Meet the Engineering Innovators Helping Solve Telecoms’ Biggest Challenges

At first sight, it might seem that the transition to 5G is on the home straight. Subscriber numbers are growing at 1 million a day, there’s a choice of 300 plus compatible smartphones on the market, and over 165 5G-badged networks around the world.

The reality, of course, is more complex. In fact, there is still a way ahead of today’s 5G networks to make full use of the technology’s potential. Most offerings today are still focused on mobile broadband connectivity, but the big growth opportunities lie in developing new enterprise-focused products and services built around new capabilities of 5G like ultra-low latency and network slicing.

A technological inflection point

Implementing highly efficient 5G networks is a demanding task, especially if it includes the disaggregation of the radio access network (RAN). RAN disaggregation is a completely new way to build mobile networks, replacing monolithic proprietary infrastructure with open, cloud-native systems built on industry standard IT. This has opened the telecom industry up to a broad ecosystem of IT and telecom technology providers, giving telecom operators a previously unseen level of choice and flexibility when it comes to vendor selection.

The resulting mobile network is vastly more capable than anything before. But it’s also relying on a more diverse ecosystem of solutions. With that, new rulebooks around network deployment and management are still being written.

Co-innovation is the key

In this rapidly evolving environment, operators must build and test solutions, scale them and ensure their reliability and regulatory compliance. They then need to deploy and secure the network across thousands of servers, often in remote or inaccessible locations.

At Dell Technologies, we recognize that no one enterprise can do all this alone. These are challenges that call for focused, multi-disciplinary teams of IT and telecoms specialists, working together to co-innovate the deep tech foundations of future networks.

This is why Dell Technologies has made a major commitment to collaborating with key players to solve telecoms’ biggest challenges. Working with CSPs, technology vendors and industry standards bodies, our goal is to integrate systems from the edge to the cloud to the core.

Dell Technologies Telecom Co-innovation Expert Centre

The Telecom Co-innovation Expert Centre (TCEC) reflects this commitment. Established to provide telecom-focused research, development and thought leadership, TCEC is a dedicated group of leading telecom engineers and elite Dell Technologies specialists.

This global team leverages specialist engineering resources to work hand-in-hand with customers’ and partners’ engineers. Collaborating in Dell Technologies telecom-focused lab facilities, as well as customer and partner labs, we focus on finding solutions to some of the biggest challenges in delivering the open IT infrastructure for the next generation of telecom solutions.

Let’s look at the team’s work in two key areas – network automation and orchestration, and securing virtualized infrastructure.

The importance of automation

One strong TCEC focus is how CSPs can reliably manage and maintain 5G infrastructure. Disaggregation brings the benefit of flexibility, but with that comes greatly increased complexity of network deployments. With thousands of servers in often inaccessible locations, it’s simply not logistically possible to manually configure and update servers at every site.

With so much of the network virtualized, it’s essential that deployments can be made remotely, with absolute consistency. The only practical way of achieving this at scale is through automation.

Dell Technologies is working with CSPs to solve this challenge, looking for solutions to reliably manage Day 1 to Day n operations with complete end-to-end automation. Our goal is to enable code-based data-center management and to reduce the deployment cost with advanced automation tools.

We are garnering valuable insights from existing RAN deployments in the field and leveraging this understanding to influence Dell Technologies’ product and solution roadmaps.

Navigating a new security landscape

Managing an open x86 architecture at non-physically secured locations like cell sites is a whole new security challenge. With deployment of servers to edge locations at scale, security needs to be built in right at the start of the life cycle, in the factory. Edge locations also lack physical security, so the network must be built to automatically recognize exactly what device is connected and detect if it has been moved or tampered with.

Dell Technologies is working very closely with operators to build an architecture which safeguards machine security from factory all the way through to production, while still allowing effortless deployment and end-to-end automation.

Building the 5G future

In this rapidly evolving landscape, cooperation across multiple industries and specialisms is essential to solve the challenges of 5G. Dell Technologies is helping facilitate this by building a one-stop global ecosystem of collaborative centers of excellence. TCEC is a key part of this, leveraging deep technical expertise and strong industry partnerships to overcome the practical challenges on the road to widespread deployment of open RAN technology.

Today, we are working with some of the world’s most advanced and ambitious CSPs to innovate, provide thought leadership and expand the boundaries of what’s possible.

Source: delltechnologies.com

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What Your Cloud Architect Needs to Know and Why

In IDC’s October 2020 report, Moving to a Connected Cloud Architecture, cloud architects are first in the list of key stakeholders of connected architecture. Per their analysis, cloud architects are “becoming prominent focal points for defining standards and policies in collaboration with business, development, and IT ops stakeholders.”

Read More: DES-5221: Dell EMC Data Center Networking Specialist Exam for Implementation Engineer

The future of “cloud movement” emphasizes the business need for a cloud architect with specific skills and knowledge. In this article, we will provide the guide to the skills and experience a cloud architect requires to get their company where it wants to go.

What Is cloud architecture and what does a cloud architect do?

The role and responsibilities of a cloud architect are gaining attention and significance in organizations of all sizes. Those who hire, manage, or function as a cloud architect benefit from a clear understanding of these three factors that define the role.

Cloud computing is the application of computer system resources not directly managed by the user, but in the cloud. These applications include data storage and computing power. Cloud computing offers faster applications, rapid resource adjustment to satisfy fluctuating demands, better manageability, reduced infrastructure costs, and reduced maintenance.

Cloud architecture (or cloud computing architecture) is the arrangement and alignment of the components and subcomponents of cloud computing. Typically, cloud architecture involves all parts of cloud computing: front-end platform, storage, servers, delivery, and networks to manage storage.

Cloud architects design and oversee implementation of a plan that translates technical requirements into a viable architecture to provide a desired result. The architect drafts a blueprint that specifies how cloud computing can achieve organizational and/or operational goals. As the designed plan often requires development of technologies, the cloud architect likely collaborates with DevOps engineers and developers.

The skilled cloud architect, then, combines technical mastery with interpersonal, leadership skills.

In keeping with technology advances, the skills a cloud architect requires increase in number and complexity. The following list itemizes that a cloud architect must be able to:

◉ Assess business goals and develop cloud-computing solutions to meet these goals

◉ Bridge the gap between business and technology

◉ Improve and maintain existing cloud-computing architecture

◉ Guide the implementation of their cloud architecture throughout the company

◉ Develop models and visualizations to communicate their plans with team members and stakeholders

◉ Stay on top of new developments and best practices in cloud technology and their chosen industry

Cloud computing is multidimensional and without fixed duration. This requires “a role that many IT organizations are now finding to be mandatory – the cloud architect.”

According to the same Gartner report, three responsibilities distinguish the cloud architect’s high-level importance:

◉ Leading cultural change for cloud adoption

◉ Developing and coordinating cloud architecture

◉ Developing a cloud strategy and coordinating the adaptation process

What specific skills and knowledge should a cloud architect have?

As the IT function becomes more integrated with other functions in most businesses, the cloud architect must be able to apply IT knowledge to various business demands and communicate those applications effectively. Bridging the gap between technological knowledge and interpersonal skills requires specific learning and experience. Depending upon the cloud architect’s degree of learning and experience, they may operate at any of three levels.

Cloud Associate

Qualified with the basic level of skills and knowledge, a cloud architect can comprehend and apply technologies, processes and systems required to build a complete cloud infrastructure.

Cloud Specialist

A more advance cloud architect has more extensive knowledge of cloud infrastructure and understands the importance of gathering requirements in the design process. At this level, the cloud architect is more prepared to work with open, robust, elastic cloud services architecture and more able to perceive the benefits, challenges and considerations of cloud services design choices.

Cloud Expert

At the most advanced level, a cloud architect understands and applies these areas of knowledge:

◉ Business resiliency: the assurance of resiliency from data protection, data security, disaster recovery, and AIOps

◉ Application development: the creation and implementation of customized cloud services

◉ Operating model: comprehension of an operating model that incorporates product development, policy and governance, and quality, all based upon a reliable cloud services platform

◉ Lifecycle and management: sequential steps from plan through feedback to develop and manage the cloud services lifecycle

◉ Workforce transformation: adaptation of workforce knowledge, skills and practices to the new roles cloud services require

Because the cloud architect is charged with understanding business issues and communicating technical processes and solutions to handle those issues, interpersonal skills are essential. A strong cloud architect will have:

◉ Business knowledge and communication skills

◉ Flexible learning skills

◉ Time and resource management skills

◉ Strong Decision-making skills

◉ Creative thinking skills

A quality cloud architect certification program includes activities that give participants the chance to practice these skills. Rather than providing only technical information, the preparation includes how-to awareness necessary to earn certification. Dell’s Proven Professional Cloud Architect Certification program is a powerful example.

Equipping for success with a skilled cloud architect

In their IT Industry Outlook 2021, CompTIA reports “Rather than making migration decisions for each IT system, companies will modify or choose systems to fit with a cloud strategy. Security assessments, integration requirements and provider comparisons will be par for the course rather than viewed as clunky overhead, and cloud will be the foundation for rebuilding efforts.”

To implement and manage the complexity of cloud strategy, a cloud architect must be equipped with the skills and experience for the job.

Explore the Dell Technologies Education Services programs that deliver cloud architect certifications and cloud courses including Cloud Infrastructure and Services, Cloud Infrastructure Planning and Design and Cloud Service Management.

Source: delltechnologies.com

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Supercharging our Software-defined Strategy with PowerFlex

Dell Technologies’ IT organization is accelerating its software-defined strategy to simplify and improve the compute and storage experience for users across its environment.

What began as an effort to incorporate software-defined storage into Dell’s data center has expanded to become the common compute and storage platform for the majority of the workloads within Dell’s modern data center to deliver flexibility and performance.

At the heart of that transformation is Dell EMC PowerFlex, a software-defined, hyperconverged infrastructure platform that features compute and storage layers running on Dell servers, with networking components and software to simplify infrastructure management.

As Dell Digital, Dell’s IT organization, modernized its applications and migrated them to its data center over the past several years, we needed a way to modernize the accompanying databases to achieve that same flexibility and agility. We chose Dell EMC PowerFlex, which supports everything from bare metal to virtualized and containerized infrastructure with one common footprint.

About a year ago, we finished converting some 65 terabytes of legacy databases to a new software-defined architecture hosted on 1,300 nodes of PowerFlex in our data center. We have since doubled the PowerFlex footprint to 2,600 nodes and more than 130 petabytes of installed capacity. And we expect to double that capacity again over the next year.

Achieving database agility

Evolving PowerFlex infrastructure has been a part of Dell’s strategy for its modern data center since 2016, as it merged two large, traditional data centers into its broader environment.

PowerFlex provides flexibility to run a uniform storage platform across all of Dell’s different types of workloads—including Oracle databases, MongoDB, Cassandra DB, Microsoft SQL Server, and Hadoop clusters—and create a unified experience. It provided a common framework to consolidate and modernize databases that were spread across the company and were using a variety of Dell products.

Our storage is now pooled, rather than being tied to different silos and arrays, maximizing storage capacity. Its massive scalability has improved database performance by at least 30 percent. (See case study Dell Digital Supercharges Performance with PowerFlex)

Initially deployed as a software solution on PowerEdge servers, PowerFlex has evolved into a fully engineered software-defined infrastructure with integrated IT operations and life-cycle management. PowerFlex is what we are now using for the vast majority of new storage and compute in our data center.

PowerFlex allows us to mix and match nodes within the same cluster, which is very flexible. So, we can have some nodes that have a certain profile and other nodes that have a different profile. We can also consume that infrastructure as storage only or compute only or both.

With PowerFlex’s simplicity and standardization, IT can offer database and application blueprints and designs to allow owners to easily provision new infrastructure for migration into our modern data center.

New options for flexibility

A key part of our efforts to increase flexibility, stability and performance in our data center while simplifying infrastructure management is creating a more agnostic environment so we have less specialized infrastructure.

We are using the increased capabilities of the PowerFlex platform to drive more abstraction between, for example, Windows VMs and SQL VMs, and other VMs so they can live together on the same cluster. We are also able to provide a more common setup for our VMware Tanzu Application Service (TAS) and VMware Tanzu Grid (TKG) environments.

In previous iterations of our environment, the need for specialized infrastructure added complexity. Cassandra required a certain architecture, our TAS and TKG environments required a different specific architecture, and our VMs required yet another architecture. PowerFlex is providing the foundation for an agnostic layer in a common compute and storage platform which allows us to provision workloads more like a public cloud.

PowerFlex also simplifies the onboarding of new functions in our environment. We don’t have to do rack reservations for specific cluster types in our data center in advance that may never be used. We can just deploy, build out everything, such as compute and storage and networking. Then when a user for instance needs another TAS cluster, we’ll just carve that up and boom, they get it. They don’t have to sit around and wait.

More new features, less down time

PowerFlex is letting us accommodate more workloads with less downtime for maintenance.

Among the features we’ve unveiled recently is a new GPU (Graphic Processing Unit) option for our Data Science as-a-Service within the platform. GPUs offer high-performance image processing through rapid mathematical calculations, offering high-performance analysis that data scientists require.

We also introduced a new high CPU, high memory option, so we’re able to offer double the compute and memory we had previously within our environment. That means we’re able to take on more and more use cases in our general-purpose infrastructure. In addition, we’re bringing in PowerFlex manager for monitoring and operational enhancements to the environment.

Faster patching and maintenance

We’ve seen massive growth in our internal IT systems that’s been driven with PowerFlex as the common compute and storage platform.

As our environment grows, one of the challenges is keeping all the various components up to date from the networking, storage and compute pieces. It is all integrated on one platform, but each component has different patching and maintenance regimes. We are introducing a capability called fault sets in our new PowerFlex design that will allow us to speed operational activities and patching.

Fault sets will allow us to deploy our new environments across eight racks and be able to take an entire rack down for maintenance without impacting the availability of storage or compute in the environment. That will significantly increase the velocity and parallelization of patching efforts within our environment.

From my perspective, I want to increase maintenance velocity, resiliency, and availability while decreasing the complexity of the infrastructure we are building. These are things that we’ve been working on for the past year and PowerFlex is the cornerstone of that.

We’re not tied to a specific way of consuming or deploying our environment. It’s very flexible. After all, it’s in the name.

Source: delltechnologies.com

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Delivering the Path to Autonomous Operations with CloudIQ

Data has become one of my favorite things to talk about.

Why? Because the digital and do-from-anywhere economy is increasing the already massive amounts of data being generated. This creates opportunity for those who can manage that data and use it to generate meaningful insights—quickly and at scale.

Read More: DES-6332: Dell EMC VxRail Appliance Specialist Exam for Systems Administrator

But organizations are still struggling with how to gain insights from all this data, not to mention how to manage, store and protect it. This puts unprecedented strain on IT departments as they try to keep up. It’s not simply a matter of having enough infrastructure. In many cases, there simply isn’t enough technical talent available to ensure that IT is supporting the needs of the business and enabling it to remain competitive and grow.

In the face of these challenges, how do we transform IT operations to leverage the power of data with speed and at scale, so the business itself can transform into a modern, digital business? Automation is the key, particularly in a world where data is no longer just in the data center, but also at the edge, in public and private clouds, and in colocation data centers.

With AIOps-driven autonomous operations as part of your IT strategy, you can get deeper access to operational data and the ability to act on it through automation at the infrastructure level. This enables existing technical staff to focus on higher-value activities, whether that’s completing security audits, developing new business apps, or being able to respond and support new business opportunities.

A model to support your autonomous operations journey

We’ve developed a clear framework for autonomous operations that takes into account differing requirements and stages in the journey. And while the journey isn’t necessarily linear, each progression can deliver substantial productivity gains.

Organizations that prioritize higher levels of automation are best equipped to address the needs of a modern digital business.

One of our building blocks for helping customer prioritize autonomous operations is Dell EMC CloudIQ — a cloud-based AIOps application that utilizes machine learning (ML) and predictive analytics to help root out issues long before they can seriously impact your business. This intelligent software is designed to bring greater insight into your Dell EMC infrastructure, to help accelerate daily IT administration workflows and mean time to resolution. With new support for PowerEdge servers available now and PowerSwitch networking planned for October announced today, CloudIQ will span the entire Dell EMC portfolio — hyperconverged/converged infrastructure, compute, storage, networking, and data protection.

This means that IT ops teams will have one UI and a single source of health notifications and recommended actions, real-time reports, and AL/ML driven analytics for their entire fleet of Dell infrastructure systems across all locations. CloudIQ also monitors data protection in public clouds enabled by Dell EMC PowerProtect and storage-as-a-Service enabled by Dell Technologies APEX Data Storage Services.

Currently, the combined intelligence of CloudIQ and the Dell EMC infrastructure portfolio supports up to Level 3 of the autonomous operations model for a sizeable and growing number of IT administration use cases. And we envision higher levels of autonomy for the future.

More automation, more productivity, more efficiency

According to a recent user survey that we conducted, CloudIQ accelerates time to resolution of infrastructure issues anywhere from 2x to10x. A great example of this in action is at Plex Systems, the prominent provider of cloud-delivered smart manufacturing solutions, where CloudIQ yields 3x faster time to resolution and productivity gains of 16 hours saved per week according to their manager of cloud operations, Darrel Schueneman.

We expect CloudIQ to deliver even greater efficiencies by integrating its AIOps intelligent insights with third-party IT tool using application interfaces like Webhook, planned for general availability this month,  and REST API, planned for general availability in October. These interfaces are designed to drive high levels of automation by integrating CloudIQ data, notifications, and recommended actions with tools like ServiceNow, Slack, Microsoft Teams, Ansible and vRealize. 

Decades of software innovation driving intelligent infrastructure

Dell Technologies has been on a decades-long journey to deliver software that radically simplifies IT. Our commitment to automation through software innovation has allowed us to achieve service levels such as 99.9999% availability that our Dell EMC VxRail hyperconverged infrastructure is designed to deliver, on average 85% time-savings for typical administrative tasks when utilizing our OpenManage software for PowerEdge servers, up to 98% time-savings to maintain a high availability storage environment with PowerStore, and the ability to automate 99% of network configuration tasks for PowerEdge with ESXi, PowerStore, PowerScale and VxRail using PowerSwitch with OS10 SmartFabric Services.

This commitment to your autonomous operations journey translates to better outcomes—in your data center or through our APEX portfolio of as-a-Service offerings, and we’re here to support you every step of the way.

I encourage you to watch the replay of our Autonomous Operations event, hosted by Mark Hamill (yes, that Mark Hamill) and featuring a panel of IT experts. In addition to seeing CloudIQ in action, you’ll learn more about how data is driving autonomous operation as a business imperative, the impact of autonomous operations across industries, the benefits to you and your customers, and how Dell can help you on the journey.

Source: delltechnologies.com

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Family Law Practice Modernizes Technology to Enable Remote Working

When I started Evans Family Law Group after having been a prosecutor for many years, I wanted to bring more professional and higher-quality representation to the Latino community. Latino clients are all too often underserved and don’t have access to quality legal services. After several years of developing the practice, I realized that family law was an area I wanted to focus on. I felt that top-quality legal services with the highest ethical standards could definitely make a difference for all kinds of clients, so I decided to broaden our reach to a larger population. 

Clients come first

In our family law practice, we try to be as close and responsive to clients as possible, keeping distractions and unproductive time to a minimum. From the firm’s earliest days, we have been fortunate to find team members who share our same commitment to clients. All of us feel that the traditional ways of working are too restrictive. When you work on adoptions, custody disputes or other family law scenarios, standard business hours aren’t always practical. Clients often need to talk early or late in the day or on weekends, and sometimes you need to be able to draft or review documents outside the office.

More Info: DES-6332: Dell EMC VxRail Appliance Specialist Exam for Systems Administrator

We decided to explore virtual working to help us take better care of clients and work more efficiently with the courts, and give us a better balance of work-life and work.

Enjoying mobility without compromise

After a somewhat disappointing experience with another hardware solution, we connected with Dell Technologies. When we heard about a new Latitude laptop, we decided to try it out. The Latitude 9510 device sounded promising because it could do double duty as a tablet and a laptop with its 2-in-1 configuration.

The look and feel of the aluminum is striking. The hinges are very sturdy, and overall the Latitude feels solid and well-designed. It’s great to have a device that gives clients an excellent impression of our firm.

We immediately took advantage of the built-in mobile broadband option, which is rock solid. Many people have told me that they would never pay for the service and would rather use hot spots, but the difference between trying to log onto a hot spot — which may not be available everywhere — and having LTE as part of the laptop, at a reasonable price for an unlimited data plan, makes complete sense to me. For example, recently the Wi-Fi went down in our Bastrop office. Our associate attorney, who was meeting with a potential new client, kept right on working. He pulled up a contract on the Latitude 2-in-1, flipped the screen, and used the Dell Active Pen when it was time to sign.

The battery life is fabulous. A lot of worrying about finding places to charge — and how long you could function between charges — simply vanished. We also got Dell Notebook Power Banks for everybody, just in case charging the battery after a long day got in the way of work. It also helps that the Dell laptops are comfortable to carry around and look elegant and professional.

Another feature I enjoy is the Express Sign-in with the proximity sensor that allows me to quickly log into my laptop without wasting any time waking the system up or typing in a password. And the audio quality is first-rate as well.

Giving free rein to innovation and creativity 

Very quickly, we found that we could use the Dell Latitudes more creatively and with greater flexibility than our previous hardware. For instance, when the device is in tablet mode, we can use the Dell Active Pen to highlight documents for clients. The tablet mode also comes in handy when we’re reviewing and annotating complex documents and want to be comfortable wherever we are working.

With the Latitudes, we also purchased Dell UltraSharp 34-inch curved monitors for everybody, along with one Dell 75 4K Interactive Touch Monitor for collaboration at the office. We use that large monitor with a Dell OptiPlex desktop computer.

The laptops on their own are outstanding, and combined with the monitors, they help us become even more versatile and inventive. It’s extremely easy to display multiple documents and discuss them — without struggling with a cluttered screen of multiple tabs that we have to keep switching between.

For instance, one of my clients recently asked for my help in evaluating six different retirement plans. In the past, this would have been a frustrating, lengthy exercise. We met over Zoom video conferencing and displayed documents side by side on the shared screen. Half an hour later, he was comfortable making a decision.

A new way of being there for clients

Everybody on the team has stories about helping clients on the fly and moving cases forward quickly. Some are dramatic, such as my work with a busy surgeon who signed off on documents and next steps in between operations at his hospital.

Overall, we find that our client relationships are stronger. People know they can reach us practically anytime, and we’ll be able to provide guidance and have productive conversations without having to prepare. Working from anywhere already removes a lot of productivity drains, like traffic and parking hassles. And the Latitudes are so dependable that nobody ever feels nervous about connecting to our applications and documents.

Honoring our promises

Not so long ago, it was hard to imagine that we wouldn’t be able to see clients or judges in person. We would have never had the personal presence and visibility to do business and develop relationships before. Now, however, the expectations are changing, and many attorneys I know are struggling with this. Evans Law Group has a unique wealth of expertise when it comes to working remotely and virtually with clients and courts, but it took the right devices to help us make full use of our skills and deliver the high-quality services we promise our clients.

Source: delltechnologies.com

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Dell and Microsoft: Changing the Game with Windows 11

What do all of these have in common? These are the themes coming from today’s Windows 11 announcement. It’s where you’ll see us continue to work closely with Microsoft to provide the PC experiences that matter, regardless of how you interact with technology.

This is critical as we think about the role PCs play in our new do-from-anywhere world. The PC remains the #1 choice for people who need to stay connected or work from anywhere. The proof is in the numbers: new data reveals that nearly 1 million PCs are currently being sold every day and IDC forecasts 18.2% growth for the PC market in 2021.

As the way we work, connect and collaborate changes, we know the real evolution is in the experiences – that’s why you’ve seen us invest in making the PC more personal, more intelligent, more connected and – of course – more beautiful.

Combine that with Microsoft’s focus on simplicity, ease-of-use and personal connection and, together, we are changing the game. Here’s how:

◉ New Design: It always starts here. The refreshed user experience and clean, fluid redesign of Windows 11 pops with our immersive displays. Take our XPS 13 with OLED as an example, this PC will dial up the new Windows layout and immerse you in stunning contrast and color.

◉ Human Connection: We all crave connectedness, and Windows 11 lets you reach the people you care about easier. Right from your desktop you can text, chat, voice or video call with just a click. But that doesn’t mean much if your device isn’t designed for connectivity and collaboration. From our 5G enabled Latitude PCs with faster internet speeds to enhancements we’ve made in our camera, displays and audio features, we’re creating experiences that allow you to truly adopt a work, play and collaborate-from-anywhere lifestyle.

◉ Choice: We all want it done our way. Today, we live in a multi-PC environment (for work, play or learning) and we don’t see that changing. With Windows 11, our devices will feature the latest innovations in touch, stylus and voice – and we can’t wait for you to get your hands on these features while working on the Dell PC model of your choice. Products like our recently launched Alienware X15 built for a new generation of gamers, our XPS and Precision devices designed for creators at all levels, and our intelligent business PCs that help you work smarter represent our passion for providing PCs that amplify your experiences from the moment you power them on.

When can you expect Windows 11? We are not at liberty to share dates just yet. But here’s what we can tell you: you’ll see many of our PCs available with Windows 11 starting on day one. And you can continue buying our Windows-based PCs with the confidence that you’ll be offered a free upgrade to Windows 11 after it’s available (all Windows-based Dell PCs on dell.com meet the Windows 11 system requirements. You can  learn more about system requirements here). So, no need to wait if you’re eyeing a back-to-school PC or treating yourself and/or a loved one to a new device.

Source: delltechnologies.com

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Data Protection in the Data Era

What we can all learn from the latest 2021 Global Data Protection Index

Cambridge Dictionary defines readiness as “willingness or a state of being prepared for something.” If we have learned anything from the events of 2020, it’s the absolute necessity to be ready for anything. And yet despite the advances organizations continue to make in digital transformation, the vast majority of IT respondents to the 2021 GDPI Snapshot survey did not report a high level of confidence in their data protection readiness.

Read More: E20-065: Dell EMC Certified Specialist - Data Scientist - Advanced Analytics (DCS-DS)

It is something of a cruel irony. While data is universally regarded as the essential ingredient for driving innovation, it is also one of the most vulnerable assets within the IT estate. The proliferation of cyberthreats, the growth of multi-cloud computing, distribution of traditional and cloud-native workloads across edge, core and cloud environments and the emergence of newer technologies such as AI/ML – all have converged to create a perfect storm of IT complexity.

Consider just the following three data points from the GDPI research:

◉ 74% find they have increased risk of data loss via cyberthreats with the growth of employees working from home

◉ 67% struggle to protect cloud-native applications

◉ 82% agreed that their organizations data protection solutions won’t meet all future business challenges

Clearly, data protection complexity is on the increase. Ensuring cyber-resiliency, for example, requires multiple layers of protection so that critical data can be quickly recovered following a ransomware attack.

Protecting cloud-native applications, Kubernetes containers and SaaS workloads further contributes to data protection complexity. And protecting data reliably and efficiently across multiple public cloud environments makes data protection harder still.

What’s more, most IT planners are not confident that their current data protection solutions will meet all future challenges. Emerging technologies like AI/ML and IoT, combined with the projected explosion of data volumes on the edge, could present significant data protection challenges for organizations of all sizes.

And for many organizations, this complexity is further compounded when they are working with multiple data protection vendors to gain the cyber-resiliency and data protection they need across hybrid, multi-cloud and edge environments. And this complexity often comes at a staggering cost: organizations that rely on multiple data protection vendors lost 66% more data in the last 12 months compared to those organizations working with a single vendor.

One way organizations are planning to reduce IT complexity is through the increased consumption of “as-a-service” solutions. The survey found 74% of organizations cite flexibility and optimized IT operations as one of their top three reasons for adopting as-a-service offerings, with storage, backup and disaster recovery the most likely as-a-Service offerings to be included in organizations’ top three priorities. And tellingly, 82% state they prefer to work with a vendor who offers multiple as-a-service offerings.

Dell Technologies helps organizations address the evolving IT landscape with end-to-end cloud data protection and cyber-resiliency solutions that protect traditional and modern workloads across hybrid, multi-cloud and edge environments.

We are deeply committed to delivering the key data protection innovations organizations need as they transform their IT operations and become more data driven.

For example, with ransomware on the rise, our Dell EMC PowerProtect cyber recovery solutions make it easier for organizations to protect, secure and recover their data from attacks.

Moreover, our new managed services for Cyber Recovery helps organizations maintain business continuity and reduce risk by providing Dell experts to manage day-to-day cyber recovery vault operations and support recovery activities.

Likewise, to simplify the protection of cloud-native apps, SaaS workloads and Kubernetes container environments, our Data Protection Suite protects diverse workloads across multiple clouds like AWS, Azure and Google Cloud Platform, with up to 80% more efficiency than competitive offerings.

And we continue to release new enhancements to our data protection portfolio to help organizations lay the groundwork for future business challenges. For example, recently we announced the availability of Transparent Snapshots with our PowerProtect Data Manager offering, enabling organizations to eliminate traditional disruption and latency issues during VM data backups, increase backup efficiencies and ensure data availability with near zero recovery point and recovery time objectives.

In addition, our new dynamic NAS data protection capabilities make it much easier for organizations to protect and recover their file data, enabling them to retire cumbersome and time consuming NDMP based data protection processes.

And with the technology preview of new Smart Scale capabilities for PowerProtect appliances, we are providing a glimpse into the future on how we will help customers expand data protection environments to exabyte scale while increasing efficiency and simplifying management.

The 2021 GDPI paints a cautionary picture but also points to ways to get out in front of those issues that can lower confidence and slow your transformation. We are staying ahead of the data protection challenges revealed in the GDPI Index with innovations that outpace ever-changing cyberthreats such as ransomware and solutions that leverage emerging technology to accelerate digital transformation. It’s an ultimate stare-down contest but we won’t blink. We are confident that by delivering holistic modern data protection solutions with rich, innovative feature sets, we can all win together.

Source: delltechnologies.com

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Data Science Certification Career that Can Give You an Edge

Data science is a profession that is qualified for collecting, analyzing, and interpreting vast amounts of data. The data scientist role is an offshoot of some traditional technical positions, including mathematician, scientist, statistician, and computer professional. This job entails the use of advanced analytics technologies, including machine learning and predictive modeling.

A data scientist needs large amounts of data to develop hypotheses, make inferences, and analyze customer and market trends. Essential responsibilities include gathering and analyzing data and using various analytics and reporting tools to identify patterns, trends, and relationships in data sets.

In business, data scientists typically work in teams to mine big data for information that can predict customer management and know new revenue opportunities. In many organizations, data scientists are also responsible for establishing best practices for collecting data, using analysis tools, and understanding data.

What Is Data Science? The Ultimate Guide

The need for data science skills has grown significantly over the years. Companies are looking to learn helpful information from big data, the large amounts of structured, unstructured, and semi-structured data that a large enterprise or internet of things creates and collects.

A data scientist is a professional responsible for collecting, analyzing, and interpreting enormous amounts of data. The data scientist role is an offshoot of some traditional technical functions, including mathematician, scientist, statistician, and computer professional. This job needs the use of advanced analytics technologies, including machine learning and predictive modeling.

A data scientist needs large amounts of data to develop hypotheses, make inferences, and analyze customer and market trends. Essential responsibilities include gathering and analyzing data and using various analytics and reporting tools to identify patterns, trends, and relationships in data sets.

Data scientists typically work in companies to mine big data to predict customer management and know new revenue opportunities in business. In many organizations, data scientists are also responsible for setting the best methods for managing data, using analysis tools, and interpreting data. The demand for data science skills has increased significantly over the years.

Which also includes:

• 8 top data science applications and handling cases for businesses
• Eight types of bias in data analysis and how to avoid them
• How to structure and lead a data science team

Why Is Data Science Important?

Data science is a highly interdisciplinary practice including an enormous scope of information and usually considers the big picture more than other analytical fields. In business, data science provides intelligence about consumers and campaigns and helps companies create robust plans to retain their audience and sell their products.

Data scientists must depend on creative insights using big data, the large amounts of information collected through different collection processes, like data mining.

On an even more basic level, big data analytics can improve brands' understanding of the customers, who ultimately help define the long-term benefit of a business or initiative. In addition to targeting the right audience, data science can help companies control their brands' stories.

Because big data is a fast-growing field, there are regularly new tools available, and those tools require experts who can quickly learn their applications. Data scientists can assist companies in creating a business plan to achieve goals based on research and not just intuition.

Data science plays a significant role in security and fraud detection because the massive amounts of information allow drilling down to find slight irregularities in data that can detect weaknesses in security systems.

Data science is a driving force between very specialized user experiences designed through personalization and customization. The analysis can be used to make customers feel seen and followed by a company.

Final Words

Data science is the secret sauce for any company that wishes to enhance its business by being more data-driven. Data science projects can have multiplicative returns on investment, both from guidance through data insight and the development of data products. Though, hiring people who take this potent mix of different skills is easier said than done. There is not enough supply of data scientists in the market to meet the demand data scientist salary is sky-high.

Thus, when you head to hire data scientists, nurture them. Keep them engaged. Give them autonomy to be their architects in how to solve problems. This sets them up to be highly motivated problem solvers to tackle the most demanding analytical challenges.

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MEC and Private Wireless – CSPs Enabling Enterprise Transformation

As 5G quickly rolls out and expands towards the enterprise market, a more open telecom business model will spark a wave of customer-centric innovation among communications service providers (CSPs).

5G’s low latency and high throughput will pave the way for new Internet of Things (IoT) and other edge applications, creating a vast landscape of unexplored opportunities for enterprise organizations. In addition, 5G’s cloud-native architecture enables the formation of a horizontal distributed computing platform that can consistently deliver the optimal balance between proximity to end-users and the cost benefits of centralized computing.

But today’s macro network does not support the capabilities required for enterprises to transform, so enterprises are turning to private mobility and multi-access edge computing (MEC). In fact, analysts predict private mobile networks will become the key enabler of the Industry 4.0 revolution. For example, they will allow manufacturers to deploy automated “smart” factories connected by secure, zero-trust mobile networks that will host innovative artificial intelligence and machine learning-based applications delivered at ultra-low latencies.

Complementing private mobility is MEC, an emerging technology which aims at converging telecommunication and IT services, providing a cloud computing platform at the edge of the radio access network (RAN). MEC offers storage and computational resources at the edge, with key advantages, such as the reduction in latency and reduced backhaul costs. MEC will enable the adoption of innovative services for enterprises and end-users (e.g., IoT/ M2M, the evolution towards Industry 4.0, 4K Ultra High Definition (UHD) video, and mobile gaming), opening a broader market for application developers and content providers.

At Dell Technologies, we believe communications service providers (CSPs) are ideally positioned to help enterprise organizations succeed with private mobility and MEC. CSPs have a vast physical infrastructure of geographically distributed points of presence (POPs) that can be repurposed to deliver edge computing resources, and they are already inside enterprise premises, providing IT connectivity and dedicated voice services. By leveraging their connectivity experience and existing POP infrastructure, CSPs are positioned to become the preferred provider for enterprises.

Further, CSPs can offer different go-to-market options, helping to reduce the complexity to implement MEC and private wireless. Aspects like spectrum utilization, service support, and RAN deployment could be delivered by CSPs, accelerating enterprise adoption. Finally, CSPs have developed an effective ecosystem of use cases based on MEC plus private wireless, addressing most enterprise verticals on the MEC front. They bundle these assets with an extensive transport network and an unparalleled ability to design and deploy RAN networks.

To help CSPs succeed in the enterprise market and drive enterprise adoption of private wireless and MEC, we’ve developed the Dell Technologies MEC 1.1.

Powered by Red Hat’s OpenShift Container Platform, Intel Smart Edge, and CommScope’s RUCKUS CBRS LTE Access Points, the solution delivers a cloud-native platform that allows CSPs to provide enterprises with an easy-to-deploy MEC and/or private wireless solution.

◉ The reference architecture includes the MEC (Multi Access Edge Compute) and a fully functional 3GPP compliant 4G Enhanced Packet Core.

◉ Alongside, a MEC controller can be delivered as PaaS on a cloud-native, Kubernetes-based telco platform (RH OCP) or be hosted in a public cloud.

◉ It fully supports CommScope’s RUCKUS CBRS LTE Access Points and its Spectrum Access System (SAS).

◉ An integrated orchestration and management console manage all the components in a single pane of glass.

Dell Technologies developed this reference architecture aiming to offer an open platform for CSPs and enterprises to accelerate the transformation of enterprise networks. We believe open solutions are critical for both CSPs and enterprise organizations, in that they eliminate lock-in obstacles and enable agile operational methods. As a result, all the solution components are industry-standard and have been pre-integrated and validated to reduce time to market and accelerate the adoption of innovative use cases.

Source: delltechnologies.com

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A Match Made On-premises: Dell Technologies and AWS EKS Anywhere

Dell Technologies and Amazon today announced that Amazon EKS Anywhere has been validated on Dell EMC VxRail hyperconverged infrastructure and Dell EMC PowerStore storage systems. EKS Anywhere is a new deployment option for Amazon EKS that enables customers to easily create and operate Kubernetes clusters on-premises while allowing for easy connectivity and portability to public cloud environments.

Read More: Dell EMC Certified Specialist - Data Scientist - Advanced Analytics (DCS-DS)

Dell Technologies collaborates with a broad ecosystem of public cloud providers to help our customers support multi-cloud environments that help place the right data and applications where it makes the most sense for them. Deploying EKS Anywhere on Dell Technologies infrastructure streamlines application development and delivery by allowing organizations to easily create and manage on premises Kubernetes clusters.

Across nearly all industries, IT organizations are moving to a more developer-oriented model that requires automated processes, rapid resource delivery and reliable infrastructure. In order to drive operational simplicity through Kubernetes orchestration, Amazon EKS Anywhere helps customers to automate cluster management, reduce support costs, and eliminate the redundant effort of using multiple open source or 3rd party tools for operating Kubernetes clusters. Dell infrastructure intelligence and automation streamlines operations, reducing downtime by 92% and making IT infrastructure teams over 68% more efficient. The combination of automated Kubernetes cluster management with intelligent, automated infrastructure is truly a match made on-premises allowing IT organizations to provide infrastructure as code and empower their DevOps teams to be the innovation engine for their businesses.

Today’s announcement includes certification of two infrastructure configurations based on our fully curated and turnkey VxRail hyperconverged infrastructure (HCI) system. The VxRail advantage is based on our unique VxRail HCI System Software which provides end to end orchestration and automation for all day to day operations and single click, full HCI stack lifecycle management for ease of operations. Customers can easily run traditional and cloud native apps on their VxRail deployments, eliminating the potential of DevOps silos. As the only HCI system jointly engineered with VMware, VxRail is the ideal platform for EKS Anywhere, which utilizes VMware vSphere to run VM-based Kubernetes clusters.

Amazon EKS Anywhere has been validated on VxRail with vSAN persistent block and file storage and our VxRail dynamic nodes have been validated to run with our groundbreaking Dell EMC PowerStore scalable all flash, intelligent and adaptable storage platform for primary, persistent block storage. Customers will enjoy the incredible compute performance, storage flexibility and ease of operations of Dell Technologies infrastructure and the flexibility of the EKS managed service.

Diagram 1: Amazon EKS Anywhere on Dell EMC VxRail cluster using vSAN for block and file storage. VxRail with vSAN configuration, using First Class Disks (FCD) on vSAN block storage and vSAN file shares storage.

Diagram 2: Amazon EKS Anywhere on Dell EMC VxRail dynamic node cluster using PowerStore for block storage. VxRail dynamic nodes with PowerStore configuration, using First Class Disks (FCD) deployed onto VMFS datastores made from PowerStore block storage volumes.

In each of the two validated infrastructure configurations, VMware Cloud Native Storage and its corresponding Kubernetes CSI driver are used. The CSI driver is leveraged by DevOps and platform teams to deliver dynamic and automated provisioning capabilities of EKS Anywhere Persistent Storage Volumes utilizing native Kubernetes APIs, enabling infrastructure as code operations.

VMware Cloud Native Storage in vSphere and vSAN enables customers to adopt a consistent operating model for cloud native storage with support for any vanilla Kubernetes distribution, all on their choice of underlying infrastructure architecture. In both VxRail configurations, DevOps and platform teams benefit from the same consistent operational experience that empowers them to innovate and deliver value for their organization.

Our work with Amazon reinforces the importance of on-premises infrastructure and Kubernetes orchestration integration in driving the future of IT. Customers can run their Kubernetes orchestration in the public cloud or on premises through a single console with EKS Anywhere, while at the same time having the reliability, security, ease of operations and global support that only Dell Technologies infrastructure can offer. At Dell Technologies, we are committed to transforming businesses and shaping the future of innovation and look forward to collaborating with AWS now and in the future on additional infrastructure platforms to make this vision a reality.

Source: delltechnologies.com

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The Coming Digital Divide

We’ve spent years talking about digital transformation, but the events from the past year and a half have signaled it is now here. During a very challenging time, we found organizations and businesses dramatically change how they service customers and deliver value to their stakeholders. Digital transformation is no longer an aspirational target, but rather a modern-day reality.

Every organization has woken up to the fact that they are now a technology company. Now comes the messy part. With this shift, entire industries are being reshaped by those organizations who can successfully navigate this change.

As organizations advance their plans, they are facing an invisible barrier that threatens to undercut their visions of this future in the form of increasing demands on IT and an increasingly competitive labor market. This is a simple supply and demand economics problem we are facing.

Demand versus constrained supply

If you have undertaken a house remodel project in the last year, you probably found a similar challenge as building supplies shot up in cost and builders were booked out months in advance. But that phenomenon was a point in time, this new digital reality is here to stay. Let’s look at why this is occurring.

Every company is now a technology company

I like to tell people the easiest and cheapest lesson to learn is the one that happens to someone else, and businesses have really taken this to heart. We’ve seen digital disruptors reshape markets for years. Lessons from outdated business models like Blockbuster, retail and automotive sectors have all been examined and reported on ad nauseam. Success in market, ability to deliver on the mission, even a publicly traded company’s market cap is now intertwined with that company’s ability to achieve success with their digital strategy.

Every function is going digital

Once an organization goes digital, there is no going back. It becomes pervasive and extends through the entire entity. The value data holds is inescapable delivering incredible insights and powering applications, simplifying processes and pretty much satisfying whatever ROI metric you throw at it. We see legacy systems and processes fade away in favor of new, agile and more informed solutions put in place, and most importantly, we see transformational experiences and products begin to form. It is a self-propelled insatiable need to continue the digital journey. It’s basically inevitable.

The problem is people, and the need for many more

Another trend you may have noticed in the past year is multiple industries  struggling to find employees, which like home construction, will resolve itself in short order as the market corrects itself. When it comes to tech workers, we’re facing an uncertain future, that of the greatest labor gap in history. Imagine during the Industrial Revolution, the need to turn a farmer into a factory worker. While it required some training, the tasks being performed were relatively easy to train for versus creating storage admins, cybersecurity engineers, IT Ops folks, or developers. Much like aging a whiskey in a cask for 10 years, failure to anticipate an increase in demand for a skillset leads to a lag in supply for which there’s no easy fix and can linger for years.

Some markets, such as the automotive industry, hadn’t anticipated how widespread and pervasive the need to go digital would be. Autonomous vehicle development started over a decade ago, but it’s only recently that the full extent of what it will take to achieve has become apparent. A few years back, a large auto manufacturer met with Dell Technologies to scope out a zettabyte of processing and storage capacity for approximately 16k videos and telemetry data to enable their autonomous program. We estimated, based on currently known and modeled storage/admin ratios at the time, the project would require 100,000 storage admins to maintain it. There simply are not enough storage admins in the world to satisfy that requirement.

We are seeing this play out in every technology discipline as the amount of VMs, GBs, Packets etc. dramatically increases We must also consider the importance of scalability as companies rely more on technology to do business, the cost of downtime has become more dramatic. There is a staffing problem and it’s not possible to buy our way out of it. Help in the form of “adding enough hands” isn’t coming, we need to try something else.

Failure to address this shortfall

I’ll never forget a conversation I had with a large retailer about their roadmap for Kubernetes. Their response was “does it say Facebook on the side of the building? We can’t even keep our admins for 18 months.” Such pragmatism and earnest consideration opened my eyes to the reality of the digital divide. It’s about people. It’s about having access to the right skillsets, and the ability to extend and scale skilled workers’ productivity that fit the needs of the business. This customer needed ways to simplify implementations, to reduce the burden on their IT staff, ways to establish policies and practices that continued moving them forward even if they experienced churn. Instead, they were faced with obstacles to digital transformation that exposed their organization to significant risk.

The path forward is automation

Dell Technologies sees autonomous operations as the way to solve this gap and enable all organizations to achieve their digital destinies. Autonomous Operations (AO) requires data (AI Ops) and the ability to act on it (Intelligent Infrastructure) can be used to augment technology workers’ capabilities as well as remove burdensome repeatable tasks. By making each employee more efficient and removing background activities that can be safely handled by machines, we can create opportunities where every company can succeed.

Source: delltechnologies.com

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Changing the Game with Hybrid Cloud and APEX

During the past year we have come to understand how critical IT is to business and how it must be a priority moving forward. The operating costs of data centers are becoming the largest expense of IT. IDC reports that the OPEX spend on IT will be around 300% more than CAPEX by 2023.

Most organizations prefer to consume infrastructure without worrying about the day-to-day operations. They often look to public cloud as the answer, as it allows them to focus on deploying and managing their workloads and applications rather than worrying about managing and maintaining the infrastructure.

While public clouds is an option, there are risks:

◉ Data Density and Gravity: There has been huge growth in data. Many business applications require data to be as close as possible to the edge to optimize performance.

◉ Cost: Cost becomes a factor when managing large sets of data. Ingress and egress costs also become a major hurdle.

◉ Regulations: Due to strict governance and compliance rules related to data privacy and security, some companies might not be able to consider public cloud.

Many organizations like the public cloud model, where they can consume workloads without worrying about infrastructure, but encounter major obstacles as well. Dell hybrid cloud solutions and APEX eliminate these obstacles.

Dell hybrid cloud solutions… buy versus build

In order to build a hybrid cloud, IT organizations have many decisions to make around vendors, virtualization technology, automation, orchestration, security, monitoring, chargeback/showback, etc. Once those decisions are made and the components of the hybrid cloud solution are procured, they need to be installed, configured and integrated together.

So many decisions, so many areas of integration, so many things to integrate. And that is only for getting the environment up and running. What about upgrading this infrastructure? Or even updating the different software and firmware of all those components? IT needs to run through tens of compatibility matrices to make sure that software and hardware are compatible with each other and have to handle separate upgrade stacks on their own.

This is what Dell Technologies hybrid cloud aims to solve. Having a single platform that has infrastructure and a hybrid cloud solution that gets installed, configured and maintained as a single product, not only reduces time to market, but also day two operations, which reduces the risk of unplanned downtime.

VMware Cloud Foundation on Dell EMC VxRail provides customers with a platform that is jointly engineered with VMware as a full stack, while taking into consideration day two operations with integration between software update stack and hardware update stack, to offer an end-to-end sustainability experience across the full solution.

By deploying a standardized and validated network flexible architecture with built-in full stack lifecycle automation for the entire cloud infrastructure stack including hardware, VMware Cloud Foundation on VxRail makes operating the data center fundamentally simpler by bringing the ease and automation of the public cloud in-house.

In addition, VMware Cloud Foundation on VxRail includes end-to-end security built into every level of the infrastructure, from compute and management security, to micro-segmentation at the networking layer, to encryption at the storage layer. Understanding that security is one of the top priorities of the data center, it extends down into the hardware.

All of this is available with single vendor support through Dell Technologies along with choices for infrastructure delivery and flexible financial consumption options.

For those looking to extend to the public cloud, VMware Cloud Foundation is available as a service from VMware Cloud on AWS, Azure, Google, IBM, Rackspace and other cloud service providers, enabling a true hybrid cloud, based on a common and compatible platform that stretches from on-premises to off-premises for your VMs and containerized modern apps.

But wait, there’s more – APEX

Another reason why IT organizations look at Public Cloud models is due to the flexible payment models that they offer. Many organizations want a custom, cloud-like experience on-premises. This is why Dell Technologies unveiled APEX earlier this year.

APEX allows Dell Technologies customers to consume solutions as-a-service and with different payment models such as: APEX Flex on Demand, APEX Data Center Utility, APEX Cloud and APEX Data Storage Services.

Each of these services allows IT organizations to consume Dell Technologies solutions with the same payment experience as the public cloud. Customers can simply log into the APEX Console to query, read and approve pre-invoice usage reports and pay only for what they are consuming. All while hosting the infrastructure on-prem.

These payment solutions can be coupled with managed services to take the load off of the organization’s IT team and let Dell Technologies handle the nitty gritty details. With that, customers will have a true public cloud experience on-prem with a public cloud payment model so they can focus on consuming infrastructure and delivering new IT services rather than spending their time on keeping the lights on. This is a game changer.

Source: delltechnologies.com

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