Three Ways to Optimize Your Edge Strategy

In enterprise IT circles, it’s hard to have a conversation these days without talking about edge computing. And there’s a good reason for this. “The edge” is where businesses conduct their most critical business. It is where retailers transact with their customers. It is where manufacturers produce their products. It is where healthcare organizations care for their patients. The edge is where the digital world interfaces with the physical world – where business critical data is generated, captured, and, increasingly, is being processed and acted upon.

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This isn’t just an anecdotal view. It’s a view backed up by industry research. For example, 451 Research forecasts that by 2024, 53% of machine- and device-generated data will initially be stored and processed at edge locations. IDC estimates that, by 2024, edge spending will have grown at a rate seven times greater than the growth in spending on core data center infrastructure. In a word, this kind of growth is enormous.

Why edge?

What’s behind the rush to the edge? The simplest answer to that question is that business and IT leaders are looking for every opportunity they can find to achieve a competitive advantage. Eliminating the distance between IT resources and the edge achieves several different things:

◉ Reduced latency– Many business processes demand near real-time insight and control. While modern networking techniques have helped to reduce the latency introduced by network hops, crossing the network boundaries between edge endpoints and centralized data center environments does have some latency cost. You also can’t cheat the speed of light, and many applications cannot tolerate the latency introduced by the physical distance between edge endpoints and centralized IT.

◉ Bandwidth conservation– Edge locations often have limited WAN bandwidth, or that bandwidth is expensive to acquire. Processing data locally can help manage the cost of an edge location while still extracting the maximum business value from the data.

◉ Operational technology (OT) connectivity– Some industries have unique OT connectivity technologies that require specialized compute devices and networking in order to acquire data and pass control information. Manufacturing environments, for example, often leverage technologies such as MODBUS or PROFINET to connect their machinery and control systems to edge compute resources through gateway devices.

◉ Business process availability– Business critical processes taking place in an edge location must continue uninterrupted – even in the face of a network outage. Edge computing is the only way to ensure a factory, warehouse, retail location, or hospital can operate continuously and safely even when it is disconnected from the WAN.

◉ Data sovereignty– Some industries and localities restrict which data can be moved to a central location for processing. In these situations, edge computing is the only solution for processing and leveraging the data produced in the edge location.

As companies implement edge computing, they are moving IT resources into OT environments, which are quite different from the IT environments that have historically housed enterprise data. IT teams must adapt IT resources and processes for these new environments.

Let’s talk about the state of many edge implementations today and how to optimize your path forward.

Moving Beyond Proofs of Concept (POCs)

The process of implementing and operating edge computing isn’t always straightforward. Among other things, edge initiatives often have unclear objectives, involve new technologies, and uncover conflicting processes between IT and OT. These challenges can lead to projects that fail to move from the proof-of-concept stage to a scalable production deployment.

To help organizations address these IT-OT challenges, the edge team at Dell Technologies has developed best practices focused on moving edge projects from POCs to successful production environments. These best practices are derived from our experience enabling IT transformation within data center environments, but they are adapted to the unique needs of the edge OT environments. To make this easy, we have distilled these best practices down to three straightforward recommendations for implementing edge use cases that can scale and grow with your business.

1. Design for business outcomes.

Successful edge projects begin with a focus on the ultimate prize — the business outcomes. To that end, it’s important to clearly articulate your targeted business objectives upfront, well before you start talking about technology. If you‘re in manufacturing, for example, you might ask if you want to improve your production yields or to reduce costs by a certain amount by proactively preventing machine failure and the associated downtime.

Measuring results can be difficult when you are leveraging a shared infrastructure, especially when you are trying to look at the return on investment. If your project is going to require a big upfront investment with an initial limited return, you should document those business considerations and communicate them clearly. Having specific business goals will enable you to manage expectations, measure your results as you go, and make any necessary mid-course corrections.

2. Consolidate and integrate.

Our second recommendation is to look for opportunities to consolidate your edge, with an eye toward eliminating stove-piped applications. Consolidating your applications onto a single infrastructure can help your organization realize significant savings on your edge computing initiatives. Think of your edge not as a collection of disconnected devices and applications, but as an overall system. Virtualization, containerized applications, and software-defined infrastructure will be key building blocks for a system that can enable consolidation.

Besides being more efficient, edge consolidation also gives you greater flexibility. You can more easily reallocate resources or shift workloads depending on where they are going to run the best and where they are going to achieve your business needs. Consolidating your edge also opens opportunities to share and integrate data across different data streams and applications. When you do this, you are moving toward the point of having a common data plane for your edge applications. This will enable new applications to easily take advantage of the existing edge data without having to build new data integration logic.

As you consolidate, you should ensure that your edge approach leverages open application programming interfaces, standards, and technologies that don’t lock you into a single ecosystem or cloud framework. An open environment gives you the flexibility to implement new use cases and new applications, and to integrate new ecosystems as your business demands change.

3. Plan for growth and agility.

Throughout your project, all stakeholders must take the long view. Plan for your initial business outcomes, but also look ahead and plan for growth and future agility.

From a growth perspective, think about the new capabilities you might need, and not just the additional capacity you are going to need. Think about new use cases you might want to implement. For example, are you doing some simple process control and monitoring today that you may want to use deep learning for in the future? If so, make sure that your edge infrastructure can be expanded to include the networking capacity, storage, and accelerated compute necessary be able to do model training at the edge.

You also must look at your edge IT processes. How are your processes going to scale over time? How are you going to become more efficient? And how will you manage your applications? On this front, it makes sense to look at the DevOps processes and tools that you have on the IT side and think about how those are going to translate to your edge applications. Can you leverage your existing DevOps processes and tools for your off-the-shelf and custom edge applications in your OT environment, or will you need to adapt and integrate them with the processes and tools that exist in your OT environment?

A few parting thoughts

To wrap things up, I’d like to share a few higher-level points to consider as you plan your edge implementations.

Right out of the gate, remember that success at the edge depends heavily on having strong collaboration between your IT stakeholders and your OT stakeholders. Without that working relationship, your innovations will be stuck at the proof-of-concept stage, unable to scale to production, across processes, and across factories.

Second, make sure you leverage your key vendor relationships, and use all the capabilities they can bring to bear. For example, Dell Technologies can help your organization bring different stakeholders within the ecosystem together through the strong partnerships and the solutions that we provide. We can even customize our products for particular applications. Talk to us about our OEM capabilities if you have unique needs for large edge applications.

Finally, think strategically about the transformative power of edge, and how it can give you a clear competitive advantage in your industry. But always remember that you are not the only one thinking about edge. Your competitors are as well. So don’t wait to begin your journey.

Source: delltechnologies.com

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How Streaming Storage Engines Are Transforming Your Industry Today

New data sources from edge devices such as security cameras, drones, mobile apps, and the Internet of Things have existing storage networks bursting at the seams. Most, if not all, of the data created from these devices are “streaming.” “Streaming data” refers to a continuous data flow with no clearly defined beginning or end.

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In today’s economy, a business’s ability to grow is directly related to its ability to store, manage and utilize data. Those who can harness data at speed and scale will win markets, minds, and more.  Information is at the core of the new digital ecosystem and hence an essential enabler for both digital modernization and disruption – making it more important than ever for organizations to be on the forefront of this digital transformation.

The recently published e-book, Modern Enterprise Data Pipelines, discusses the modern streaming storage engine Pravega. Pravega, developed by Dell Technologies, enables endless insights and process optimization and modernization, all with a significant reduction in operational costs. In the e-book, you can read much more about the technical nuances of Pravega, but to truly understand its power, let’s look at a few examples showing how it can be used:

Preventative maintenance

We’ll look at preventative maintenance in a specific industry – roller coasters – but this example can be applied to any industry. Using Pravega to ingest real-time streaming data from thousands of sensors along a roller coaster, the data can be used to identify key points as simple as how many cars are present on the roller coaster at any time, or as complex as how many vibrations per second a sensor experiences while the car passes it at a certain point. If a normal vibration reading is 3,000 vibrations per second, a threshold can be set to alert a maintenance technician when that vibration reading is too high – alerting the technician that a particular ride needs maintenance. The same data can be accessed later using the exact same tools and compared across different rides or over a longer period – to generate trends – which can be helpful in predicting failures or determining the need for maintenance.

While this is an example of a roller coaster, the same basis can be used in general automotive use cases, when thresholds can be set for oil temperatures, tire pressure gauges, and so on, in order to alert users to the need for preventative maintenance before the problem leads to much bigger problems, like a flat tire or poor engine health.

Industrial IoT

In a manufacturing environment, anomaly detection can be extremely important in saving time, resources, and money. By placing IoT sensors and cameras along the manufacturing line, Pravega can ingest images and data such as belt speed and temperature. Camera images can automatically discover parts, or products, that are out of specifications and then create an alert that something is not right. By utilizing the data from the sensors, the user easily finds out that the ambient temperature of a machine was too high and/or the speed of the belt was incorrect. Instead of just fixing the problem, a machine learning model may be created – teaching those sensors that if the temperate reaches a certain threshold or if the belt reaches a certain speed, to automatically enable a fan or reduce the speed before anomalies in the product are ever created.

Regardless of the product, this example can work in any manufacturing process. Further, anomaly detection can be used in many different industries outside of manufacturing. It can be used in the financial sector, to find anomalies in mobile check deposits, in coffee shops to monitor preventative maintenance on their machines and provide automatic reordering of supplies, or in hydropower facilities, to find shortfalls in portions of a powerplant. The practical applications are unlimited.

Project alignment, object detection, and allocation

In a construction environment, drones have been used to stream real-time video and telemetry into Pravega. By providing a real-time glimpse of the progress of a construction project, analysis can be completed to compare the digital rendering of the project to the actual progress, delivering a progress report that is always up-to-date and can ensure the accuracy of the construction and appropriate time frames for future planning.

At the same time, by attaching sensors to construction equipment on the ground, Pravega can enable object detection. Equipment, people and materials can be tracked for inventory purposes, or for allocation reasons – ensuring that they are making the best use of each portion of their resources across multiple projects.

And while this particular use case is in construction, similarly to all the other examples, it can be used as easily in other industries. For instance, nearly the same use case was completed in mining, including drone feed for progress reporting and sensors for heavy machinery allocation. The drones monitored the rendering down into the ground instead of building above it. 

Metric regulation

In a “smart kitchen,” Pravega has been used alongside digital thermometers in large storage coolers to ingest streaming temperature readings in real-time and create an alert when the temperature is out of range. This can prevent entire coolers from spoilage if a door is left ajar. It also helps maintain food costs, since keeping the food at an optimal temperature allows for the longest possible shelf life. This is only the beginning of a “smart kitchen” project, which will soon have multiple stages of sensors and alerts to maintain many different aspects of the process.

As you can see, streaming storage engines such as Pravega provide a backbone to ecosystems of data that put processes in place to leverage the value of streaming data. With those processes in place, organizations such as the ones described above are more prepared to derive value from the data that full of intricate complexities but is also naturally ripe with opportunity. Edge computing and the internet of things brings the promise of new possibilities to those organizations brave enough to work towards unlocking them.

Source: delltechnologies.com

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What Is Data Science? Know Roles, Career Path

The recent boom in the data industry has driven the demand for data science professionals at the enterprise level across all industry verticals. There are job openings for data scientists, data engineers, and data analysts. And there seems to be a lot of confusion and varying opinions among people regarding the roles and skillsets driving this field.

Data science is the area of study that includes extracting knowledge from all of the data collected. There is a significant demand for professionals who can use data analysis to an aggressive advantage for their organizations. In a career as a data scientist, you will create data-driven business solutions and analytics.

Beginning a Career in Data Science

Most employers look for data science professionals with advanced degrees, such as a Master of Science in Data Science. Candidates for data science roles typically start with a foundation in computer science or math and build on this with a master’s degree in data science, data analytics, or a related field.

In these graduate-level programs, professionals achieve core competencies in predictive analytics, statistical modeling, big data, data mining applications, enterprise analytics, data-driven decision making, data visualization, and data storytelling.

Alternatively, some students may find that a degree in data analytics is better fitted to their career aims. Studying data analytics shows students how to employ statistics, analytics systems technology, and business intelligence to accomplish particular goals. With this foundational knowledge, students learn how to find a logical, data-driven path to solving a complex problem. They also learn how to overcome data restrictions, such as trading with uncertain data sets and reconciling data from different sources.

Experiential learning is a vital element of the program. Students learn by creating portfolios of real-world projects, showing competency with key technologies, visualization, and communication techniques, and the ability to translate information into recommended actions. Graduates finish the program with a core analytical skillset to layer more specialized technical or industry-specific applications.

What Is the Role of a Data Scientist?

Data science has been called “the sexiest job of the 21st Century” by Harvard Business Review. The Scope of Data science is becoming more popular in recent times.

Data scientists can simplify big data through coding and algorithms and turn it into a problem-solving solution for the business. They usually have a great base in computer science, statistics, mathematics, modeling, analytics combined with an intense business sense.

Small startups are making a massive amount of data every day, thus resulting in improved hiring. The pay scale of data scientists is well-groomed because of the never-ending demand. They generally work with the developers to give value to the end consumers.

The Function of Big Data

The function of a data scientist is becoming more necessary for a traditional organization because Big Data is constantly transforming business strategies and marketing skills, and data scientists are the core of that change. Big data generation leads to the considerable scope of data analytics and DevOps.

Everything is happening because of the broad range of software, from human resources and marketing to R&D and financial forecasts. It’s never so easy to maintain and interpret all the data extracted from these services.

Important Data Science Skills

Data scientists are experts in software, like Java, Hadoop, Python, and Pig. Their chores include business research, structuring analytics, and data management. The main goal for Data Science’s future to get bright is its high-end demand because of digitalization.

Data scientists are the game changer for any organization. They can critically analyze big data and get the solution for the enhancement process quickly. The experts assist in building marketing strategies as well as produce great advice on the product front. Data science works as the building block of any organization.

Data Science Is Helping the Future

Data science enables retailers to change their purchasing habits, but the importance of gathering data extends much further.

Data science can promote public health through wearable trackers that motivate individuals to adopt healthier habits and alert people to potentially critical health issues. Data can also improve diagnostic accuracy, accelerate finding remedies for specific diseases, or even stop the spread of a virus. When the Ebola virus outbreak hit West Africa in 2014, scientists were ready to track the spread of the disease and predict the areas most exposed to the illness. This data supported health officials in front of the outbreak and prevented it from becoming a worldwide pandemic.

Data science has critical applications across most industries. For example, farmers use data for efficient food growth and delivery, food suppliers to cut down on food waste, and nonprofit organizations to boost fundraising efforts and predict funding needs.

Seeking a career in data science is a smart move, not just because it is trendy and pays well, but because data very well may be the pivot point on which the entire economy turns.

Conclusion

The Data Science sector observed a massive hike of 650% since 2012. As organizations are turning towards ML, big data, and AI, the market for data scientists is increasing. Data science has made everyday lives easier by monitoring devices near one’s home or workplace, improving the quality of online shopping, enabling safe online fund transactions, and many more.

The field of Data Science does not end here, and it has made a significant input in medical science. The analytics and requisition were helpful in Medical Image Analysis, Genomics, Remote Monitoring, and Drug Development.

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Software Innovation Powers the Unity XT 5.1 Release

Dell Technologies announces the availability of Dell EMC Unity XT 5.1, a new release packed with innovative enterprise software enhancements and features that will continue to positively impact business outcomes.

More Info: DES-2T13: Dell EMC Cloud Infrastructure Specialist Exam for Cloud Architects

When Unity XT was introduced to the market in 2019, it doubled performance over its Dell EMC Unity predecessor with faster processors, more memory, more capacity, a guaranteed 3:1 DRR and multi-cloud deployment options. This release makes Unity XT even better with new capabilities for Advanced File, Block and vVol Data Services, Data Protection, Data Migration, Management, Multi-Cloud Operations and Software-Defined Storage. We continue to advance Unity XT’s leading midrange position and drive business value, that help customers simplify and streamline their storage operations. Unity XT is designed for performance, optimized for efficiency, and built for a multi-cloud world with a strong emphasis on value, reliability, and quality for the thousands of satisfied Unity XT customers around the world.

Consistent Innovation

In a highly competitive environment, organizations will need new and innovative solutions to successfully complete their digital transformation journey. Unity XT continues to help customers innovate while remaining an integral part of our primary storage portfolio strategy. What’s most important to Dell is consistently enabling organizations with leading edge technology and products that provide them with greater simplicity and agility to transform their business and remain competitive.

Innovation remains essential for over 28,000 customers that depend on more than 70,000 Dell EMC Unity XT systems to store, manage, and protect their data. The Unity XT 5.1 release is a testament to the investments Dell continues to make in technology with Unity XT and now with PowerStore, that will drive and achieve positive outcomes.

Portfolio Leadership with Choice

Portfolio breadth makes Dell Technologies the go-to source for flexible storage to meet a variety of IT objectives. Whether organizations need primary storage, software-defined storage, unstructured data storage platforms, HCI or converged infrastructure, our portfolio has you covered. In fact, many of our customers use multiple Dell EMC storage systems for increased agility inside their IT environments. For example, a cost-conscious customer might use PowerVault to directly attach to Dell PowerEdge Servers for server capacity expansion or in a branch office. Others may choose Unity XT hybrid arrays to run a departmental SQL database and PowerStore with its data-centric, intelligent, and adaptable infrastructure for use with modern workloads and innovative edge solutions.

IT organizations also have access to Dell’s vast supporting ecosystem solutions such as AppSync for integrated copy data management, Connectrix for enterprise network performance, PowerPath to enable intelligent multipathing, CloudIQ predictive storage analytics, Unity XT and PowerStore metro node appliances providing IT with synchronous replication over metro distances, Storage Automation & DevOps Resources for workload automation flow and much more.

92% of the Fortune Global 100 Companies use Dell EMC Entry and Midrange Storage

Top 10 Largest Energy Companies in the world use Dell EMC Entry and Midrange Storage

Top 10 Largest Banks in the world use Dell EMC Entry and Midrange Storage

Modern Storage Portfolio Underscores Innovation

We invite you to check out our entire storage portfolio, including our new Unity XT 5.1 release. We’re confident that as you delve into the portfolio, you’ll realize that the right choice for your IT infrastructure, applications and business outcomes is at hand. Individually, these products continue to exceed expectations including systems shipped, total capacity, and market share gains. Through sustained investments in technological innovation and roadmap imagination, Dell Technologies is ready to bring more innovative solutions to your data center and to fit with your cloud strategy. Unity XT 5.1 represents our commitment to modernize your infrastructure so you’re able to innovate with data – faster and more efficiently.

Source: delltechnologies.com

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The Transformation Knothole

Squeezing through is painful, but brings powerful lessons

Andreessen Horowitz partners Martin Casado and Sarah Wang set the Cloud Twittersphere ablaze recently with an impact analysis of public cloud spend on the market valuations of multi-billion-dollar SaaS companies. The debate that ensued collapsed into a typical zero-sum, all-or-nothing, public-versus-owned/operated infrastructure argument. The prevailing view was that cloud is a fantastic value proposition, granting immediate infrastructure and the ability to scale as required.

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While this is generally true in the early stages of cloud adoption, public cloud growth is not always smarter than on-premises private cloud deployments – and the power of owning and operating the technology that drives your IT strategy. This false dichotomy of public cloud juggernauts and enterprises is a gross oversimplification of the broader dynamic that has played out over the last decade and will continue into the next.

It’s not uncommon to hear people say that cloud operators/hyper-scalers are better at running IT services; and so enterprises will eventually relinquish their IT operations to them. The familiar “private versus public cloud” debate holds that public cloud is cheaper than owning and operating IT infrastructure. That’s not entirely wrong, as public cloud plainly delivers on its promise early in a company’s cloud journey. But, as the company scales, and growth starts to slow, the pressure that public cloud puts on margins can start to outweigh the benefits. It starts to chip away at the “cloud is great” mantra that exists across most industries.

Public cloud never was – and never will be – the most economical approach to IT. Its utility, and popularity, lies elsewhere: speed (immediate infrastructure) and scale.

Many industry experts have locked themselves into a zero-sum notion of on-prem versus public cloud. It’s a false dichotomy that goes something like this: Enterprises, with their legacy systems and more traditional organizational structure, are ill equipped to manage and host their own IT (or private cloud). They will eventually cede to the newer, cooler companies to handle this. Sound familiar?

This ignores the fact that virtually every industry on earth is going through digital transformation – though they may be at different stages of maturity. This is what I call the transformation knothole. Being “pulled through the knothole” often has a spiritual locus, describing a traumatic or painful life experience that leaves you fundamentally changed on the other side. You face something so intense or overwhelming, that what you trusted in or held close beforehand simply falls away.

Today, entire industries are being pulled through this knothole. Transforming an entire sector’s business dynamics to keep up with the pace of digital transformation is really hard work and can be downright exhausting. You need compute and analytics everywhere data exists — scale, speed, agility, security – to maintain momentum. To survive. Ouch, right?

But when you squeeze through and come out the other side, you realize that relying solely on public cloud isn’t – and never was – the answer. That’s the fundamental change wrought by the knothole. Companies realize they need to own and manage not only their IT strategy, but many of the services and solutions that drive it, because IT becomes a differentiator and a driver of innovation. By giving it all away, enterprises lose their edge to be agile and more competitive.

All companies do not survive the digital transformation knothole. They get stuck. They get overtaken by new, more nimble entrants. But those that do make it through emerge with room to accelerate and OPTIMIZE their digital business. Once transformed, they see that the services they relied on for speed and agility are now consuming a huge portion of their operating expenses.

As a digitally enlightened company, they have the time and motivation to optimize their means of production. They look at their service provider margins and say, “wait a second, I can do this better and cheaper.” They realize that an enormous amount of market value is being lost due to the impact of public cloud costs on their margins. When they look to optimize infrastructure, they see huge potential savings from shifting workloads from public cloud to in-house or co-location, leased facilities. They realize that the initial appeal of speed and scale has given way to runaway costs that easily eclipse what would be spent on running their own data centers. They know they need to optimize and find balance.

The false dichotomy that many consistently present, assumes that there will always be non-digital dullards and technology wizards. The dullards will need the wizards to survive. I don’t buy it. When companies have digitally transformed – made it through the knothole – the differences between cloud and enterprise organizations become pretty hazy.

If digital business runs on information technology, IT becomes a major cost AND a strategic point of differentiation. It becomes target #1 for innovation and optimization.

Just because public cloud is more flexible and faster early on, doesn’t mean it won’t become more costly later. And it’s important to plan for that. Why rely entirely on someone else to provide such a critical part of your business? If cost savings were a reason to initially jump onto public cloud, the irony of that draining your market value a few years later will be stark. It may seem crazy to not jump into the public cloud early on, but it’s foolish to stay on it forever. (Hyperscale providers have very high profits margins – partly because they run their own infrastructure and can smartly reinvest in new products and great talent.)

Some of our largest customers — SaaS companies, consumer web tech, e-commerce, you name it – are most often hybrid AND multi-cloud. They don’t always own data centers, but they do own and operate substantial IT estates, commonly in co-location facilities.

Will some industries remain forever non-digital? Sure, but they will be the exception to the rule. Most industries are going to get pulled through the painful and difficult knothole. Can it be traumatic? Yep. Will it leave some scratches and even scars? Probably. But when companies realize that they need the strength, reliability and been-there-done-that of an enterprise like Dell Technologies, we’re there to catch them on the other side.

Source: delltechnologies.com

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Digitally Transforming for a Do-Anything-From-Anywhere World

I recently had the pleasure of speaking with a few incredible IT leaders from the City of Amarillo, Texas, Honeywell and Vancouver Film School (VFS) to discuss how the last year has changed their approach to driving better experiences and faster business results, and how they are innovating today to help their organizations digitally transform.

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Despite facing different challenges, they all shared the same priorities: modern infrastructure, digital resiliency, a digital-first approach and culture.

Modern infrastructure built on agility and hybrid cloud flexibility 

Our conversation centered on just how critical agility is — being able to move quickly and pivot as needed. That requires investments in a modern infrastructure that embraces the flexibility, choice and predictability of hybrid cloud. This was never more clear than last year when our customers – and Dell Technologies – needed to quickly pivot in the course of a weekend to shift our team members to work from home. Having the ability to scale and manage the entire experience in a consistent environment across clouds ensured productivity didn’t skip a beat – our teams and customers were supported.

Richard Gagnon, CIO of City of Amarillo, Texas, shared how his team was able to create new applications and re-route resources with its hybrid-cloud approach when stay-at-home mandates were ordered. Essential personnel were working remotely in just days, and a 75-person virtual call center for remote public health clinics was set up over a weekend. Now, the City of Amarillo is further investing in its hybrid cloud infrastructure to enable disaster recovery services anywhere and developing a broadband solution to provide internet to schools, healthcare organizations and more.

At Dell Technologies, we’ve designed and built a cloud environment that provides a platform for greater agility and automation, and notably enhanced DevOps and better experiences for our application development teams. Our internal teams have access to self-service provisioning, allowing them to better collaborate and innovate with speed. As a result, we’ve dramatically improved our productivity, speed, security and visibility. And it’s foundational to the experiences we are delivering through APEX and the APEX Console.

Digital resiliency must combine culture and technology

Creating a culture that fosters collaboration and connection is critical for digital resiliency and overall transformation.

When it quickly had to create an all-remote learning environment, Vancouver Film School provided laptops to students and access to Dell Precision workstations to ensure they could stay connected and continue their graphic and data-intensive curriculum. Bernard Gucake, Head of IT at VFS, said they also used software on top of Dell Isilon storage as part of their adjusted IT strategy to give students the ability to share files and access storage more seamlessly. He added that connecting with your users is important to truly transform — look at trouble tickets and work as a team to figure out how you can solve problems at the root to improve the end-user experience – and learn from it.

Like VFS, Honeywell’s ongoing digital transformation and collaborative culture created a successful quick shift to remote work. Sheila Jordan, Honeywell’s Chief Technology Officer, shared how Honeywell made investments in network upgrades to support increased devices, bandwidth and VPN access, but also focused on employee engagement best practices. Remote work was new for many employees. For example, ensuring teams were engaging with each other on video so they didn’t miss any non-verbal cues was important – as was making sure folks were forgiving of the new remote work attire. Which I think we all look back on and laugh a little, because it’s all so commonplace now.

In fact, many organizations are not looking back. This combination of technology and collaboration is fostering the do-anything-from-anywhere culture. It delivers greater flexibility and for global teams, creates a level playing field for discussion and innovation.

Data drives intelligence

And then there’s the data – how we use it to extract insights that create new opportunities for businesses, greater IT efficiency and improved user experiences. But with today’s widely distributed workforce and increasing data growth at the edge – that data too, is widely distributed. Modern infrastructure gives organizations the ability to manage, analyze and secure data everywhere it exists and deliver more value.

Honeywell is exploring the convergence of IT and OT (operational technology) at the edge. By integrating insights from systems and applications they can have greater visibility into what’s happening across a facility – everything from building traffic to temperature control to maintenance. And, have it all in a single view to make critical decisions that impact productivity and overall costs. Honeywell is even taking those insights and deeply integrating them into new applications across the organization – actionable insights that break down data silos across manufacturing, facilities and various smart building systems. And those insights make their way into their own Honeywell Forge offering for customers.

Security must be embedded into everything

As data becomes widely distributed, the potential attack surface of an organization increases. Security must be embedded into everything to limit the need for quick fix “Band-Aids” after the fact. It requires a proactive ongoing approach – it must be intrinsic.

We all agreed that security is everybody’s job and that process, culture, education and automation are key. Rich shared that the City of Amarillo has developed a robust education program and incorporated security into their performance reviews – they even phish their own employees to see if they take the bait. These are critical opportunities to ensure that everyone understands and underscores the importance of security.

Digital Transformation is a continuum

The organizations that have made investments in their digital transformation journey fared better during the last year than those that haven’t. The City of Amarillo, VFS and Honeywell make that clear. They were able to pivot quickly to keep business running, customers and students supported, and innovation humming. Organizations are now leaning in even further and adopting modern solutions and services that give them the ability to see around corners and be ready for whatever comes next. That means investments in better online experiences for customers and developers, automation and analytics for data-driven outcomes, and security. A world where teams and customers can thrive and truly do anything from anywhere.

Source: delltechnologies.com

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The Ripe Selection at the Server Market

Selecting the right server for your IT infrastructure can feel like selecting the best produce at the grocery store. There are some clear losers, but when selecting the best avocado, I sometimes feel the need to consult a fortune teller. After moving past the bruised selection, which one is best for toast or as a burger topping? Will it be ripe tomorrow or in three days? How long do I have until it needs to be mashed into guacamole?

More Info: DEA-1TT4: Dell EMC Information Storage Management (DECA-ISM)

Selecting the right servers feels the same. There are pretty clear upfront winners and losers: yes for GPUs, no for single-socket, must be a 2U. But what is right for my current applications as well as updates over the next year and whatever comes in the next 3-5? When looking at an individual application in your vast data center deployment, the answer can become drowned out by the noise of the greater system requirements.

Luckily, Dell is playing the role of grocer and learning some best practices from our customers. When it comes to hardware selection, you have shown us that there are three clear differentiators:  specializing in data analytics, high-performance computing, and a combination of virtualization and AI.

In terms of hardware components, this divergence represents a tradeoff between CPU density, GPU density, and storage. These components relate to HPC, virtualization/AI, and data analytics respectively. Further, the research shows that CPU density and storage are opposing components. In simpler terms, HPC sacrifices storage for the sake of CPU density, and data analytics workloads sacrifice CPU density for storage.

To put this in a concrete example, our C6525 is highly specialized in HPC, the XE7100 in data analytics, and the XE8545 in artificial intelligence. Dell’s other PowerEdge servers are sprinkled evenly across this framework; none overachieving in any two specializations. You will also notice that because a server is highly specialized does not mean it does not contain aspects of the other two workload components. However, the main trait does overshadow the other two:

◉ C6525 – 4x 64-core AMD Milan CPUs in a 2U with 6 drives per node

◉ XE7100 – 100x toolless drive carriers with 2 Intel Xeon per node

◉ XE8545 – 4x 500W A100 GPUs in an air-cooled environment

Your next question may be, “What about the other components? Having fast memory is incredibly important to my applications.” You are not wrong. The reason memory and IOPS don’t make a major appearance is because they are important across all workloads at varying degrees. They are important, just not a top three differentiator.

This finding has some significant implications for your data center. To optimize the performance of your applications it makes sense to pair your applications with a cluster of servers that are best suited for the software requirements. In a recent IDC study, they found just this. It is better to purchase servers that are fit-for-purpose and leave less strenuous and less critical applications to cloud providers. By using this fit-for-purpose strategy you can improve performance and scalability for your business critical and emerging workloads.

For many of our customers, it may not make sense to buy these super specialized servers for their data centers. This is why Dell Technologies builds our servers along the spectrum of specialization. Consider where the PowerEdge with AMD rack portfolio falls on this framework. Depending on of your workload requirements you could build multiple clusters for the different parts of your business. This operational strategy could increase your performance and productivity for applications and software engineers.

All this being said, server selection is still just as much an art as it is a science. There are many data center requirements that fall outside of the internal hardware components. System management, security, and financing options all play a crucial role in what works best for your data center. However, this framework can be used as a simple tool for starting your selection process. To find out more about the complete server selection process please read the full IDC study on fit-for-purpose infrastructure.

Source: delltechnologies.com

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Enabling Digital Innovation in the Telecom Industry

The global telecommunications opportunity at the edge

The edge opportunity is tremendous and will transform every industry – powered by the confluence of connected devices and systems, highly distributed compute and storage technology, and 5G. By 2025, it is expected that 75 percent of all global data will be produced, analyzed, and acted upon at the edge. As organizations across all industries look to drive new value with edge technologies, IDC projects that the number of new operational processes deployed on edge infrastructure will grow from less than 20 percent today to more than 90 percent by 2024.

More Info: DES-2T13: Dell EMC Cloud Infrastructure Specialist Exam for Cloud Architects

Communications Service Providers (CSPs) will be critical enablers of the next decade of innovation and are essential to enabling the enterprise edge. But it requires a transformation of their businesses and networks.

Realizing the edge opportunity

There are three key imperatives that need to happen in order for CSPs to capture the once-in-a-lifetime opportunity that the edge presents and move beyond the hype of 5G to the reality of a resilient next-generation network:

Telecom transformation

As telecoms work to provide greater connectivity across the world and capitalize on the emerging edge, they must quickly move and adopt new software solutions to capture the full potential of the edge. Network operators must accelerate their transformation efforts and partner with strategic advisors to rapidly optimize their IT infrastructure, modernize networks and enhance services.

Ecosystem evolution

As telecom networks disaggregate and move toward delivering powerful infrastructure and applications at the edge, the number of components to deploy and manage across geographic locations grows exponentially. To strategically identify and deploy new solutions and mitigate the risk and complexities associated with evolving network infrastructure  – CSPs need to leverage an open ecosystem to ensure that they can choose from truly open architecture and deploy carrier-grade solutions and outcomes, instead of disparate components.

Enterprise go-to-market

Moving to an open network infrastructure is just one piece of the puzzle. Telecoms need to monetize the networks that they’ve invested in, and the way to do that is to sell new edge services to enterprises – ultimately helping everyone to capture the edge opportunity.

How to support the future of telecommunications

Dell Technologies is working to support CSPs on their journeys to unlock innovation and strategically transform their infrastructure. This is something we do at scale, around the globe, every day… and it’s why we’ve decided to focus these capabilities on the telecommunications industry.

Dell Technologies is uniquely positioned to drive enablement and support across the three imperatives that are critical for CSPs:

◉ Accelerate telecom transformation

We have years of demonstrated, practical experience helping the world’s largest organizations on their digital transformation journey.

◉ Contribute to and leverage the open ecosystem

We are building the telecom-specific infrastructure foundation and associated open network solutions to help CSPs capitalize on 5G innovation and capture edge revenue opportunities. And, working with partners, Dell Technologies is developing an Open Telecom Ecosystem Lab to explore and nurture future telecom technologies and applications.

◉ Enable enterprise go-to-market access

Over the past 37 years, Dell Technologies has built one of the technology industry’s most robust sales and marketing capabilities. And, we have developed a world-class supply chain that offers our company and customers scale, cost efficiency, and dependability. Finally – we have a world-class services organization with more than 60,000 dedicated professionals and partners in over 170 countries. Dell Technologies has the breadth and expertise to help CSPs capture the enterprise edge opportunity.

And to drive our company’s increased focus and investment in the telecommunications industry – we created the Telecom Systems Business within Dell Technologies, a growing (and hiring!) organization of telecom and technology experts helping CSPs to ascend to and maintain their rightful role in the edge economy.

I am excited to work with our telecom customers and partners to build and cultivate a robust ecosystem that will deliver a full-stack continuous innovation, continuous development pipeline to power telecom innovation.

Source: delltechnologies.com

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Azure Stack HCI Updates Drive Innovation and Operational Efficiency

This March, at Microsoft Ignite, we announced exciting new features arriving on Dell EMC Integrated System for Microsoft Azure Stack HCI in cooperation with Microsoft and AMD, to drive business innovation and boost operational efficiency. At Dell Technologies, we strive to help you focus on supporting high-value business objectives to outflank the competition, with a powerful solution that provides a seamless user experience and flexible consumption model.

Read More: DES-1142: Dell EMC PowerMax and VMAX All Flash Specialist for Platform Engineer (DCS-PE)

Today, we’re proud to announce the release of these new features on the fully tested and validated system that integrates an intelligent infrastructure foundation from Dell Technologies with Azure Stack HCI OS from Microsoft.

Innovate everywhere

To focus on innovation, you need to expand supported workloads and use cases. As an agent of the business, IT needs to be empowered to support transactional and analytical workloads with the performance, scalability, resiliency, and efficiency only delivered by modern infrastructure.

We understand this, and to help you innovate everywhere, we’ve expanded Integrated System portfolio to include AX-6515 and AX-7525 node options with AMD EPYCTM 2nd generation processors. The high-density, high performance CPUs allow you to handle challenging workloads within a small infrastructure footprint, whether you are running resource intensive workloads with high performance storage needs or running lightweight applications at the edge.

Drive efficiency

While focusing on innovation, you want to keep the ship running smoothly by optimizing operations, so you can avoid delays that could impact transformation projects or possibly the entire value chain. To keep the infrastructure operational and efficient, you need to find ways to automate provisioning and delivery.

This is why Dell Technologies has introduced factory installed Azure Stack HCI OS across all Integrated System configurations in order to remove the need for customers to install the OS on their own. By reducing the complexity of installation and the reliance on professional services or the support team, you can focus valuable resources on other high-value tasks, and make IT a true champion of the business.

We’ve also delivered operational efficiency in our new configurations through the Dell EMC OpenManage Integration with Microsoft Windows Admin Center extension to deliver management features and seamless lifecycle management using Cluster-Aware updating of OS, BIOS, firmware, and drivers. To improve the serviceability experience and streamline operations, we have also introduced the call home features for Azure Stack HCI.

Execute confidently

One of the most valuable assets of your business is its data and it makes sense you want to protect it. Our new Azure Stack HCI configurations with AMD EPYCTM processors include enhanced data security features embedded at the processor-level with AMD Infinity guard which protect confidentiality and integrity of data and memory encryption. When combined with existing data protection and security features from Dell Technologies such as Bitlocker & Shielded VMs, Secure Erase & Secure Boot, Lock Server Configuration and Firmware, you will be able to execute your workloads confidently with intrinsic security across the entire stack.

With the combined engineering and support expertise of Dell Technologies, Microsoft and AMD, we have been able to come together to deliver a powerful Azure Stack HCI solution, and will continue to deliver innovations and provide peace of mind for our customers evolving needs.

As Raghu Nambiar, Corporate Vice President of Datacenter Ecosystems and Solutions at AMD states, “AMD works with the best in the industry to help customers experience the innovations and performance in our AMD EPYC processors. A perfect example is our collaboration with Dell Technologies and Microsoft to deliver Microsoft Azure Stack HCI solutions. The deep engineering relationships across our companies allows for the integration of the innovative features designed into our processors. This enhances the experience of Azure Stack HCI, helping to deliver excellent performance and scalability, while enabling advanced security to our customers.”

Source: delltechnologies.com

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The Edge of Exascale: NVIDIA BlueField at Durham University

The cost of data movement — in both runtime and energy — can be a showstopper on the road to exascale. As supercomputers and machine learning farms grow, one way to improve performance and efficiency is to teach the network how to route data flows, meet security constraints, and even perform specific tasks. Smart network devices can take ownership of the data movement, bringing data into the right format before it is delivered, while contributing to security and resiliency.

Read More: DES-1B31: Dell EMC Elastic Cloud Storage Specialist Exam for Systems Administrator

The Durham Intelligent NIC Environment (DINE), part of the DiRAC memory intensive service at Durham University, is a 16-node cluster equipped with Dell EMC PowerEdge C6525 servers with NVIDIA® BlueField® DPUs. These smart network interface cards (smartNICs) enable the intelligent processing and routing of messages to improve the performance of massively parallel codes in preparation for future exascale systems. They also provide researchers with a test-bed to develop new computing and network paradigms.

The DINE cluster is hosted alongside the COSMA supercomputer and is used by computer science researchers, DiRAC researchers and international collaborators. The research computing team deployed the BlueField technology in half-height, half-width smartNIC cards. Each card is configured to operate in a host-separated mode, providing direct access to the Arm cores. Researchers can then launch HPC message passing interface (MPI) codes across the cluster, making use of both the AMD® EPYC™ server processors and the Arm processors. This, in turn, frees the compute nodes from data transfer tasks and communication duties.

“The DINE supercomputer will allow researchers to probe novel technologies in preparation for running advanced codes on exascale machines,” Dr. Alastair Basden says. “It will enable a step change in model resolution in fields such as weather forecasting, climate change, and cosmology, with a huge scientific benefit.”

To test the BlueField technology, the Durham team had to compile two versions of their code — one that executes on the server processors, and one that executes on the Arm cores. The team reported that recompiling the code for the Arm cores took seconds. When they run a job across the DINE cluster, they direct MPI jobs to run on the smartNIC instead of the CPUs, which allows the CPUs to carry on with their tasks without MPI interruptions. The smartNICs can also handle unexpected messages (buffering), take overload balancing, or manage message replication to facilitate resilient algorithms.

Along the way, faculty, staff, students, collaborators and others will benefit from working with cutting-edge technologies. According to Tobias Wenzierl, Project Principal Investigator for DINE, these technologies allow them to design algorithms and investigate ideas that will help redefine the future of HPC for facilities around the world.

“We have been suffering from a lack of MPI progress and, hence, algorithmic latency for quite a while, and we have invested significant compute effort to decide how to place our tasks on the system,” Weinzierl says. “We hope that BlueField will help us to realize these two things way more efficiently. Actually, we started to write software that does this for us on BlueField.”

Based on the results at Durham University, the NVIDIA BlueField DPUs are on the journey to the infrastructure-as-code data center, where users can send a job out and have it run wherever it is most optimized for performance and efficiency. The DINE system is also leveraged by the ExCALIBUR program, aiming to redesign high priority simulation codes and algorithms to fully harness the power of future supercomputers, keeping UK research and development at the forefront of high-performance simulation science.

Source: delltechnologies.com

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Delivering the Best of Both Clouds

It’s a hybrid cloud world

Our customers tell us every day: They appreciate the ease and agility of as-a-Service models, but don’t want to be locked into any one platform. They want the flexibility to choose the right path to best meet their objectives. A hybrid approach – with the mixed use of private cloud, public cloud, and on-prem infrastructure – delivers.  

On-prem is in demand

Industry research confirms our own experience with customers: Nearly three out of four respondents (72%) in an Everest Group survey say they have a hybrid-first or private-first cloud strategy. This indicates that along with growing public cloud momentum, there is a continued reliance on on-prem infrastructure.

More Info: E20-393: Unity Solutions Specialist Exam for Implementation Engineers (DECS-IE)

In fact, 88% of cloud strategies include on-prem infrastructure, according to a recent ESG Research Study. On-prem adoption is expected to remain steady at this level – or even tick up slightly – over the next three years. On-prem can be deployed wherever it is needed, from data centers to edge locations and colocation facilities. This is important for mission-critical or performance-intensive workloads that require infrastructure to be right where the data is being processed and analyzed, as well as for security and compliance. On-prem is the cornerstone of private cloud, offering several key advantages.  

Drivers of adoption

Organizations use on-prem private cloud for risk mitigation, fast performance, cost containment, and compliance. These are the top factors driving decisions on where to place workloads and data, according to research from IDC commissioned by Dell Technologies. In fact, according to a recent IDC Cloud Pulse Survey, private clouds are seen as strategic imperatives. Today private clouds account for 40% of cloud spending, though enterprises expect to spend more on private than public clouds two years from now. Most organizations today have two or more in their enterprise, with customer feedback and publicly available data suggesting this number will continue to grow.

The same can be said for public cloud. Typically, enterprises use two or more vendor platforms today with anticipated growth. Organizations will continue to turn to public cloud for simplified operations and enhanced agility. These are important drivers for accelerating innovation. Customers say their use of public cloud increased due to uncertainties in 2020, and they expect a more balanced approach between public and private cloud to return.

The best of both clouds

What’s abundantly clear is that both private cloud and public cloud have their advantages. Yet, there are also trade-offs when choosing one or the other. Our customers tell us they want a solution that brings together the best of what each has to offer. They want an alternative approach that bridges this divide, delivering as-a-Service wherever it is needed.

Source: delltechnologies.com

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A Remarkable Journey

In the last year, the world has developed a deeper appreciation for the importance of communications technologies. It is no secret now that we depend on our mobile devices and applications to stay connected to the world around us, but this is just the beginning. As we move into 5G, many new opportunities will arise, especially around advanced Enterprise applications. Communications service providers (CSPs), who have historically struggled to launch new services fast and competitively, have a unique opportunity to help build the digital applications of the future. By now, we know that AR/VR experiences, telemedicine services, autonomous vehicles, connected cities, and smart factories will all depend heavily on the 5G technology, and enterprises will depend heavily on CSPs to develop and deliver that technology. Being in this space for a long time, Dell Technologies is a leader in enterprise digital transformation. We understand the monetization opportunities to help our CSP customers lead in this space, and we are ready to help with their efforts to deliver on the promise of 5G.

More Info: DEA-1TT4: Dell EMC Information Storage Management (DECA-ISM)

But, how will 5G drive innovation for the future? Remember that 5G isn’t just a faster, bigger version of 4G. It brings a host of new capabilities to wireless communications, including the kinds of hyperscale features typically associated with the leading cloud service providers. Containers, microservices, network slicing, and multi-access edge computing are new developments in 5G that companies like Dell Technologies and its partners are using to elevate the mobile network from connection pipe to innovation engine.

Consider, for example, the remarkable factory of the future. More than simply a “smart” factory, these 5G-powered factories will be able to leverage video analytics, artificial intelligence, machine learning, and millions of IoT sensors to optimize processes, troubleshoot systems, and drive real-time decision making on the factory floor. In the remarkable factory, machines detect and schedule their own repairs, supply chains remain constantly refreshed, and factory owners can even auction off excess production capacity to generate new revenue streams. And CSPs will play a central role in creating, implementing, and maintaining these solutions.

5G has the potential to transform many industries. In healthcare, 5G technology can help hospitals provide real-time telemedicine to serve remote communities and save lives. For sports stadiums and live events, on-site 5G network services can deliver augmented reality experiences directly to fans’ mobile devices. In shopping malls and airports, private 5G networks can bring mobile broadband connectivity to customers wherever they are.

The success of 5G will be a collaborative effort, not just between CSPs and enterprises but between CSPs and their network equipment vendors. At Dell Technologies, you can see the future of 5G being developed today at our Telecom Co-Innovation Expert Center in Cork, Ireland. The Center is where telecom providers and Dell Technologies engineers come together to create the 5G technology solutions that will drive the future, from autonomous drones to neuro-haptic devices.

Innovation doesn’t happen in a vacuum. It’s the result of collaboration and a shared vision. CSPs know their network. Dell Technologies knows enterprises. Together, we can create 5G technology solutions that bring together products from a global ecosystem of partners to solve the challenges of the future and unlock new revenue opportunities in exciting ways. You can think of it as a place where great ideas are born. Or you can think of it as a place where remarkable journeys begin.

Dell Technologies is committed to making sure that CSPs can effectively monetize their 5G investments and continue to innovate as new market opportunities emerge. Because the real success stories of 5G have yet to be written. To learn more, join us on June 9th for our Telecom Transformation Event where we lay out our plans to simplify and accelerate the journey to cloud-native 5G networks for CSPs.

Source: delltechnologies.com

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Reimagine HCI with VxRail

VxRail Hyperconverged Infrastructure, driving data center modernization

Since we introduced VxRail Hyperconverged Infrastructure (HCI) five years ago, I’m proud to say we’ve been helping customers reimagine IT and address complexity head on by reducing infrastructure silos, driving more efficient operational teams, and delivering payback in as little as 10 months. Our exclusive joint-engineering relationship with VMware enables us to deliver unique automation and orchestration features that simplify operations across core, edge, and cloud deployments.

More Info: E20-555: Isilon Solutions and Design Specialist Exam for Technology Architects (DECS-TA)

As business continues to evolve, the solutions around them must evolve as well. Our users tell us they are looking for ways to simplify their infrastructure, scale when and where they need to, and address more workloads with the same operational models while simultaneously adopting next generation technologies.

Today I’m excited to share new advancements in our VxRail hardware and software and ask you to reimagine how a simplified operational model, seamless technology integration and agility, and transformational storage flexibility can help you rapidly and confidently modernize your IT environments.

Reimagine simplicity with software to enhance VMware

VxRail HCI System Software continues to be our biggest differentiator driving more value for VMware HCI environments.  It is the one-stop shop for automation, orchestration, and management of your entire VxRail environment. We have made several improvements to put more functionality into the hands of users as well as curate, simplify, and automate the overall experience.

◉ Single click, automated lifecycle management is a key differentiator for VxRail, and we continue to drive that automation higher up the stack to align with larger VMware ecosystem updates, bringing NSX-T and Tanzu all into a single upgrade cycle.

◉ The ability to self-deploy through the configuration portal provides more control over the deployment process especially for larger enterprise customers with multiple locations. This means you’ll be able to perform the installation based on your timelines and within your guidelines, expanding the freedom and flexibility of VxRail.

◉ Reimage and reallocate nodes between clusters or create new clusters to meet workload demands.

◉ Plan for updates more easily with the ability to pause and resume updates and perform partial updates to clusters.

Reimagine agility with next generation PowerEdge

Our next generation PowerEdge servers were launched in March. Today we are announcing fully curated support for those PowerEdge servers in our P, V and E series. The seamless integration of PowerEdge and the ability to run multiple generations of nodes side by side has long been a cornerstone of VxRail value. Users do not have to rip and replace clusters or perform the integration and validation to take advantage of new technology because Dell Technologies has already done it for them with over 100 dedicated test engineers and 25,000 hours of lab testing per release. We will be publishing a complete technical review of next generation PowerEdge on VxRail, until then, here are a few highlights:

◉ Address more workloads with 3rd Generation Intel Xeon Scalable processors, providing up to 42% more cores than the previous generation.

◉ Run more AI and ML workloads with the NVIDIA A40 and A100 GPUs for the P Series.

◉ Power up applications with a 166% increase in Intel Persistent Memory

◉ VxRail systems with 3rd generation AMD EPYC™ processors, offer customers flexibility and scalability with up to 64 cores per processor.

Reimagine transformation with VxRail dynamic nodes

To address more workloads and scale IT infrastructure with more flexible storage options we are introducing new VxRail dynamic nodes. These dynamic nodes integrate into the VxRail solution just like any other VxRail node, they have the full complement of VxRail HCI System Software and the lifecycle management you would expect with one seemingly small (but actually pretty big) difference. They are designed to utilize shared storage.

By adding new VxRail dynamic nodes combined with VMware HCI Mesh technology or external storage arrays (Dell EMC PowerStore, PowerMax and Unity XT), users can address new workloads and scale as needed without fundamentally changing the HCI operational model. This gives you the ability to:

◉ Share vSAN between VxRail or VCF on VxRail clusters, building pools of compute to utilize vSAN storage in cross cluster architectures

◉ Attach external storage to workload domains with clusters of dynamic nodes, extending the VCF on VxRail operational model to run data-centric workloads dependent on array-based services

◉ Discreetly add the resources needed to drive your business, scaling compute and storage separately

What would reimagining HCI with VxRail change for you?

Feedback from our customers is clear: the ability to automate day to day tasks and lifecycle management frees them to focus on their business. The seamless integration of new technology de-risks their solutions and enables them to innovate. And that innovation helps them accelerate differentiation, delivering new applications and features faster.

As I look back at the advancements, the efficiencies, and the pace of change over the last five years, I can’t help but wonder what we will see over the next five, and what data center, cloud and edge operations will look like.

Join me in reimagining what your IT operations and business opportunities could look like with VxRail as we continue to evolve, integrating new technology, enabling more storage options, and enhancing your VMware experience.

Source: delltechnologies.com

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