can take the “temperature” of subscribers at any given point in time and take individualized actions to maintain loyalty and improve the customer experience. Among the groups within O2 that utilize NCX insights in day-to-day operations are Network Operations, Marketing, and the CTO Office.

Solution Benefits

The NCX solution offers benefits to telco carriers of all sizes and these benefits can be realized in both revenue gains and cost reductions. Some examples:

◉ A net present value ROI for the overall project of $2M over 2 years for an initial project investment of $4.5M.

◉ Extending that same ROI over 6 years, cashflow generated from the same project could exceed $40M, a significant payback in cost savings and revenue from the initial $4.5M investment.

◉ 15% decrease in the cost of retaining subscribers. The total cost savings will vary from carrier to carrier based on number of subscribers, cost of retention and geographical market saturation.

◉ 20% increase in upsell, increasing total revenues to offset the decline in average revenue per user (ARPU) seen across the industry.

◉ Customer churn can typically be reduced by 1% to 2% over a 6-year period, which can be significant for large carriers with hundreds of thousands of subscribers.

◉ Complementing churn reduction is the number of subscribers that can be added as the result of implementing a project like NCX. Operators with 150,000 or more subscribers can see net new subscriber adds of over 100,000 over that same 6-year period, directly attributable to the insights from data analytics and subsequent actions taken to build the subscriber base.

The Dell Technologies solution at O2 is built on the following technology foundations:

◉ Dell Technologies’ approach to telco data analytics, which is a departure from traditional methods of delivering data-driven insights to customers. Rather than attempting to “own” the entire analytics stack—from data ingestion to storage, analytics, visualization, machine learning and automation—and thereby locking customers into monolithic vertical solutions, Dell Technologies gives customers choice. Do you prefer Tableau or Kibana for visualization and reporting? Zeppelin or Jupyter for computational analytics? Software-defined storage or a standalone storage system for your data lake? With Dell Technologies, customers can pick and choose the tools they are familiar with and avoid having to retrain staff and integrate unfamiliar technology into their analytics environments. By validating Dell Technologies hardware, storage and networking infrastructure with a broad ecosystem of partners and toolsets, we make it possible for customers to deploy analytics solutions in an open and disaggregated way while ensuring they get the performance and data management required to create innovative use cases, all while maintaining control and ownership of their data.

◉ The breadth of the Dell Technologies product and solution portfolio for analytics, which features a range of products that are purpose-built for a variety of analytics, machine learning and deep learning applications (such as the PowerEdge C4140, equipped with NVIDIA Tesla GPUs to unlock deep learning capabilities for applications ranging from computer vision, natural language processing and autonomous driving), and delivered as part of fully integrated and optimized Dell Technologies solutions that combine hardware, software and services to eliminate guesswork and reduce risk for customers, allowing them instead to focus on deriving business value from their data.

◉ Cardinality’s telco-optimized Perception platform, engineered to stream data from network probes and other telco data sources and then perform real-time data prep, cleansing and analytics on that data, storing the results and making them available to business users in the form of reports and visualizations, and to data scientists for further analytics and training of machine learning algorithms. Perception is Kubernetes-based and can run on-prem, in the cloud, and in hybrid environments.

◉ Dell Technologies ability to deliver and support end-to-end solutions for customers globally.

◉ O2’s ability to innovate on the joint solution and provide cross-functional value to business stakeholders looking to make data-driven decisions.

With award-winning solutions like NCX and a growing ecosystem of best-of-breed partners like Cardinality, Dell Technologies is excited to become the preferred IT infrastructure provider for telecom as the industry evolves toward 5G and data-centric business models built on disaggregated, cloud-based architectures.

Source: delltechnologies.com

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Introducing Easy and Highly Protected Multi-cloud Managed Services

Dell Technologies Cloud PowerProtect for Multi-Cloud provides a fully managed service with a single target for backup and recovery for all three of the major cloud players today. This service provides end-to-end flexibility to adjust throughput and backup windows to meet data protection policies -- without resource underutilization and management overhead.

Customers are looking for ways to easily manage and protect their workloads in a multi-cloud world with more freedom to choose vendors seamlessly and avoid the obvious vendor lock-in challenge. The daunting task of scattering data over many locations can create compliance risks, synchronization issues, and duplication of data across clouds. All of this can drive up resource costs and lead to inefficient backup processes with low reliability. In addition, the migration of data from one cloud to another is subject to high egress costs.    

Dell Technologies Cloud PowerProtect for Multi-Cloud, announced today at Dell Technologies World, solves these challenges with a fully managed service that provides a single target for backup and recovery for all three of the major cloud players today; AWS, Microsoft Azure and Google Cloud.

The multi-cloud capability is enabled by low latency, high throughput connections from a Dell EMC PowerProtect appliance in a central location adjacent to the public cloud providers. This architecture enables dynamic connectivity between backup source locations in the cloud and the PowerProtect for Multi-cloud service. This gives the customer end-to-end flexibility to adjust throughput and backup windows to meet data protection policies as part of an overall IT strategy without resource underutilization and management overhead.

The primary use cases that are provided with this service are:

◉ Cloud disaster recovery allows the restoration of point-in-time data availability to any public cloud provider in the event of data failure or data loss, avoiding cloud vendor lock-in.

◉ Backup to protect on-premises data in a cloud-adjacent location by leveraging familiar and trusted array-based replication from on-premises PowerProtect DD appliances replicating to the PowerProtect for Multi-cloud service.

◉ Long-Term Retention (cloud-tiering) is available for data on-premises and/or in the cloud. PowerProtect for Multi-cloud can be a remote site to protect data that needs to be retained for regulatory requirements (governance and compliance) as well as for workload migrations.

This service is powered by PowerProtect appliances, which deliver enterprise-grade features to meet stringent governance and compliance policies and up to up to 65x data deduplication leading to greater storage efficiency and lower costs. Plus, customers can realize even more cost savings with zero egress fees when leveraging this solution with Microsoft Azure.

In a nutshell, this solution brings the same features and benefits of an on-premises PowerProtect appliance to multi-cloud, delivered as a service.

PowerProtect for Multi-cloud builds on the Dell Technologies Cloud Storage for Multi-Cloud Offerings. Storage for Multi-cloud includes capabilities based on PowerMax, PowerStore, PowerScale and Dell EMC Unity XT as well as Disaster Recovery as-a-Service for VMware environments.

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Will a Dell EMC Data Science Certification Help Advance Your Career?

Whether you are an aspirant or a professional, Dell EMC Data Science Certifications will equip you with the practical and theoretical knowledge required to become a successful Data Scientist.

You will also discover what questions to ask when faced with data, draw inferences from it, and then visualize it to effectively communicate your findings. With a center on hands-on learning, you will also work on multiple projects and assignments in e-commerce, finance, entertainment, and many more.

Dell EMC needs to help enterprises, and other organizations worldwide keep up with IT's rapid progress by introducing four new certifications in its training program.

The Data Science certifications are part of Dell EMC’s Proven Professional program, and according to the company, they are being introduced to help minimize the barriers preventing enterprises from transforming. A Dell EMC report says that inadequate skills and expertise are among the top three obstacles that slow digital progress.

What Are the Objectives of Dell EMC Data Science Certification?

After attending the Dell EMC Data Science and Big Data Analytics training, candidates will be prepared to:

• Address big data analytics projects.
• Apply relevant analytic techniques and tools to analyze big data, create statistical models, and identify penetrations that can lead to actionable results.
• Select appropriate data visualizations to communicate analytic insights to business sponsors and analytical audiences.
• Practice and work on R and RStudio, MapReduce/Hadoop, in-database analytics, Window, and Madlib functions.

What Are the Prerequisites for Dell EMC Data Science Certification?

• Experience with SQL.
• Strong quantitative background with a solid understanding of basic statistics.
• If candidates are looking to update their programming skills, they should check out the many Spring People certification.
• Experience with a scripting language, such as Java, Perl, or Python (or R). 

Dell EMC Professional Certificate In Data Science

The Dell EMC Professional Certificate in Data Science will make you industry-ready. Data Science Certifications allow you to choose a course depending on your current skill level, career aspirations, and the time you are willing to devote. You will get to study the basic and advanced Data Science concepts in statistics, machine learning, and programming and incorporate them with Data Science.

In the statistics domain, you will learn about probability, regression, and inference, to name a few. Parts on machine learning will prepare you design algorithms that learn on their own. SQL and Hadoop will help you deal with large quantities of data- access it, manipulate it, and break it. Programming will help you put all of this into practice and receive the insights and results you want.

The case studies for the Data Science certification program have been carefully collected from various fields. No material which one you go in, you will use your Data Science skills. These skills can be used in banking, finance, entertainment, pharmaceutical, environment, economics, and many more.

Dell EMC Data Science Certifications prepare you for a career as a Data Scientist and highlight thoughts and tools you will need throughout the entire data science pipeline, from asking the right kinds of questions to making assumptions and publishing results. These Data Science certifications enable you to develop a collection of designs that you can showcase during your data science profile interviews. Data Science Certifications will prepare you for the real-world skills necessary as you begin working as a data scientist.

Building Data Science Projects

What recruiters and HR analysts need to see is relevant work experience, along with the Data Science Certifications you hold. A portfolio with projects that demonstrate your skills and a resume that shows you understand the bigger picture of doing business problems will make you stand aside from the rest. To be successful in this changing career, you should understand how to turn your analytical results into actionable information for other companies at your company.

Dell EMC DEA-7TT2 Certification | Insanely Popular Tips for Success

Ultimately, suppose you can do great work, positively impacting the enterprise’s digital transformation goals. In that case, you will be a good hire regardless of what certificates you hold.

In fact, given all of the Dell EMC Certifications in Data Science, you could learn everything you need to know. However, it would require you to research and work gathering up all the different resources out there and structuring them into a curriculum that enterprises and hiring professionals fancy.

Summary

As they say, no time like now! Data Science is mushrooming right now, with no signs of subsiding anytime soon. So, fully make the most out of it now if you are someone who likes to play with numbers and does not get enough to do calculations, equations, and that kind of stuff repeatedly. Data Science is setting for you!

Here is the time to wrap up the article. We hope you will have gained a little something out of sparing your time and effort in going through the write-up.

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You Say You Want an Evolution?

Reinvent your operating model with SONiC

When it comes to the network operating system (NOS), there is a revolution underway. If you’re reading this blog there’s a good chance you’re a part of it—or ready to join. The traditional vertically integrated networking software stack has some inherent limitations, and it’s driving a fundamental shift in the approach to enterprise networking. And that revolution is driving an important evolution of open source enterprise networking, with Software for Open Networking in the Cloud—or SONiC.

Since our announcement of the Enterprise SONiC Distribution by Dell Technologies earlier this year, we have continued to evolve this platform, improving the manageability and validation of SONiC on Dell platforms and achieving consistent API and CLI support for all features:

◉ Cables & optics qualification

◉ Performance & scale measurements

◉ Scale-out L2/L3 fabrics (VxLAN – EVPN Overlay)

◉ Scale-out L3 data center fabrics

◉ L2/L3 multicast top-of-rack/aggregation

The availability of a fully supported SONiC distribution with industry-leading manageability is exciting for our industry and for customers. SONiC, based on Linux with containerized microservices, was designed for cloud architecture from day one. The challenge has been to extend the benefits and flexibility of cloud to enterprise and service provider customers, who have unique requirements to integrate SONiC with their data center and network stacks. Enterprise SONiC Distribution by Dell Technologies provides the API, CLI and hardware configuration automation to create the bridge between these two worlds, and it unleashes rapid innovation and customer empowerment unlike anything we have seen in networking.

Recently, I had the pleasure of participating in a SONiC industry roundtable, hosted by IDC’s Research Vice President, Datacenter Networks, Brad Casemore. We were joined by Microsoft’s Dave Maltz, VMware’s Pere Monclus and Comcast’s Yiu Lee to discuss the networking revolution that is underway, and how it’s driving the evolution and increasing adoption of SONiC. In fact, as Brad described, IDC is seeing growing demand for switches that ship with or will run SONiC, and forecasts a SONIC data center switch market that will reach $2 billion by 2024.

Vive l’évolution

The industry networking software stack traditionally has been vertically integrated with the hardware, along with proprietary management and telemetry features. While the integrated model provided management and support for enterprises and service provider customers, it had many limitations including a slow innovation cycle and limited flexibility to customize the software stack for different deployment options.  These limitations were significantly amplified with the transition to cloud and modern applications. Traditional networking was not designed to support an empowered developer community that requires self-serve provisioning, rapid development and implementation of features and automated application deployment.  The industry experimented with many network operating systems and open source community projects to resolve this disconnect, with mixed results—until now.

SONiC has evolved into an industry software platform with a significant ecosystem and consistent growth in features and adoption. This is the result of deliberate design and investments to solve the root cause of the issues:

◉ SONiC is Linux-based NOS with a containerized architecture, which allows developers to leverage all the industry investment in bare metal automation, container management tools and lifecycle management. There is no need to develop separate tools for networking from the rest of the data center stack (compute and storage), as has been the case for traditional networks.

◉ Infrastructure managers, developers and site reliability engineering teams are able to use their familiar observability tools, dashboards and processes for networking immediately, and have direct integration with the rest of infrastructure, accelerating project timelines and improving availability dramatically.

◉ The cloud-native architecture of SONiC makes it possible to support different silicon and CPU options in many hardware form factors, which expands the use cases significantly to edge, SmartNICs, 5G, NVMe-oF appliances, etc.

◉ Additionally, the Enterprise SONiC Distribution by Dell Technologies includes support for API, CLI and hardware configuration for all the features, enabling seamless support for current data center and network deployments. Developers and infrastructure managers no longer have to choose between forward looking cloud architecture and optimization of current deployments with automation.

This increasing maturity of SONiC means the time is right for adoption. In our roundtable discussion, Comcast’s Yiu Lee talked about how SONiC delivers the reliability and ease of day-in, day-out operation without additional investment in development resources, particularly as feature sets have become more mature and the SONiC community has gotten stronger.

It is really exciting to be at this point in the development—in the evolution—of SONiC, and it will be great to experience the acceleration of innovation that is made possible by this new architecture.

I encourage you to get some additional perspective on SONiC by watching the replay of the SONiC industry roundtable. In doing so, I think you’ll see that the time is right to evolve your network infrastructure.

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Dell EMC PowerScale and ECS Tackle Data Analytics with Cloudera CDP

The development of our Dell EMC PowerScale and ECS platforms was informed by the challenges the enterprise faces when scaling distributed systems like Hadoop. As data teams continue to scale their Hadoop and analytics systems, the need increases for flexible compute and storage. Data teams now are processing more data than ever before, but with the growth of data comes significant management challenges. To address these issues, many data teams pivot to architectures that allow for independent scaling of compute and storage in both Object and HDFS for Hadoop. At Dell Technologies, we have helped our customers work through these challenges for many years.

Since collaboration with Hortonworks and Cloudera began in 2015, Dell Technologies has engaged in joint engineering and validation efforts to bring our leading edge file and native HDFS storage product Dell EMC PowerScale and distributed object storage product Dell EMC ECS to both Hortonworks Data Platform (HDP) and Cloudera Data Hub (CDH).

Extending the Partnership

With the release of the Cloudera Data Platform (CDP), the Cloudera team is enabling IT to deliver easier, faster, and safer self-services analytics experiences. Today, we are announcing that we will work with Cloudera to validate and certify CDP with PowerScale OneFS and ECS. Our new partnership is built on the base of many years of QATS certification for both CDH & HDP platforms with our unstructured data solutions.

“As customers continue to expand their Machine Learning workloads and the storage requirements evolve, we’re excited to collaborate with Dell Technologies to bring to market solutions backed by its leading-edge unstructured data storage offerings like PowerScale and ECS,” said Nadeem Asghar, VP of Solutions and Partner Engineering at Cloudera. “Dell Technologies shares our commitment to ensuring our customers can always stay ahead of industry and technology trends and we look forward to delivering solutions to our customers for years to come.” 

Benefits for Data Teams

This new three-year investment strengthens the Dell Technologies and Cloudera relationship, allowing us to:

1. Continue to support our existing joint customers on existing and future hardware and software releases.

2. Bring shared storage model at scale with innovative and fully validated end-to-end platforms to support the growing Hadoop ecosystem.

Over the course of next few months, we are contracted to work jointly with Cloudera to certify PowerScale as the primary HDFS store for CDP-Private Cloud Base 7.1.x. In the same timeframe, we also plan to certify Dell ECS through QATS as the S3 object store for CDP 7.1.x.

Building a Solid Data Foundation for Analytics

Finally, PowerScale’s capability for data consolidation that can manage data for several Hadoop distributions simultaneously enables us to offer phased migration services from CDH or HDP to CDP. This simplifies the process and significantly minimizes business risk in migrating to the new Hadoop distribution. At Dell Technologies, we plan to launch these migration services as CDP-Private Cloud Base becomes available for on-prem deployment.

Source: dellemc.com

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Unleash Innovation with PowerEdge and OpenManage

Innovation is more than just getting there first. It is about understanding what it takes to deliver flawlessly and consistently. Importantly, it requires an enterprise-wide vision of data for a connected experience, rapid enablement and continuous refinement.

New capabilities across the Dell EMC PowerEdge server and OpenManage solutions portfolio help empower enterprises to become innovation engines with scalable, connected and reliable infrastructure and tools. Additionally, a new code collaboration with Splunk will help jump-start the insights-driven IT operations journey by uncovering the hidden insights in their data.

Connected Experience with the Dell EMC PowerEdge XE7100

Technology innovation across an organization is integral to delivering customer value. Underlying this process is the Dell EMC PowerEdge XE server family of purposely-built infrastructure like designed for complex emerging workloads.

The new PowerEdge XE7100 is the industry’s highest-density 5U storage server with flexible configuration options engineered for intelligent video analytics, media-streaming and object storage. It holds up to 100 high-capacity hard drives, or 67%  more drives than a competitive system, to store more data securely. Additionally, the PowerEdge XE7100 is equipped with one or two dual-socket nodes with up to four accelerators to avoid data silos to boost inferencing performance.

The Flatiron Institute provides a highly interactive research environment for researchers, data scientists and programmers to work together through computational methods, including data analysis, theory, modeling and simulation. “Being able to retain long-term and complex data for researchers to access and collaborate in joint research is critical,” said Dr. Ian Fisk, co-director, Flatiron Institute. “The new Dell EMC PowerEdge XE7100 enables us to provide a highly collaborative IT environment to the pursuit of understanding the phenomena of our world.”

With the XE7100, high performance does not equate to higher total cost of ownership (TCO) and less  simplicity. In a standard 42U rack, the denser, 5U PowerEdge XE7100 can scale easily with up to 200 more high-capacity drives, 20% less administrative efforts, 50% fewer power cables, and it enhances power supply efficiency for lower operation costs and carbon footprint with up to 40% less power.

Payment solutions for PowerEdge XE7100 include Flex On Demand, which provides customers with the ability to pay for technology as they use it. When it is time to scale for business growth, it provides immediate access to buffer capacity and adjusts payments to match actual usage.

Rapid Enablement from OpenManage Systems Management Enhancements

With intelligent tools, customers can adapt and maintain the infrastructure quickly to drive innovation. When technology platforms can be enabled and expanded seamlessly, IT becomes an enabler of rapid innovation.

The Dell EMC OpenManage Systems Management portfolio enables rapid deployment and scalability of dynamic infrastructure with the following benefits:

◉ Reduces complexity with full-stack management capabilities in the same place for both physical and virtual hosts with OpenManage Integration for VMware vCenter v.5.2. With the support of the PowerEdge XE2420 server for the Edge, OpenManage Integration for VMware vCenter delivers a seamless systems management experience at full speed from the edge to the hybrid-cloud. For example, the admin can update hypervisor and firmware in an 8-node PowerEdge cluster in less than 4 minutes.

◉ Automates and simplifies server lifecycle tasks and scales operations rapidly with OpenManage Enterprise FlexSelect architecture, which provides ultimate flexibility and reduces the learning curve. With one interface, users can:

     ◉ Prevent downtime through intelligent analytics, predictive alerts and automatically generated support tickets with OpenManage Enterprise SupportAssist.

     ◉ Streamline and automate the catalog and repositories update tasks with OpenManage Enterprise Update Manager

     ◉ Identify and control underutilized resources and power consumption to aid workload planning with OpenManage Enterprise Power Manager.

◉ This innovative FlexSelect pluggable architecture enables seamless integrations with industry leading management consoles to make PowerEdge server management flexible.

     ◉ Streamlines IT service and operation management workflows for broader organization with OpenManage Integration with ServiceNow.

Continuous Refinement with Infrastructure Insights

Infrastructure insights, powered by AIOps capabilities from OpenManage Systems Management tools like iDRAC, help continuously refine the data center to become resilient. iDRAC streams over 180 server telemetry metrics for proactive monitoring. Analyzing and visualizing this data helps uncover hidden insights between seemingly unrelated events for proactive management. With fine-tuning, these insights can make the infrastructure and business more flexible. OpenManage Enterprise and plugins automate notification and action following pre-defined policy, so your infrastructure is more responsive and secure.

To help our customers jumpstart an insights-driven operation, Dell Technologies partnered with data analytics leader Splunk to develop the Dell EMC iDRAC Redfish for Splunk Enterprise add-on for ingesting Redfish telemetry data.  Our experts also developed a visualization dashboard allowing organizations to monitor the full spectrum of business and infrastructure performance insights in one dashboard.

Source: dellemc.com

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New DLm Enhancements Deliver Cloud Connectivity and Simplify Operations

Dell Technologies has a 30-year history of innovation and leadership in mainframe storage. That legacy of innovation and leadership continues today with Dell EMC Disk Library for mainframe (DLm) virtual tape release 5.3. This release adds Amazon S3 cloud support, supporting IBM-compatible Transparent Cloud Tiering, 3-site automated tape failover and a new graphical user interface for the DLm8500. These new features were announced at SHARE Virtual 2020: Power-on Reset, along with the new DLm2500 for feature rich, yet cost-effective mainframe storage.

In supporting IBM-compatible Transparent Cloud Tiering, we’re leveraging our award-winning all-flash, PowerMax 8000 as well as PowerProtect DD series of deduplication storage and optionally, object storage using Dell EMC Elastic Cloud Storage (ECS). All of these products combine to ensure that your physical (or virtual) tape requirements for mainframe data protection are exceeded, whether you need to stretch your tape to cover newer requirements, commit data to the cloud while saving on mainframe CPU costs or simply, finally, say goodbye to cumbersome, complex physical tape.

DLm Virtual Tape enables Amazon AWS and Amazon GovCloud via S3

Dell Technologies recognizes that your mainframe storage strategy must increasingly leverage your organization’s expanding cloud infrastructure in order to reduce costs. Ideally, this is done using capacity within an existing cloud infrastructure and offloading physical or virtual tape data identified as requiring long-term retention. According to Gartner, “by 2025, 35% of data center mainframe storage capacity for backup and archive will be deployed in the cloud to reduce costs and improve agility, which is an increase from less than 5% in 2020.”

In the years since DLm first wrote to the cloud, Amazon has expanded their cloud offering, tailoring AWS to include US government users with an offering known as “Amazon GovCloud” which DLm now supports in this release, making it easier for US federal agencies with mainframes and an AWS account to store their data.

PowerMax 8000 with DLm Virtual Tape and Dell EMC ECS helps eliminate costly mainframe CPU usage 

Until IBM created “Transparent Cloud Tiering,” movement of data across tiers of storage using Hierarchical Storage Management (HSM) consumed a considerable amount of mainframe CPU cycles (aka MIPs) each time data was moved between storage tiers to (ultimately) the lowest cost storage, originally, physical tape, but now, ideally, the cloud. This movement of data has never been an efficient use of the mainframe. Transparent Cloud Tiering aligns with Gartner’s most recent recommendations for mainframe tape to:

“Reduce billable MSU consumption and license costs by offloading mainframe backup and space management functions to non-billable zIIP engines and cloud storage.”

Now, Dell EMC PowerMax 8000 and DLm users can also make use of Transparent Cloud Tiering, fully compatible in operation with IBM’s implementation. With Dell EMC IBM-Compatible Transparent Cloud Tiering, a Dell EMC Rest API Proxy running on the mainframe communicates with HSM and directs the movement of data on PowerMax storage to and from the DLm, and ultimately onto Dell EMC ECS cloud object storage while associated metadata is updated in the cloud. This implementation of PowerMax and DLm (and optionally ECS for the cloud repository) not only results in the elimination of mainframe CPU cycles (MIPS) to move the data from the storage tier to the tape tier and finally to the cloud tier, but also leverages a fast FICON tape interface while giving users an on-prem. vs. cloud option for data.

DLm automated failover is also enhanced with additional multitenancy and 3-site capability

DLm continues to evolve its support in a multiplicity of environments, helping to leverage your investment to be more than just “tape replacement”. Unlike other virtual tape systems, DLm’s “multi-tenancy” and “shared storage” capability enables your organization to use virtual tape to satisfy the simultaneous needs of multiple departments’ demand for their own “unique” tape, with their own set of specifications like RPO/RTO or tape addressing. If you’re a storage service provider, you’ll probably recognize that DLm can help you generate more profit with a single investment by meeting the individual needs of several customers.

Now, DLm 8500 and Dell EMC GDDR automated failover version 5.3 expand on the ability to automate the failover of DLms to a 3rd asynchronous site, which is a common configuration for DR.

Simplifying mainframe virtual tape operations and sharing storage

Also being introduced in this release, DLm8500’s simple, intuitive graphical interface; the ideal operational interface for companies that may need to stretch their existing storage administration staff to cover more systems or may be re-assigning non-mainframe staff to manage mainframe tape operations. From the new “dashboard” to a consolidated view of tape volumes and tape libraries, the DLm8500’s GUI makes tape operations a simple matter of “point and click.”

Source: dellemc.com

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Three New Reasons to Use PowerScale OneFS to Tackle Unstructured Data

It’s estimated that unstructured data (file or object) often accounts for nearly 80% of the data footprint of an organization. That amount of data is expected to grow year-over-year and is increasingly spread out across core data centers and clouds, causing significant complexity for customers.

Think about it – more businesses are looking at hybrid and multi-cloud options that provide simplified management and automation capabilities. Organizations are looking for solutions that provide the performance needed to harness their data to accelerate outcomes. And we’ve certainly seen an increase in the need for flexible tools that support user sharing / collaboration no matter wherever the data lives.

Dell EMC PowerScale, our industry leading scale-out NAS platform, is relied on by thousands of organizations to address their unstructured data needs for simplified management, performance and flexibility – at the edge, the core or the cloud. Today’s release of PowerScale OneFS 9.1, the power behind our PowerScale storage systems, offers several new features that further build on these capabilities, including:

1. Simplified management

◉ In the face of increased threats, simplified, scalable and powerful CAVA-based anti-virus software support that is compatible with all of the leading antivirus vendors.

◉ Alerting of node-level and cluster-wide data that is configurable with a great deal of granularity to meet business needs.

◉ Backups have been significantly enhanced to include advanced restarting capabilities that provide faster backups and improve RPO and RTO objectives.

◉ Increased cluster uptime, which is enabled by faster detection and resolution of node or resource unavailability.

2. Faster performance

◉ OneFS 9.1 is optimized to provide maximum performance for flexible workloads. CloudPools software has been further optimized to deliver faster throughput and lower latency for seamlessly recalling tiered data from the cloud. Internal testing has also shown that it’s possible to have faster data access for encrypted NFS data for some workloads.

3. Increased flexibility

◉ OneFS allows multiple PBs of storage to be managed by a single admin. OneFS 9.1 delivers even more features like flexible audit log management and purging to meet security, compliance and business needs.

◉ Flexibility in configurable encryption settings of SyncIQ replicated traffic provides fine-grained control to admins.

Dell Technologies is at the forefront of storing, accessing, retrieving and managing files at petabyte-scale. So, if you are looking to your lower your IT costs, maximize your storage efficiency and future-proof your storage for emerging workloads on a platform that can linearly scale capacity or performance as needed – we encourage you to check out our PowerScale storage systems and OneFS 9.1.

The new release of the software defined OneFS 9.1 is designed to provide you with the flexibility that can help do more with your unstructured data – whether it’s at the data center edge, the core or the cloud. Are you ready to scale-out with us? You’ll be glad that you did.

Source: dellemc.com

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Bare Metal: Making a Comeback

From DCOps to DevOps

Information technology began its journey with mainframes. Then came the x86 revolution. x86 ruled the world by providing a platform to run applications and databases. Next came the age of virtualization, which shifted the focus from hardware to a software-defined infrastructure that allowed IT workers to run multiple applications on a single server with simple portability between servers.

As the business landscape continues to evolve, there is a new wave of “as-a-service” solutions to address everything from infrastructure (IaaS) to platforms (PaaS) to all manner of software applications (SaaS). It is clear that “as-a-service” is going to be here for a long time, as it provides greater flexibility in terms of commercial models (e.g., OpEx over CapEx, subscription-based) and operational agility (e.g., on-demand, self-serve, API-driven, automation).

Bare metal, though a foundational element for all the XaaS solutions, was buried under abstractions. Today, we see a revived interest in bare metal across industries; and for some, bare metal is a fundamental substrate in the legacy IaaS definition that, when isolated, brings key benefits to enterprise customers.

What is bare metal, and why is it regaining its lost glory?

Bare metal is a physical server with no software/hypervisor—just processors, memory, NICs, and storage. A key advantage of bare metal is that it allows applications to access hardware resources directly, whether in the form of CPU, DDR4 RAM, NVMe, GPU, FPGA, or SmartNICs.

Dell Bare Metal Server

So, what’s driving the revival in bare metal demand?

◉ Resource intensive workloads

Applications & Databases are demanding more compute, memory, and storage resources. Use cases like Gaming, video transcoding, and augmented/virtual reality applications require predictable performance. Latency-sensitive applications such as autonomous vehicles and telco workloads will need access to physical NICs to offload data plane processing.

◉ The rise of artificial intelligence and machine learning

Enterprises have started embedding AI/ML in their business processes. These are compute-intensive processes that require additional resources in the form of GPUs for accelerated training and inferencing.

◉ The maturity of the cloud-native

As more and more workloads are created with a microservices-based architecture, technologies such as containers and their orchestration have matured. Containers on bare metal are gaining momentum, as they provide significantly lower latency for memory access and much better CPU-utilization metrics. Other initiatives like Metal operator, MetalLB, and Metal3  are also making it easier to run containers on bare metal.

◉ Security and compliance

With full control and access to the hardware components, bare metal lets you choose how a server is being used and who has access to it, ensuring data protection for sensitive applications.

◉ Real-time analytics

Many enterprises are looking for hyper-customized, in-memory data processing to leverage real-time analytics on their streaming data. Bare metal offers high performance with access to NVMe, DDR4 RAM, and other accelerators, providing millions of IOPS.

Bare metal provisioning is a complex task that involves multiple tools and time-consuming processes. But what if the same bare metal is made available in the cloud, where it can be consumed in mere minutes? This new approach of bare metal as a service would allow users to have full access to the servers with cloud-based automation so that users can focus on their applications without having to worry about underlying server provisioning and hardware maintenance.

Dell Technologies has partnered with Equinix to provide Equinix Metal to provide a Bare-Metal-as-a-Service solution. Equinix Metal offers the same user experience as Dell bare metal servers but in a service-based consumption model. In this model, Equinix manages the server procurement, installation, and hardware lifecycle, while customers still enjoy complete server access with the full advantages of automation, thus accelerating innovation.

BMaaS solution layers

1. Hardware layer. This layer is powered by the industry-leading Dell PowerEdge series of servers. Users can access these servers through API, CLI, SDK, or UI without maintaining their own data centers.

2. Southbound abstraction layer. This layer is responsible for bootstrapping the bare metal server, power management, and firmware management—all without any human interactions. This layer is also being made open source for community participation.

3. Cloud API layer. This layer provides user access to bare metal servers. It allows on-demand consumption of servers, self-serve portal, API access, and billing management. It facilitates programmatic interaction with all aspects of the server—including cloud-init and metadata—using conventional HTTP requests. Native API libraries in all popular languages (Golang, Ruby, Python, Java, PHP) are also available.

Bare Metal as-a-service stack

The entire solution has been designed with DevOps principles in mind, where the full server can be consumed as a piece of software. Users can leverage tools like Terraform and Ansible and integrate the server deployment in their CI/CD pipeline.

Terraform template variables

What does BMaaS do for your business?

This new operating model is aimed at:

◉ Eliminating CapEx outflow

◉ Achieving predictable OpEx

◉ Accelerating application deployment

◉ Making a business more agile

◉ Allowing hybrid-cloud strategy

◉ Simplifying infrastructure management

◉ Promoting Cloud-native development with APIs & DevOps tooling support for bare metal

◉ Serving high performance compute services to all bare metal hungry workloads

Choosing the right compute platform is critical for success. Doing it the right way can move your business priority shift from data center operations to DevOps, where you manage the apps, and we manage the ops. Lastly, bare metal is the catalyst for the anticipated promise of a true multi and hybrid cloud platform.

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