Introducing New Storage and Data Protection Multi-Cloud Innovations

The future of IT is hybrid – a world that balances the right public cloud services with the right on-premises infrastructure to provide the performance, scale, functionality and control required of modern applications and development paradigms. As customers consider this hybrid model, it is important to take a data-first approach. With data being the most valuable asset of your business, you must be mindful of how it is to be accessed, managed, protected, and secured. In this blog we demonstrate examples of this approach – from sharing data across clouds, to protecting data from cyberattacks, and cloud-enabled disaster recovery for quickly resuming normal operations.

It’s a multi-cloud world

Most organizations today find themselves working with two or more cloud providers to meet workload-specific requirements. Each of these clouds offers benefits and strengths – so it is no surprise that organizations end up managing a mix of investments in multiple clouds.

What we do – in collaboration with Faction – is provide a consistent way to manage storage and data protection for multiple clouds from a single place with one uniform experience.

Our current multi-cloud portfolio consists of:

◉ Dell Technologies Cloud Storage for Multi-cloud combines the performance and enterprise-grade features of Dell Technologies storage systems (Dell EMC PowerScale, PowerStore, PowerMax and Unity XT) and the best native cloud services in AWS, Azure, Google Cloud and Oracle Cloud to offer customers simple, flexible, direct multi-cloud access.

◉ Dell Technologies Cloud PowerProtect for Multi-cloud is a fully managed service that enables customers to efficiently protect their data and applications across public clouds in a single destination via a low latency connection.

Today we are introducing new multi-cloud storage and data protection capabilities, as well as sharing the results of third-party studies that demonstrate the power and flexibility of our multi-cloud offerings.

Delivering secure, simple, managed cyber recovery for multi-cloud

Protecting against ransomware and other cyberattacks is quickly rising in importance for both IT and business executives. With the average cost of an attack being $13M, it’s easy to see why this is so concerning. As IT deployments become more complex, with on-prem deployments combined with applications running in multiple public clouds, it is hard to build a world class centralized solution to protect critical data from the modern threat of sophisticated cyberattacks… until today.

With PowerProtect for Multi-cloud customers can protect their business from ransomware, insider attacks and other cyber threats with confidence. Today we are building on this solution by adding new capabilities to combine the security of our battle hardened Dell EMC PowerProtect Cyber Recovery with the simplicity and economics of the cloud.

Customers benefit from a both physical and logical isolation of their critical data – an air-gapped and secure Cyber Recovery vault in a cloud-adjacent Faction-powered data center. Data integrity is further ensured through enterprise-grade features like data immutability, and our CyberSense intelligent analytics, which enables data recovery with the confidence that it is free from malware or other compromise.

Should a cyberattack occur, your data can be recovered from the vault back to your data center, or the cloud of your choice: AWS, Azure, Google Cloud and Oracle Cloud – and you can get back to business.

Enabling simplified disaster recovery with Superna for PowerScale for Multi-cloud

PowerScale customers looking for a full cloud-enabled disaster recovery solution can now take advantage of Superna Eyeglass DR Manager for replication orchestration and metadata management. With the hosted software from Superna, users can protect themselves from disaster with confidence, and enable continuous business operations by leveraging the cloud instead of incurring the cost and complexity of a dedicated secondary disaster recovery site.

Using Superna Eyeglass DR Manager with PowerScale for Multi-cloud, customers can replicate data from their data centers to Faction’s cloud-adjacent data center. The enterprise-grade feature-set enables one button failover, flexible SyncIQ scheduling, continuous readiness monitoring, DR testing, data loss exposure analysis, reporting and more. Applications can be recovered to the cloud-adjacent data center, or in the customer’s public cloud of choice. The solution can be purchased directly from Dell Technologies via the Extended Technologies Complete program.

PowerScale for Multi-cloud delivers massive performance at scale and dramatic cost savings

Our PowerScale for Multi-cloud service allows for a single data repository to be served to multiple clouds. Customers can take advantage of compute resources across the clouds simultaneously to process their data sets. There is zero data gravity, as the data is not being transferred from one cloud environment to another, but simply accessed when needed. This approach to multi-cloud data access avoids the complexity, cost and time of managing multiple data copies.

Recently, the Enterprise Strategy Group (an IT analyst research and validation agency), conducted two testing audits to verify the functionality and performance of PowerScale for Multi-cloud.

The first study explored a demanding, data-intensive genomic processing workload. The validation showcased how a challenging workload can benefit by using the processing capabilities of multiple clouds with a single data set provided by PowerScale.

Benefits noted in the report include:

◉ Massive scale: GPU compute cores were used simultaneously across the three clouds and scaled up to one million cores, illustrating the ease of tapping dynamically into compute resources of multiple clouds. While spot instances are offered by public clouds at a discount, there is no guarantee of their availability. The workload was moved between clouds to take advantage of the availability and low cost of spot instances.

◉ Extreme performance: The solution can reach up to 2 Tb/s simultaneous multi-cloud throughput via multi-protocol data access on PowerScale for NFS, SMB, HDFS and S3. The self-service bandwidth re-provisioning enabled the re-allocation of the supported service bandwidth between the clouds to ensure that even the most demanding workload gets the performance that it needs.

◉ Dramatic storage cost savings: Storage costs were as much as 89% lower with PowerScale for Multi-cloud, when compared to managing three copies of data across three clouds.

The second ESG study focused on PowerScale for Microsoft Azure, our all-inclusive, zero egress solution for Azure customers. In addition to validating a genomics workload, ESG explored PowerScale’s integration with native cloud services, using Azure HDInsight for an analytics workload. HDInsight worked seamlessly, integrating with PowerScale’s native HDFS data access protocol. PowerScale did what it does best, scaling throughput linearly as the Hadoop worker node count increased, with no sign of saturation. ESG called the service “one of the most performant cloud file services we know of in the market today.”

Additionally, we continue to expand our multi-cloud services to new regions, most recently adding Chicago to the list of Azure deployment location choices.

Source: delltechnologies.com

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Advance Your Analytics Workloads With Cloudera and Dell Technologies

Data is the lifeblood of the modern business in today’s data era. It is the fuel that powers smarter decision making while unlocking newfound productivity and progress. Over the last decade, we at Dell Technologies have been delivering deeper insights to our customers with flexible, scalable, enterprise data analytics solutions that bridge structured and unstructured data.

Big Data Analytics platforms like Apache Hadoop are key in deriving insights from this massively growing datasphere. We have been partnering with the leading analytics platform providers like Cloudera to bring jointly engineered, optimized and tested Big Data Analytics solutions to market while providing extensive consulting and professional services to those who need it to help our customers at every step of their digital transformation journey.

Together, Dell Technologies and Cloudera are committed to deliver data insights anywhere, from the edge to the core data center to the cloud. With Cloudera Data Platform (CDP) Private Cloud Base combined with scale-out NAS like Dell EMC PowerScale and enterprise object storage like Dell EMC ECS, you can soft-migrate and seamlessly transition from Hortonworks to CDP. Consolidating data in one place also simplifies containerization and/or virtualization of Hadoop, so you can provide Hadoop-as-a-Service with PowerScale as the storage foundation.

With the recent launch of the new PowerEdge servers, customers can get the compute power needed for all of their workloads and applications, including the highly compute-intensive Big Data Analytics solutions. Optimizing the latest technologies and featuring 3rd Generation AMD EPYC™ processors, PowerEdge R6515 accelerates data processing capabilities by up to 60% in Big Data Hadoop databases, speeding time to insights.

Customers are benefitting from the innovations coming out of Dell Technologies and Cloudera. It is helping us transform too. Our own IT organization is delivering data-driven business insights to employees and customers around the world by running analytics and AI workloads on a massive data lake powered by Cloudera’s Apache distribution and our infrastructure portfolio of PowerEdge, PowerSwitch, PowerScale and PowerFlex.

Cloudera recently recognized Dell Technologies’ leadership in Hadoop/Big Data analytics and our long-term relationship with the Global Partner of the Year award. This award was granted, among other things, based on year-over-year growth trajectory, development commitment and technology alignment, and, joint wins and success stories over the past year.

Going forward, we are working with Cloudera for customers to consume Hadoop solutions in any way they need. You can buy the individual solution components, such as servers and storage on demand, and/or you can buy integrated Hadoop solutions on demand.

Source: delltechnologies.com

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Empowering Today’s Patients With Smarter Data

In our digitally enabled world, we’ve come to expect instant access to information, services and products. Until recently, people have had limited insight into their own medical information and little choice in how they receive healthcare services. As one of the nation’s top integrated healthcare systems, Sentara Healthcare decided to drive industry transformation, starting with our own digital services.

Acting on foresight

Several years ago, my team and I recognized that we had to focus on developing solutions that make it easier for our patients and health plan members to access their own personal information and consume our service offerings. For example, patients were still having to call to schedule appointments, drive to medical clinics to meet with their doctor, and wait for a phone call to get an answer to a particular question. We wanted to develop digital services to provide our patients with more self-service options such as the ability to schedule appointments, message clinicians, and meet by video with doctors wherever they were — at homes, offices or even hotel rooms.

To realize our customer-centric vision, we had to simplify data access for all our users, regardless of their geographic location. We also had to maximize IT staff efficiency, so they could spend more of their time developing new services for patients. This meant replacing our traditional IT model — which was built on siloed systems — with a highly agile, secure and flexible multi-cloud solution (pdf attachment).

We were proposing a complete overhaul of our culture, technologies and workflows, along with how we interacted with our stakeholders. Working with healthcare data leaves no margin for error, so we engaged Dell Technologies as a strategic partner to help design and implement a data-first, cloud-smart model that could meet our existing and future requirements.

Being ready for the unexpected

All the new digital services that we implemented emphasized the critical importance of greater IT agility.

The pandemic hit shortly after we had completed the initial rollout of our multi-cloud solution from Dell Technologies. As a result, we already had in place a highly flexible infrastructure, allowing us to quickly pivot and meet our new requirements with minimal cost and interruption. Leveraging our existing workforce, we immediately rolled out new types of telehealth services so that patients could still get needed care during quarantines, wherever they were sheltering in place. We also enabled many of our employees to work from home, while meeting our requirements for network security and data protection.

With our new capabilities, we accelerated data access by 88% and streamlined our electronic medical-record workflows. Instead of taking 15 hours, processing data from the system now takes just two. We’re also saving millions of dollars yearly in IT operational costs.

Transparency that empowers

Today, we have the IT infrastructure foundation needed to expand what we call Sentara’s “digital front door,” to give patients greater insight into their health data and expand how they can interact with their care teams. Our IT department is also working with clinicians and other staff to ensure they have the tools they need to stay productive and improve communication and collaboration with patients.

Increasing data transparency in our industry ultimately improves healthcare. When patients receive their test results as quickly as their doctors do, there’s less waiting and unnecessary anxiety. By providing digital information along with test results, we help people understand what numbers mean and if any action is recommended. Armed with actual data about their own health, people can then use this information to make lifestyle adjustments and avoid ungrounded fear.

As patients get access to a continuous stream of personalized healthcare data, they can become more proactive about their own wellness. For example, they’ll be able to ask informed questions about why a test result continues to change, and what they can do to reverse any unhealthy trends. Would diet adjustments or exercise be as — or more — effective than taking medication?

We’ll see other positive outcomes from the collaborative, patient-centric healthcare model. It will drive the creation of new digital solutions designed to help us improve our health at any age. Cost models will also shift, so instead of using valuable resources on reactive care when we’re sick, we’ll invest proactively in helping ourselves live longer, healthier lives.

Source: delltechnologies.com

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Why Is Data Science Important? Ways Data Science Brings Value to the Business

Data science is a broad term and incorporates tools, business acumen, algorithms, and machine learning to derive insights and intelligence from raw data. The tools used to analyze and make predictions range from Dell EMC, SAS, Apache Spark, and Tableau.

In describing why data science is essential to how information is collected and processed, Data science gives meaningful information based on large amounts of complex data or big data. Data science, or data-driven science, combines various statistics and computation fields to interpret data for decision-making purposes.

Path of a Data Science Can Add Value to Business

1. Enabling Management to Make Better Decisions

An experienced data scientist is expected to be a trusted advisor and strategic partner to the organization’s upper management by assuring that the staff maximizes their analytics capabilities. A data scientist communicates and explains the value of the institution’s data to promote improved decision-making rules across the entire organization through measuring, tracking, and recording performance metrics and other information.

2. Directing Actions Based on Data Science Trends - Which in Turn Aid to Define Goals

A data scientist explores and examines the organization’s data. They recommend and prescribe specific actions that will enhance the institution’s performance, better engage customers, and eventually increase profitability.

3. Challenging the Staff to Choose Best Practices and Concentrate on Issues That Matter

One of a data scientist responsibilities is to ensure that the staff is familiar and well-versed with the organization’s analytics product. They prepare the team for success by demonstrating its effective use to extract insights and drive action. Once the staff knows the product capabilities, their focus can shift to addressing key business challenges.

4. Identifying Opportunities

Data scientists question the existing processes and accept developing additional methods and analytical algorithms during their interaction with the organization's current analytics system. Their job requires them to improve the value derived from the organization’s data continuously.

5. Decision Making with Quantifiable, Data-driven Evidence

With data scientists' arrival, data gathering and analyzing from different ways has ruled out the necessity to take high stake risks. Data scientists build models using existing data that affect a variety of potential actions - in this way, an organization can learn which path will make the best business outcomes.

6. Testing These Decisions

Half of the battle includes making certain decisions and completing those changes. It is crucial to understand how those decisions have affected the organization. This is where a data scientist comes in. It gives someone who can measure the key metrics related to basic settings and quantify their success.

7. Description and Refining of Target Audiences

From Google Analytics to customer surveys, most companies will have at least one cause of customer data collected. But if it is not used well - for instance, to identify demographics - the data is not helpful. The importance of data science is based on the ability to take existing data that is not significantly helpful on its own and combine it with other data points to make penetrations an organization can practice learning more about its customers and audience.

A data scientist can help identify the key groups with precision via a thorough analysis of disparate data sources. With this in-depth information, organizations can tailor services and products to customer groups and increase profit margins flourish.

8. Selecting the Right Talent for the Organization

Reading through resumes is a daily chore in a recruiter’s life, but that is changing due to big data. With the amount of information available on talent - through social media, corporate databases, and job search websites - data science specialists can work their way through all these data points to discover the candidates who best fit the organization’s needs.

By working the vast amount of data that is already available, in-house processing for resumes and applications, and even sophisticated data-driven aptitude tests and games - data science can ease your recruitment team's make more rapid and more specific selections.

Conclusion

Data science can add value to any business that can use its data well. Data science is essential to any company in any industry, from statistics and insights across workflows and hiring new candidates to help senior staff make better-informed decisions. If you are interested in becoming a Data Science expert, we have the right guide. The Data Science Career will provide you insights into the most trending technologies, the top companies that are hiring, the skills needed to jumpstart your career in the thriving field of Data Science, and allows you a personalized roadmap to becoming a successful Data Science expert.

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Dell Technologies Raises the Bar for Delivering Technological Innovation

We are pleased to announce that both Dell EMC PowerStore and Dell EMC VxRail have been named to the 2020 Products of the Year by TechTarget’s Storage Magazine and SearchStorage. Dell Technologies was the only major vendor to win in two categories. In the hyper-converged and composable infrastructure category, Dell EMC VxRail E Series with Intel Optane persistent memory was named the Gold Award winner while Dell EMC PowerStore took home the Silver Award in the disk and disk subsystem category.

The key to transformation is taking rapid action at the right time. That is why we put our customers and partners at the center of everything we do – helping them to stay agile. The 2020 Product of the Year selection, which marks just the latest award in a string of customer, partner and industry recognition, is further validation that we are headed in the right direction.

VxRail: Making the Exceptional Expected

Launched over 5 years ago, VxRail remains the only jointly engineered hyperconverged infrastructure system with VMware. VxRail has continually set and raised the bar for reliability, performance and operational simplicity with features like single click upgrades and VMware synchronous releases (30-day commitment), helping to make Dell Technologies #1 in HCI Systems for 14 consecutive quarters.

Our customers realize exceptional productivity and business advantages with VxRail as highlighted in a recently completed IDC study The Business Value of Dell EMC VxRail and VMware Cloud Foundation on Dell EMC VxRail. Some of the impressive results include:

◉ 452% 5-year ROI with 10 months to payback

◉ 32% faster transactions and 39% faster queries

◉ 72% lower application costs

In addition, customer reviews were instrumental in delivering us the prestigious March 2020, Gartner Peer Insight Customer Choice for HCI. One customer noted: “They promised us a ‘mythical unicorn’ of IT; VxRail definitely delivered” – Senior Network Analyst II, Education (read full review).

We also delivered innovation at the edge with the release of our first-ruggedized VxRail, the D Series, resulting in CRN naming it one of the Coolest Hyperconverged Systems for 2020.

PowerStore: The Future of Storage is Here

Last year, we introduced PowerStore – a modern storage appliance designed for the data era. This groundbreaking new platform broke records at Dell Technologies, becoming the fastest-ramping storage products in our history, with quick adoption in diverse industries around the world. Customer reviews cite the platform’s uniquely adaptable infrastructure, modern software design, 7x performance improvement vs. previous platforms and game-changing innovations like AppsON.

◉ “…it fits like a glove with our cloud strategy”

◉ “…delivers the best data reduction with phenomenal performance”

◉ “…leverages virtualization like no other array on the market”

In addition to the Storage Magazine award, PowerStore has also been recognized by CRN as the overall winner for 2020 Product of the Year for Storage – SMB External Storage Hardware, CRN 2020 Tech Innovator Award, Storage-Midrange, as well as taking home and a Design Value Award Winner for Design Management Institute!

Source: delltechnologies.com

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Career Spotlight: Training Students, Supporting Schools, Loving It

When I met Litzy for the first time at her high school, I was impressed. Litzy was a member of the Dell Student TechCrew, a program that trains students to become industry certified technicians and use their skills to set up IT helpdesks at their schools to serve their peers. I thought I might be talking with a future leader in the IT industry.

Litzy and I chatted while she caught up on some IT tickets, and I asked what drew her to the class as one of only two young women participants. She shrugged. “My dad made me take it,” she said, “I would never have picked it on my own.” My heart sank. I realized she was right, but we could change that. IT could be the kind of class anyone could join.

I never would have seen myself working at Dell, either. I was an educator by training and trade, with a master’s degree in Maternal and Infant Dietetics. I was still a project manager for a school district in Texas in February 2015 (and a Dell customer!) when my journey to Dell began, though I didn’t know it at the time. I was trying to plan summer work; we had 15,000 devices coming in for a “summer refresh” and 15,000 new devices that we would need to deploy—all within the span of eight weeks. It was an impossible task. No matter how I looked at it, there just wasn’t enough time for our team to do the work.

So I did what I always do when I need inspiration to solve a problem: I visited a classroom and worked with students. As I washed beakers with them in the science lab, the students bemoaned the lack of summer jobs. That’s when it hit me: they need summer jobs, and I need capable technology workers. I spun up the opportunity to engage kids in this solution via paid summer internships. Our program went on to win a social impact in education award from Dell that year.

When I was ready for a career change, I knew from my interactions with Dell employees that it was a place I could thrive. I had met Craig Epstein, Vice President of Quality Engineering, when he came to observe our student IT program. I put him to work sorting and untangling cords while we talked, so he could experience the good and the bad of having 35,000 kids with devices—the reality of customer experience.

Apparently he didn’t hold it against me, because I joined his team as an education specialist in 2016. A couple of years later, I transferred to the Giving team to help create and support education opportunities for kids around the world.

Now I lead our philanthropic endeavors for the United States and Canada, as well as managing the growing program that is TechCrew, which moved from a pilot in 2019 to a full fledged program in 2020—and it’s still expanding. This year, we will reach students in 23 school districts across 12 states. We’re focusing on rural, low income, and low access areas.

Back in 2015, I could never have foreseen that today I would proudly sport a Dell employee badge, creating social impact in education for kids all over the world. Kids like Litzy, who is about to graduate high school and pursue a degree in computer science at the college of her choice. I had the privilege of writing her letter of recommendation.

Source: delltechnologies.com

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Redesigning Meeting Spaces of the Future

Recent events and global cultural shifts have encouraged employers to rethink their workplace policies and accommodate a more flexible hybrid work model. These days, employees are in constant motion across office, home, and “third spaces.” But this new way of working requires companies to adopt new technologies that better support collaboration.

Meeting rooms still have a place in our future, but they’ll need to foster collaboration with employees in the room as well as with those joining remotely. According to Dell-commissioned research conducted by Wainhouse, 78% of IT and meeting rooms decision makers believe the utilization of video-conferencing enabled meeting rooms will increase. Additionally, 69% expect to increase their budgets for meeting room technologies.

Read More: DEA-64T1: Dell EMC Converged Systems and Hybrid Cloud Associate

Meeting planners and attendees are constantly looking for easy to use technology that drives a seamless experience in the meeting space. They’re looking for a fast and fluid experience. This includes being able to instantly share information, chat over video and connect accessories that boost our productivity. Yet when it comes to conference rooms and other shared spaces, we often struggle to find an intuitive, uncomplicated experience. It’s more likely that we’re dealing with poor audiovisual experiences, incompatible ports, malfunctioning equipment and an array of devices needed to launch a meeting.

To tackle these issues, modern display solutions should offer users the ability to:

Connect quickly with seamless casting technology that is easy to install and easy to use

Present and share content confidently, knowing that both video and audio is crisp and clear

Collaborate with onscreen annotation and data capture, so users can easily save and share content remotely and in person.

According to Wainhouse Research, adding interactive monitors to meeting rooms yields extensive productivity benefits like saving 11.3 minutes for every one hour meeting. Fifty percent of respondents cite improved employee engagement and greater creativity.

Dell’s Large Format Monitors are redefining the modern workspace to offer easy connectivity, presentation and collaboration technologies. Features include up to 20-point multi-touch screen, impressive 4K resolution visuals, USB-C connectivity and Dell’s exclusive Screen Drop feature. Our large format monitors are easy to setup and use, allowing teams to connect quickly without any disruptions. They are software and hardware agnostic so users can pair them with virtually any PC, OS or software. They ensure seamless group collaboration, letting multiple users write, edit, annotate or erase notes simultaneously.

Dell Meeting Space Solutions include the OptiPlex 7080 Micro configured with Microsoft Teams Rooms or Zoom Rooms, audio/video peripherals and Dell Large Format Monitors. Meetings can start on time with proximity detection and one-touch join to instantly project content in the room and with remote participants.

We understand the unique challenges facing meeting planners today – they are constantly being pulled into different directions to coordinate technology needs for team meetings without vendor support or IT assistance. As the world’s number one monitors company for seven years running, Dell offers a variety of display solutions for all types of meetings — from small, medium and large spaces to open areas and learning labs.

Source: delltechnologies.com

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How the Dell SafeShutter Webcam Balances Convenience and Privacy

Video conferencing has become a staple for many – adding conveniences to our everyday work lives, but not without its share of land mines. Hilarious scenes from TV shows depict the embarrassing hazards of forgetting to turn off your webcam, while viral videos like the recent one featuring a lawyer whose filter was stuck on “cat” showcase the need for simple and convenient technology. From people walking behind us during video conferences to permanently affixing a sticky note to our computer cameras, we worry about webcam privacy while we work. It doesn’t need to be this way.

We asked ourselves, can there be a balance between the convenience of seamlessly joining video calls with the privacy and the safety of knowing the camera is secure? This was our north star.

Enter SafeShutter, available on the new Latitude 9420 and 9520 devices. It’s the industry’s first automatic security webcam that knows when to automatically open or close by syncing to your video conferencing applications (if you give it permission), so you can work securely and confidently from anywhere.

Here’s the important part: though it connects to your video conferencing software, it lets you take control of your privacy with camera disable (F9) and mic mute (F4) keys to override software settings. Aimed against malicious surveillance and hacking, the keys provide extra assurance at the hardware level and offer additional security.

The process of designing this technology, while maintaining the Latitude’s premium design, was a challenge. As our Latitude screen borders (or bezels) get smaller and smaller, there is simply no room to put a mechanical camera shutter on them. In order to create a device that has a sleek look and feel, we didn’t want to place a switch on the side of the device. So, if the shutter control can’t go on the top or on the side, where do we put it? The team designed a new security-hardened, hardware-controlled circuit that is tied to the F4 and F9 keys. When you press a key, you can instantly turn the camera on or off, or hardware mute or unmute your mic. No fumbling and losing precious time to turn off your video through the conferencing software should the unexpected occur. A simple touch of the key will turn it off.

We all have had that awkward moment of talking while still on mute. Or worse, thinking our video was off when it wasn’t. In either scenario it is a simple case of human error. Here’s a fun fact about SafeShutter: an engineer accidentally created an audible “click” that lets you know the camera has closed. To keep your mind at ease, we’ve created a privacy LED light that turns on when the camera is in use, paired with the keyboard indicator lights that denote if the camera and audio are on or off – no sticky note needed.

With teams pushing for the convenience to more easily join calls and other teams pushing for privacy and security, I’m incredibly proud that we were able to deliver on both. With SafeShutter available on the industry’s most secure commercial PCs, combined with AI-based features that provide intelligent background noise-cancelling, auto-mute and smart connectivity features (like ExpressConnect, that prioritizes bandwidth to your conferencing apps to prevent dropped calls) – it’s safe to say the Latitude 9420 and 9520 offer one of the best video conferencing experiences on a PC.

I’m not saying unwanted guest appearances from toddlers or pets won’t ever happen to you. But if it does, you’ll be able to confidently and securely stay in control.

Source: delltechnologies.com

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The Dell EMC PowerEdge Portfolio: Your Innovation Engine

Where Will Your Innovation Engine Take You?

The data era is well underway, and its scope and impact will be like nothing we’ve ever seen. Data is being created at an unprecedented pace, and customers and partners of every type are seeking modern ways to access, activate, move, store and secure it every day. Customers are also looking at ways to do this where the data is created, to increase efficiencies and hasten the speed to insights and drive more impact from data. And this “digital first” mindset has only accelerated over the last year.

We stand ready to help customers and partners accelerate their digital transformation, and to push the limits of their full potential. This fourth industrial revolution will be driven by modern infrastructure, flexible consumption models and differentiated services. In addition to modernizing the operations of our portfolio, we are also focused on enabling customers in new areas around edge, telco, cloud, artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML).

The innovation that we will see over the next decade is incredibly exciting.

We can help you build your innovation engine

With the largest launch of our PowerEdge portfolio, Dell Technologies is pleased to announce solutions that deliver critical and differentiated capabilities.

The Dell EMC PowerEdge portfolio is built on the following key pillars that drive business success:

Adaptive Compute

PowerEdge servers deliver adaptive compute with the latest advances in a platform specifically built to enable your workloads and business requirements — both now and in the future. We’ve segmented our server portfolio to deliver the right combination of technology and capabilities to address your unique compute and workload needs. These naturally encompass a wide range of use cases from new workloads around cloud and AI/ML to more traditional workloads around big data and virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI).

For example, we’re making GPUs mainstream with an AI-optimized portfolio. We recently announced the all-new PowerEdge XE8545 server, which was designed as a powerhouse for AI workloads. It brings together up to 128 cores of 3rd Generation AMD EPYC™ processors and four NVIDIA A100 GPUs to deliver an AI infrastructure without compromise. Designed to optimize performance of NVIDIA’s vGPU software and Multi-Instance GPU capabilities, the XE8545 doubles HPC performance and increases machine learning by up to 7x. The XE8545 also powers the latest HPC Ready Architecture for AI and Data Analytics, including the new Dell-developed and open-sourced Omnia automation software.

Edge computing is on everyone’s mind – the traditional idea of the “data center” and where, when, and how your data is processed, is shifting rapidly. Dell Technologies has you covered with ruggedized form factors designed for unique constraints and the ability to process data at the point of creation. Built for harsh, remote environments, the PowerEdge XR11 and XR12 ruggedized servers are purpose-built to provide enterprise performance outside the data center. We’re talking servers that can stand up to heat, cold, dust, vibrations and shocks with a hardened chassis and minimal footprint.

Autonomous Compute Infrastructure

Automation helps you respond rapidly to business opportunities with intelligent systems that work together as well as independently to deliver outcomes aligned with business priorities, freeing IT to stop managing and start innovating. By providing world-class tools for integration, autonomous compute infrastructure helps you adapt to changing environments, enables rapid digital transformation and positions you to grow, scale and evolve.

Dell Technologies offers extensive capabilities that makes it easy to build automation in your organization. Our comprehensive strategy outlines the path to success for full automation.

Autonomous compute infrastructure can help you overcome the many challenges you face in the data era. Automatic certificate enrollment, auto discovery and automated firmware updates are just a few of the many features of our OpenManage systems management solutions.

Additionally, zero touch deployment from iDRAC9 brings automated functionalities such as server discovery, installation and configuration, security settings, OS deployment and updates, freeing IT resources to focus on higher value activities. In the future, autonomous compute will help customers fully realize self-deployed, self-provisioned and self-managed infrastructure. Today, customers can achieve on average 85%-time savings and eliminate 38 steps by utilizing the OpenManage portfolio to automate steps involved with typical IT Admin tasks like deployment, monitoring, firmware updates, and incident resolution compared to manual methods.

Proactive Resilience

Start Strong. Stay Strong. And Outmaneuver Threats.

Cyber security continues to be a major source of sleepless nights for most IT folks. Dell Technologies includes cyber security enhancements across our entire portfolio helping you establish and maintain a secure IT ecosystem, from the edge to hybrid cloud. These elements bolster your trust and confidence in Dell Technologies as the primary source of IT solutions in today’s data era.

Embed trust into your digital transformation with an infrastructure and IT environment designed for secure interactions and the capability to anticipate potential threats. Our proactive resilience starts with the silicon design and permeates the system’s lifecycle, from manufacturing, through the supply chain, and retirement – all from a single, trusted vendor.

We continue to innovate across our Cyber Resilient Architecture and the supply chain to bolster your security, all while following and often exceeding, world-renowned best practices and standards. We are the first server vendor with a cross-portfolio solution for cryptographically verified hardware integrity with Dell Technologies Secured Component Verification. Secured Component Verification provides “as-built” hardware validation for the server upon delivery to ensure integrity in transit. Additionally, Dell Technologies’ implementation of UEFI Secure Boot Customization was highlighted in the National Security Agency (NSA) technical paper “UEFI Secure Boot Customization.”

Build an innovation engine that’s ready for anything

PowerEdge servers enable you to rapidly adapt to evolving business demands and harness data from any environment, leverage intelligence and automation to free IT for higher value activities and embed trust with proactive resilience to protect against cyber threats. With PowerEdge servers as your innovation engine, you can seamlessly navigate this data era and be prepared for the unexpected.

Source: delltechnologies.com

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The Uncompromised Power of the Dell Technologies AI Infrastructure

With the release of third generation AMD® EPYC™ processors, Dell Technologies is excited to introduce the refreshed Dell EMC PowerEdge server portfolio, which brings adaptive compute capabilities to an incredibly broad range of workloads. These servers don’t just power your data center, they’re designed to help you innovate, adapt and grow well into the future.

The Dell EMC PowerEdge XE8545 is a brand new and incredibly powerful server that simplifies artificial intelligence (AI) infrastructure in your data center. It is designed specifically for accelerated workloads, which make it ideal for cutting-edge machine learning models, complex high performance computing (HPC) and GPU virtualization.

Powerful compute and parallel processing — for unparalleled performance

Key capabilities of the PowerEdge XE8545 include optimized CPU to GPU performance and accelerated I/O throughput. This server combines the maximum core counts of two powerful 3rd generation AMD EPYC processors with four of the highest performing NVIDIA® A100 GPUs. In fact, this is one of the first servers to have the new NVIDIA NVLink™ baseboard with the incredibly fast A100 chips in it. For example, you can boost A100 machine learning inferencing with 1.46X more images per second per GPU within the PowerEdge XE8545.

We’ve also increased the speed of storage with NVMe™ and reduced data latency with PCIe Gen 4 to accelerate I/O throughput, which prevents performance bottlenecks when you’re executing large data sets. These components help you take full advantage of the server’s compute power by keeping the data close to the processing.

No compromises — with simplified data center management

While AI infrastructure is loaded with performance features, it also has a reputation for being difficult to deploy and manage. We’ve remedied these concerns with a server design and management features that radically simplify your experience.

The PowerEdge XE8545 is a 4U, standard-depth rack server, so it fits effortlessly into your existing data center. It is completely air cooled for greater efficiency and lower cost of operation. This avoids the hassle of incorporating extra piping to accommodate liquid cooling. You can analyze more than 150k images per second, leveraging 2x AMD Milan CPU and 4x NVIDIA A100 SXM4 500W GPU, all with standard air cooling in the PowerEdge XE8545.

The server also includes iDRAC compliance and OpenManage Enterprise support, helping you easily implement, monitor and maintain your data center with OpenManage integrations.

Speed time to value

Regardless of whether you’re doing training or inferencing, solving tough problems involving fluid dynamics or genomics, analyzing data or virtualizing GPU operations, it’s time to unleash the uncompromised power of the PowerEdge XE8545. Catalyze the development and implementation of machine learning algorithms, quickly perform advanced computations and analyze data with amazing speed.

Invest in a modern infrastructure that meets all your AI training demands and sets your organization apart. Do it today, with the PowerEdge XE8545 server — your innovation engine.

Source: delltechnologies.com

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OEM Solutions Enable Human Progress

Throughout my eighteen-year career at Dell Technologies, I’ve worked across multiple divisions and geographies, engaging with thousands of customers from global players to large Government departments and individual consumers. And now, as I lead our global OEM Solutions business, I am regularly asked by family and friends: what’s new, what’s different?

Responding to customer needs

For me, what’s different about OEM is the way our technology becomes part of something bigger. We partner with our customers, who are often disruptors in their industries. Together, we combine our IP to bring innovation to market faster, co-designing solutions, that have changed and continue to change our world for the better. For example, our technology powers our OEM’s solutions, which they go on to use to diagnose and treat diseases, reduce energy costs, and make factories more efficient.

Co-designing solutions

How do we work together? We roll up our sleeves and become partners in the design process, making solutions that our OEM customers subsequently market and sell to their customer base. It’s a smart division of labor, where we both focus on our core expertise.

OEM’s strong engineering capability is exactly what sets us apart. We offer ruggedized systems certified for challenging environments, long lifecycle products with managed product transitions plus incremental expertise through a range of partners. We not only modify these products but can even build an entirely new solution or fully customize existing platforms to meet the exact needs of our customers and partners.

We help select the right compute power and customize the hardware platform to optimally run our customers’ IP. We test, certify, build, and ship it globally. Industries around the world rely on our expertise to accelerate their business and drive a positive impact on their communities worldwide. 

Faster detection of disease

For example, we provided our Dell Technologies product portfolio and best in class engineering services to Konica Minolta to develop a solution that can conduct deep tissue analysis and track minuscule changes in an individual’s mammogram over many years This will enable doctors to diagnose conditions such as breast and lung cancer sooner than before. Konica Minolta needed a powerful hardware platform that could process up to 300 images in a single scan and animate those images in mere minutes. By combining X-ray machines with advanced hardware and AI, doctors have access to new tools that ultimately protect lives. 

A force for good

On the environmental front, we’ve collaborated with Doosan in South Korea to help turn the world on to cleaner and safer power. In India, our partnership with Qognify is making smart cities safer and more secure. In the UK, we’ve partnered with Hark to support their solution design to reduce energy expenditure and carbon emissions.

The future

As we continue into 2021, what lies ahead? Innovation continues to thrive particularly in vertical industries such as healthcare, transportation, industrial automation, and many more. To help these industries continue to evolve through technology, I’m excited about the potential of our recently launched OEM Engineered Solutions, which offers validated, turnkey customer solutions to end customers through Dell Technologies sales channels. We’re also building on the tremendous momentum we have with our channel partners to deliver capabilities that extend past our core strengths.

Our OEM customers are optimistic about the road ahead and will never stop innovating which is exactly why I’m heading into this year feeling incredibly energized. I see Edge computing continuing to drive digital transformation, and Dell Technologies and our OEM customers and partners are well-positioned to take advantage of this trend. As processors become more powerful, storage becomes more affordable and network access improves, I am confident that we’ll discover new opportunities to change our world for the better.

Source: delltechnologies.com

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When the Classroom Has Left the (School) Building

It’s hard to believe it’s been a year since the pandemic turned our world and classrooms upside down. The school year and uncertainty may be far from over, but I think we should pause for a moment and reflect on the enormous tenacity, grit, resilience and heroism our educators and students have shown navigating constantly evolving circumstances.

More Info: E20-920: Dell EMC Cloud Services Expert Exam for Cloud Architects (DECE-CA)

Overnight, in the midst of a global crisis, teachers and administrators curriculum online and worked to come to grips with how to use technology to connect with students. Students and families rapidly set up space, tools and schedules for learning from home. As tech partners in the trenches, we immediately had two priorities – finding out what the most urgent needs were and how we could help.

The power of the pivot

There are so many inspiring stories. Lubbock ISD, for example, anticipated the likelihood of having to move to remote learning prior to spring break last year. They made the pre-emptive decision to facilitate a move from a cart-in-classroom model to sending each student in first grade and above home with a Dell Chromebook. Teachers shared that being able to provide students with a device they were already familiar with to receive and submit classwork was invaluable.

With timelines for returning to the classroom uncertain, equally important was understanding how technology would need to evolve in response to this increase in learning from home. We engaged our education customers who shared concerns that poor connectivity would be a barrier for many students. And we responded quickly, bringing to market our Dell Chromebook 3100 with LTE in just eight months. This LTE-enabled device, available March 9th, will provide broad mobile carrier support, offering connectivity for those learning from areas that don’t have reliable (or any) internet access.

Educators also needed to keep an eye on what was coming next and prepare for blended/hybrid learning models. To help, we partnered with the State Education Technology Directors Association (SETDA), sponsoring a committee with state directors to redefine the blended/hybrid learning model and provide resources for every state. The technology and tools that have been put in place could prove valuable for the future. Post-pandemic there will be more situations that require a hybrid approach. Texas knows this well as storms recently stopped the state in its tracks. Next time, hopefully, embracing a ‘school from anywhere’ approach means less school interruptions (although this may be unpopular with students!).

Resiliency will endure

Now that the time has come to start thinking about emerging from the pandemic and our children going back to school, technology will continue to play a role in the success of students – both inside the classroom and out. The ability to engage with technology and use it to further education, develop new skills and eventually pursue careers will be critical in a post-pandemic world where the digital economy will have transformed industries like never before. That’s why it’s particularly concerning that an estimated 12 million kids in the U.S. alone currently lack adequate internet or computing devices at home. For these children, not having access to basic tools means they are unable to fully participate in remote education, which puts them at risk of falling behind.

When we look at this issue, it’s clear that it needs to go beyond the classroom to address the broader community needs. Research demonstrates that just handing out devices to students doesn’t lead to improved learning. Once students have these important tools, they need the digital literacy skills to engage fully with the online curriculum and educational applications which will enable them to learn from anywhere. We also see the opportunity to go beyond – providing in-demand technology skills and curriculum to open doors to the jobs and careers they may want to pursue in the future.

It has been a year of challenge and change, but also one of exploring new ways of working to deliver education in a completely new ways. Let’s make sure that we continue to push even further to ensure what we’ve learned can drive even greater opportunities for equitable access for students for today and the years to come.

Source: delltechnologies.com

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A Big Technology Boost is Coming to Telecom

When consumers think of communications innovation, they tend to think of apps (Uber, Netflix) or smartphone vendors (Apple, Google). Few realize how much complex technology is behind the telecommunications networks that ensure those apps and phones work as advertised. Communication service providers (CSPs), for their part, are tired of watching “digital natives” grab the glory—and a big chunk of the revenue along with it. They know they need to escape the cost and complexity of traditional network architectures and digitally transform themselves through the cloud, containers, and other innovative technologies if they want to compete as service innovators rather than simply connectivity providers.

More Info: DES-6321: Dell EMC VxRail Appliance Specialist for Implementation Engineer

The inflection point for this transformation realization is 5G. With its massive market potential for new revenue-generating services, 5G is motivating CSPs to shift from cautious adopters of technology to cutting-edge pioneers. The good news is that all the great things that 5G has to offer—new enterprise services that will generate increased revenue in vertical markets such as retail, financial, manufacturing and more—depend upon what CSPs do next. But CSPs also depend upon their network equipment vendors to deliver that innovation. 5G network transformation is much bigger than more RAN towers and servers. It will require new approaches to the network such as multi-access edge computing (MEC) and a cloud-native service architecture so that services be spun up anywhere in minutes, especially in enterprise environments.

CSPs are ready to embrace a more agile, flexible, and scalable network infrastructure. The new  vertical services, enabled by 5G, will demand not only more speed, but will also lower latencies. Moving compute closer to the network edge is an important step in the right direction. Quickly spinning up network functions and services in the cloud is another. These solutions require technology partners that support open standards, actively develop reference architectures with other 5G vendors, and bring innovation to market faster—whether it’s the latest chipsets in the market or the most advanced cloud-native network functions (CNFs) from 3GPP vendors. And that’s what Dell Technologies is doing today.

Dell Technologies is where the industry is headed

At Dell Technologies, our vision for CSPs is to create the open, modern platform that is required to accelerate telecom innovation and revenue growth. We help them do this in three ways: transform network operations, modernize network technology, and enhance the services portfolio. For example, we’ve made significant advancements in four critical areas:

◉ Converged core solutions, pre-validating partner solutions that leverage cloud-native software architectures from VMware and RedHat to reduce risk and accelerate the deployment of CNFs in the network

◉ A services edge platform featuring scalable, flexible, and rapidly deployable servers that can be placed at the near or far edge of the network, including inhospitable environments, to power new services and create new revenues

◉ Open virtual RAN (vRAN) solutions that are designed to give operators flexibility, choice and control of which deployment models and vendors they want for RAN distributed units (DU), central units (CU) and other critical RAN functions

◉ Next Gen Operations, our offerings catapult your OSS / BSS into the future with high availability, cloud solutions and open, cloud-native technologies

In addition, Dell Technologies is the global leader in IT infrastructure, giving us the scale to meet the needs of CSPs of all sizes, all powered by a secure global supply chain, and available in a variety of consumption models.

Combining vision with momentum

The world’s leading CSPs aren’t waiting for the future to arrive. They’re creating that future today with Dell Technologies…

◉ CenturyLink uses Dell EMC PowerEdge servers to deliver private cloud services at the edge for its enterprise customers

◉ Verizon and BT have both partnered with Dell to offer their customers virtualized network services

◉ SK Telecom and Dell have found a brilliant way to monetize 5G with one of the world’s first fully integrated MEC solutions, dubbed OneBox MEC

These success stories are just the beginning. We continue to expand our technology portfolio to solve the challenges that CSPs are facing today in the market, whether it’s reducing network cost and complexity or accelerating the deployment of new revenue-generating services. With Dell Technologies on your side, the future has never looked brighter.

Source: delltechnologies.com

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Delivering Innovation with Object-Based Analytics

As analytic workloads continue to grow, more pressure is placed on data teams to build an effective data strategy.

One large financial customer of ours is challenging their data teams to help fight false-positive card declines, which according to Javelin Research costs issuers and merchants over $118B. However, ensuring fraud prevention while cutting down on the false positives can be a fine line to walk. The key to solving this problem with an analytics model is to start with the data.

At Dell Technologies, we have helped our customers work through these challenges for many years, from building fraud detection to enabling life-saving healthcare. We understand that getting the data strategy right can help teams build models to solve their real-world problems. Dell Technologies has engaged in joint engineering and validation efforts to bring our leading distributed object storage product Dell EMC ECS to integrate industry leaders in the Analytics space.

Today we are happy to announce a collaboration with unified analytics warehousing leader Vertica, which will allow our customers to deliver cloud innovation on-premises, greater operational flexibility and efficiency, and scale infrastructure resources independently. Working with Vertica will allow our joint analytics customers to deliver flexible and efficient architecture by separating computer and storage.

Collaborating on Object-Based Analytics with Vertica

Vertica is a unified analytics warehouse built to deliver blazing-fast query performance regardless of scale or concurrency requirements. It is a highly scalable analytical database that works well in many deployment situations – on-premises, on top of a Hadoop or S3 data lake, and in any public clouds. Vertica features powerful SQL-based analytics, time-series, geospatial, and in-database machine learning capabilities. Vertica removes typical barriers to analytics for some of the world’s most prominent data-centric organizations.

Vertica in Eon mode decouples compute from storage to give customers the benefits of cloud architecture for analytic workloads. Previously only available in the public clouds, Vertica now offers Eon Mode with superior on-premises object storage solutions.

“Our customers trust us to provide the greatest freedom in how they consume the highest performance analytics – flexibility for the broadest deployment options, whether it’s deploying Vertica on any major public cloud or on-premises with more leading object storage options,” said Colin Mahony, senior vice president and general manager of Vertica.

Help Data Teams Solve Real World Problem

Data Teams can begin taking advantage of our joint collaboration today. Today’s announcement allows customers to:

◉ Vertica in EON Mode for Dell EMC ECS delivers cloud innovation on-premises.

◉ Separate compute and storage with ECS + Vertica EON Mode for delivering operations flexibility and efficiency.

◉ Scale infrastructure resources independently. Storage can grow without adding expensive compute, and compute can be scaled up or down with variable or intermittent workloads.

Vertica in Eon Mode for Dell EMC ECS gives companies a consistent platform for analytics across all of their environments, whether their data resides in the cloud or on-premises, or in a hybrid architecture.

Source: delltechnologies.com

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