Empower Communities to Strengthen Their Digital Literacy Skills

It’s anticipated that 82% of web traffic will be video this year, up 40 percent in just the last five years (thank you, TikTok). And while most of the information we’re consuming, creating and collaborating everyday lives online, 16 percent of adults in the United States are not digitally literate.

While that percentage may not seem alarming, the reality is that approximately 32 million adults, many of whom may be caregivers to young children, do not have the competence or confidence to navigate our digital world, let alone help children safely navigate this new frontier.

This monumental shift in how we consume information in our daily work and school routines, combined with this digital literacy gap not only exposed but accelerated a significant digital divide within our country – particularly in the realm of education.

Building Digital Literacy in Education

For students to fully participate in the digital arena, they need more than just access to technology, but an understanding of how to use it effectively and safely. This is no easy feat, especially for educators and caregivers who are often starting at square one when it comes to incorporating technology into both their students or child’s everyday routines.

Recognizing the considerable struggle, Dell Technologies partnered with the International Society for Technology and Education (ISTE) to provide resources to individuals, schools, districts and states that support digital literacy skill-building.

The Digital Skills for a Global Society provides resources to guide learners, educators and caregivers in getting the digital literacy skills they need to be successful in work, empowered as citizens and fulfilled in life. Users can begin by taking a 30-minute customized questionnaire to evaluate their skills and upon completion of the questionnaire, resources are provided to guide them in their digital journey. They are given opportunities to learn how to safely locate content online, evaluate resources, interpret information, express ideas, and communicate and collaborate.

Educators can dive deeper by registering for the Digital Literacy in the Classroom Course. The free five hour online course will guide educators as they strengthen their digital literacy skills while also engaging in strategies for implementing digital literacy skills across the curriculum. This is particularly important because digital literacy and digital citizenship are often incorporated into curricula as an afterthought versus embedded into subject areas from the start. By prioritizing digital literacy in curricula development, Dell Technologies and ISTE believe these concepts can become better ingrained in students’ behaviors, both now and in the future.

Lifelong Digital Learners

At Dell Technologies, we believe every student should be afforded the opportunity to have access to today’s technology, as well as an understanding of how to use it. This allows them to be an informed learner, while empowering them to have a more active role in an increasingly digital world. Likewise, we believe every educator should be equipped with the tools and skills needed to advance the next generation of digitally literate students.

Rooted in our goal of transforming one billion lives by 2030, we’re committed to turning this belief into a reality for communities.

Source: dell.com

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Break Down Data Silos with a Data Lakehouse

In the data‑driven era, you must be able to generate value from all your data capital, from the intelligent edge to core data centers to multiple clouds. But the distributed nature of data can make that complex and costly — setting up barriers to insight and innovation. Traditional data management systems, like data warehouses, have been used for decades to store structured data and make it available for analytics. However, data warehouses aren’t set up to handle the increasing variety of data — text, images, video, Internet of Things (IoT) — nor can they support artificial intelligence (AI) and Machine Learning (ML) algorithms that require direct access to data.

Adding a data lake promised to help solve these issues, by enabling enterprises to capture all types of data — structured, unstructured and semi‑structured — more flexibly and cost‑effectively than traditional data warehouses. Today, many organizations use a data lake in tandem with a data warehouse — storing data in the lake and then copying it to the warehouse to make it more accessible. However, this adds to the complexity and cost of the analytics landscape.

To compete in the digital era, your organization needs new solutions that evolve data management from siloed, rigid, costly and slow to unified systems that enable analytics and AI with speed, scalability and confidence. The new Dell Validated Design for Analytics – Data Lakehouse supports business intelligence (BI), analytics, real‑time data applications, data science and ML in one platform. It provides rapid, direct access to trusted data for data scientists, business analysts and others who need data to drive business value. Consisting of PowerEdge servers, PowerScale and ECS Object Storage, PowerSwitch networking and powered by Apache® Spark® and Kafka® with Delta Lake technologies and Robin Cloud Native Platform, this solution is designed to help you harness more data to transform insights across your organization.

Create Value from Data

This Data Lakehouse enables self‑service access to reliable, quality data for all users so they can run analytics, AI, ML and other data‑driven workloads to create value from data. With the Data Lakehouse running on‑premises or in a colocation facility, better data quality and control for BI and reporting give you the power to run critical analytics projects with more confidence in the value of the results.

Self‑service and on‑demand tools and frameworks further empower data engineers and data scientists, while interactive query coupled with better data availability facilitates more informed decision‑making. Performance optimizations such as caching, indexing and data compaction increase data access and processing speed  to drive more valuable outcomes. Dell Technologies customers report that they’ve experienced total benefits of $60.8 million over three years and saved hundreds of millions in cost avoidance with fraud detection.

Simplify Your Data Landscape

With the Data Lakehouse, all types of data — structured, semi‑structured and unstructured — can land and stay in your data lake, providing a single source for all enterprise data and eliminating the need for separate systems to serve real‑time data applications. No more chasing, copying or moving data between architectures. Support for atomicity, consistency, isolation and durability (ACID) transactions ensures consistency as multiple users concurrently read and write data. Data Lakehouse further eliminates complexity and guesswork by making all types of data available on‑premises or from a colocation facility. With solutions from Dell Technologies, customers report that they’ve saved up to 12 hours per week with automated reconciliation of data feeds, seen 18–20% faster configuration and integration, and experienced a 25 percent reduction in support required.

Protect and Secure Your Data

The Dell Validated Design for Analytics — Data Lakehouse provides a unified source for structured, semi‑structured and unstructured data, allowing data teams to embed advanced features such as audit logging and access control. They provide a uniform way to manage access control, data quality and compliance across all types of data using standard interfaces similar to those in data warehouses. You can further improve data quality by reducing manual extract, transform, load (ETL) between the data lake and warehouse.

This solution further helps you keep data safe with cyber‑resilient PowerEdge servers that are powered by 3rd Generation Intel® Xeon® Scalable processors with hardware-enhanced security integrated into every step of the server lifecycle. Additionally, the solution protects you from cyberattacks with ransomware defense and smart AirGap isolation integrated in PowerScale. Finally, our Future‑Proof Loyalty Program provides peace of mind and investment protection with Dell Storage and Data Protection offers.

Source: dell.com

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Global Retailer Gets Flexibility for Less Investment

Retail is one of the most challenging and competitive markets for consumer non-durable goods. While most sales are generated in-store, appealing online experiences and fast deliveries mean retailers need to offer customers a multichannel experience that builds brand loyalty. Successfully competing in this environment involves a substantial amount of IT infrastructure that is integrated across the organization to deliver a unified and personalized buyer journey. Managing the associated costs is equally important, especially in this intensely competitive market with razor-thin margins.

Deploying Modern Technology

Recently, Dell Technologies worked with a global multichannel retailer to modernize its storage environment for unstructured data. Historically, the retailer refreshed this technology every five years and purchased new equipment as a capital expense (CapEx). However, during the next refresh cycle, it wanted to avoid incurring another large upfront investment and a cash flow analysis identified significant cost savings made possible with a consumption-based payment model. The retailer chose Dell Technologies APEX Flex on Demand solution so that it pays only for the storage capacity consumed monthly, helping lower the cost of IT infrastructure.**

Dell Technologies’ server, storage, networking, data protection and CI/HCI products are all available with Flex on Demand. Customers select the configuration and services for their workload requirements, a contract term and levels of committed capacity, typically 40 – 80% of the total amount deployed, with the remainder being buffer or reserve capacity.

Committed capacity charges are billed monthly and buffer usage is charged only when consumed. At the end of the 12- to 60-month contract term, customers can go month-to-month, agree to a new contract, or return and refresh the equipment. Flex on Demand also features a billing limit for storage, data protection and hyperconverged infrastructure, so charges for usage above 85% of deployed capacity are waived, a feature that is unmatched by other on-prem vendors and public cloud providers.***

Increasing Budget Flexibility and Leverage 

Deploying this payment model enabled the retailer to pay for the exact amount of storage capacity is used. On-demand buffer capacity is available to scale up or down at any time to effortlessly support the company’s growing storage requirements, usage spikes and cyclical increases during peak shopping periods. Flex on Demand’s unique billing limit also enabled the ability to control costs during high utilization periods.

The retailer projected its infrastructure costs would be approximately 10% lower over five years compared to a capital expenditure because it is paying for the technology consumed. These and other cost savings enabled the retailer to upgrade the storage system in a second data center and deploy the additional capacity needed to deliver a superior customer experience. It also helped reduce the risk of under- or over-deployment and produce stronger business outcomes and margin performance. Results of this magnitude are helpful to any business or industry, especially in the slim profit margin world of retail.

Staying on the Cutting Edge of Technology 

Faced with a very competitive environment, the retailer needed to provide an industry-leading personalized buyer journey. This required processing large volumes of highly sensitive customer and operational data. By upgrading to a modern storage system, the retailer was able to deliver better customer experiences by increasing its ability to generate rich insights into consumers’ wants, needs and purchasing behavior. 

Gaining Simplicity, Agility and Control 

To manage highly sensitive customer data, retailers must comply with strict business standards to maintain security and privacy. By leveraging an on-premises, cloud-like solution, the retailer maintained security controls within its data centers. This allows security protocols to stay consistent with business standards without interruption to existing processes. The on-premises solution also provides full control of data security policies and responsibilities, an option that is not possible with public cloud solutions.

For the retailer, a flexible IT consumption model using APEX Flex on Demand is an ideal financial approach that generates multiple business benefits. Deploying modern technology in not one but two data centers with 10% in cost savings justified a pivot in the retailer’s overall business and IT strategies. Moving from a CapEx model to an OpEx-like approach enables enhanced customer experiences and business outcomes, delivering the ultimate benefits of less is more.

**Payment solutions provided to qualified commercial customers by Dell Financial Services through Dell Technologies group companies or authorized business partners. Solutions may be changed without notice and are subject to product availability, eligibility, credit approval, acceptable documentation and local applicable law. Some solutions, including end-of-term purchase options, may not be available or may vary by country. Within the EU, the EEA, the UK and Switzerland certain solutions are provided by Dell Bank International d.a.c. and in Spain by Dell Bank International d.a.c Sucursal en España. Dell Bank International d.a.c. is regulated by the Central Bank of Ireland.

*** Available with Flex on Demand for Storage, Data Protection, and VxRail. Dark sites, non-metered deployments, and customers non-compliant with their contract terms are not eligible.

Source: dell.com

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Simplifying Your Infrastructure as-a-Service Deployments

With the explosive growth of containerized applications running from the core to the edge, and onto the Radio Access Network (RAN), businesses of all sizes and roles are challenged with managing the myriad of infrastructures needed to host those ever-growing applications.

Dell Technologies and VMware have created a solution architecture (illustrated below) that simplifies IaaS deployments at Cloud Service Provider locations for their end customers, offering the end customer a virtual private cloud leveraging the multi-tenancy features of VMware Cloud Director with the implementation simplicity of Cloud Foundation.

Tanzu and VxRail are key differentiating, turn-key solutions to address this growing market.

For cloud service providers deploying this validated solution is an opportunity to expand revenue for a consumption-based model. This solution helps accelerates time-to-market and time-to-revenue to capture more market with continually expanding outcome-based offering portfolio. The joint solution validation simplifies experience for cloud service providers to deliver such offerings and functionalities native to vSphere and now available in VMware Cloud Director.

Tanzu as-a-Service with VMware Cloud Director multi-tenancy on VxRail and VMware Cloud Foundation gives competitive advantages as follows:

For Cloud Service Providers

◉ Enabling providers to offer dedicated private cloud or multi-tenant cloud for managed Kubernetes services.

◉ Providing multi-tenant k8s (Kubernetes) managed services for tenant DevSecOps and developers on existing vSphere environments.

◉ Leverage your existing vSphere and vCenter expertise and knowledge without needing a new, steep learning curve.

For Customers

◉ Focus on the business applications, not the infrastructure, with VMware Cloud Director, VMwareApp LaunchPad and integrated VMware Cloud Marketplace, third party or custom applications.

◉ Build, run and manage your applications with a robust underlying platform which enables you to focus your resources on application development and not on infrastructure management. Deploy your own container-based resources to better enable you application lifecycle.

◉ Boosts developer velocity and scale modern application services using a pre-wired, modular application-aware platform to quickly deploy containerized workloads.

In summary, cloud service providers can build the services around this reference solution more quickly and shorten the time to market to differentiate via additional services to their customers. From the operator experience perspective, together with VMware, we offer a consistent infrastructure which is achieved by joint product integrations and validations. This consistency is to simplify cloud native, DevOps practices providing a streamlined path to K8s production. The end-result is to drive operator efficiency.

Operational consistency and efficiency at the infrastructure layer provides a better developer experience. Developers can be more productive when they know the stability of the infrastructure that translates to better predictability or outcome-based app development. Application modernization can happen in a predictive schedule, measured in weeks, not months.

Source: dell.com

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The Three Keys to Business Resiliency

Global events and conditions over the past two years have increased awareness of the need for organizations to be prepared. In their May 2021 study, McKinsey & Company clearly expressed that the speed and uncertainty of change requires companies build long-term plans to withstand the threat of disruption in order come out stronger. That summarizes the critical need for business resiliency today.

That need has made business resiliency a key responsibility for businesses of all sizes. That warrants understanding what business resiliency is, what it comprises and how to insure your business has it.

What is Business Resiliency?

The International Organization for Standardization (ISO) defines business resiliency as an organization’s ability to both absorb changes and adapt to changes in the environment in order to deliver their objectives in ways that mean survival and prosperity.

Let’s distinguish between business resiliency and the more familiar phrase “business continuity”. Business continuity is about having a plan to deal with difficult situations, so business can continue to function with as little disruption as possible. Business continuity might mean restoring the supply chain, managing despite utilities outages or withstanding a cyberattack.

Business resiliency, in contrast, is an organization’s ability to withstand unpredictable changes by continuing to perform and emerge as an improved, even stronger force in their market, for their customers and employees. Consider these examples; cementing supply chain reliability, transferring seamlessly to alternative utilities in case of outages and increasing customer confidence by preventing cyberattacks before they occur.

Businesses today face ever-increasing threats while being pressured to perform to a higher caliber. Organizations must give increased attention to heightened degrees of threatened disruptions and how to survive them. Such threats, which may trigger situations testing a company’s resiliency, may include but are not limited to:

◉ Geopolitical factors such as COVID-19 continuing, international conflict

◉ Climate change, natural disaster, health threats

◉ Digital and technological change

◉ Cyber event such as attack, fraud, vandalism, ransomware infection

What Contributes to Business Resiliency? 

A business’s ability to respond and prosper in the face of change comes from integration of three more exact resiliencies, digital resiliency, cyber resiliency and workforce resiliency.

Digital Resiliency

Digital resiliency, according to IDC in March 2021, is essentially the definition of business resiliency applied specifically to the digital capabilities of an organization. In other words, a company’s knowledge and skills for rapid adaptation of its digital capabilities that restores, even capitalizes on the changing conditions.

Digital resiliency combines proactive digitalizing business operations with configuring its digital capabilities to restore operations and capitalize on changed conditions immediately. Consequently, it boosts your company’s ability to not merely survive, but to also capitalize from such forward thinking concepts as:

◉ Planning organization-wide processes for fast recovery from disruption

◉ Applying both data and digital governance to support rapid response to disruptions

◉ Continually improving digital innovations’ speed and time to market

Research by the World Economic Forum shows that when companies integrate advanced digital technologies across the value chain, they are likely achieve significant improvements in multiple performance measures, such as:

◉ Productivity increases of up to 90 percent

◉ Lead time reduction of up to 80 percent

◉ Speed-to-market improvements of up to 100 percent

◉ Energy efficiency improvements of up to 50 percent

Cyber Resiliency

Cyber resiliency is a business’s ability to respond seamlessly to a data attack or data failure. Cyber resiliency restores disrupted operations while maintaining customer trust and absorbing all impact on the business’s brand, financial footing and legal stability.

Whereas cybersecurity minimizes the threat of data attack or failure, cyber resiliency minimizes the impact itself by maximizing the ability to return quickly to previous or improved levels of performance. As a result, the greater your company’s cyber resiliency, the stronger its performance, reputation and financial footing in the aftermath of a disruption.

True cyber resiliency relies on four integrated elements, which may offer a workable cybersecurity “checklist” to ensure that your organization:

◉ Manages and protects data and data management systems

◉ Identifies and detects all potential risks and threats

◉ Responds to and recovers from any data disruption

◉ Governs and assures that all personnel can effectively respond to any disruption

Every business should conduct recurring cyber resiliency assessments to check, update and modify its preparedness in response to changes in business, operations and technology.

Workforce Resiliency

Workforce resiliency demonstrates employees’ ability to respond to threats such as scams and phishing attacks designed to infiltrate the organization. The growth of remote workforces and employees’ use of personal devices over the past two years has fed the rise of greater, more varied cyber-risks and cyberthreats. Every business’s workforce today must be willing and able to:

◉ Acquire an evolving set of soft skills to apply in the changing business environment

◉ Navigate changes in their company’s business operations and assignments

◉ Develop capabilities to work with advancing technologies

◉ Deal with disruptions efficiently and effectively as they arise

Ensuring that employees receive essential information and education in each of these areas is a business imperative. As organizations focus today on technology’s exponential rate of change, they must not overlook the human component.

As you evaluate your organization’s present level of business resiliency, you must project future actions that will ensure the ability to counter and overcome ever-greater risks and threats.

What do Dell Technologies and Dell Technologies Education Services offer to each component of your company’s business resiliency? Check Dell Technologies Business Resiliency Services.

Source: dell.com

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Run Untrustworthy Data Out of Town

The Edge: A New Frontier

I used to love shows about the Wild West when I was a kid. People came from everywhere to stake their claims and make their fortunes. They lived on the edge of civilization, trying to create value for themselves and their families. Anything was possible — and that usually meant criminals swaggered around town doing whatever they wanted. That is, until the sheriff showed up and formed a posse to chase them out of town.

Right now, the edge is like the Wild West. The edge is where data is created and acted upon to create immediate, essential value. Edge computing delivers many benefits — such as faster, better insights using more data at the point of creation and consumption — but those benefits don’t come without challenges.

Edge Data: The Good, the Bad and the Ugly

As edge data becomes more central to business decision making and as enterprise data is increasingly combined with external data to enhance analytics and artificial intelligence, it’s more critical than ever to ensure that all the data used for decision making is trustworthy and transparent. Because of this, the industry is recognizing the importance of digital monitoring, reporting and verification, designed to keep bad actors out of your data and out of your decisions.

Like the Sheriff of Deadwood, Dell Technologies has gotten together with the larger open-source community and formed a posse to drive bad data out of town. Project Alvarium, with the initial code seeded by Dell Technologies, is building a framework for a Data Confidence Fabric (DCF) that can deliver data from the edge, data center and cloud to devices and applications — with an industry-first, measurable confidence score.

DCF: The New Sheriff in Town

DCF fulfills the four principles of data trust — attest, transform, annotate and audit. It provides a standardized way of quantifying, screening, measuring and determining whether data meets your organization’s relevancy and trust standards to deliver more confident insights. Dell’s open-source contribution tracks the trustworthy handling of edge data from its creation and delivery to applications and across different vendors, networks and geographies.

Ensuring the trustworthiness and transparency of data is essential for organizations of all types and sizes. Early use cases for the Dell Technologies revolutionary data confidence solution will likely revolve around industries where edge data is proliferating and trustworthy data is critical for protecting lives and health, such as healthcare, industrial Internet of Things, digital twins, smart cities, military and government.

Find out how you can use the power of open source to put together a data confidence posse and start leveraging more trustworthy data across the wild west of your data estate. Discover more at our edge solutions page.

Source: dell.com

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Want to Work in Data Science? Review the Career Outlook

Data science is a field of study that desires to use a scientific approach to extract meaning and insights from data. On the other hand, machine learning guides a group of techniques used by data scientists that allow computers to learn from data. It not only supports businesses make better decisions but is also helping them to find new opportunities. Data Scientists are the superheroes of today's companies, who collect, cleanse, and organize the data using their intense skills.

What Is Data Science?

Data Science is a hot topic among skilled professionals and organizations concentrating on collecting data and drawing meaningful insights to aid business growth. A lot of Data is an asset to any organization, but only if processed efficiently. The requirement for storage grew multifold when we entered the age of big data.

Until 2010, the initial focus was on making a state-of-the-art infrastructure to store this valuable data, which would then be accessed and processed to draw business insights. With frameworks like Hadoop that have taken care of the storage part, the focus has shifted towards processing this Data. It is not confined to the thesis; it requires every evaluation. You must thoroughly know the target business domain to turn your insight into a solution.

As a data scientist, you not be limited to a countable number of datasets for analysis. Hence your domain experience should be older sufficiently. Higher is your domain expertise; the greater will be the chances of becoming a high-paid and successful data scientist.

Prerequisites for Becoming a Data Scientist

Even though the data science domain open-heartedly welcomes professionals from different backgrounds & experiences, it is worth knowing some requirements of becoming a data scientist before deciding on moving to data science as a career option. These prerequisites are not required and to have; however, they will indeed make your journey simple.

• Unconditional love for data.
• Analytical mindset and quest for logical reasoning.
• Hands-on with computers & programming languages.
• Familiarity with Maths, Statics & Linear Algebra.
• Understanding of business operations.
• The attitude of life long learner.
• Excellent command over communication.

Why Choose a Career in Data Science?

Data science was hailed as the “Sexiest Job of the 21st century”, and I am sure this is an essential factor in choosing data science as a career. Nowadays, any business, big or small, is always on the hunt to find people who can understand and deconstruct data.

Choosing a career means respecting the various fields in which data science has been built, such as statistics, maths & technologies, etc. The diversity of skills required to become a data scientist can be seen as an asset.

Now, let me draw your attention to a few essential factors for why you should choose data science as a career:

• Outstanding salaries.
• Exceptional growth & demand in the market.
• Endless career opportunities.
• Constant hard work or No tedious work.
• Part of industry is changing human lives in every aspect.
• High prestige.
• Be part of the future.

Data science has shown the capability that can transform industries and our society. With a limited supply of specialized professionals and a rapid demand, it has become a lucrative career.

However, the industry has a considerable shortage of skilled data scientists! Even though the jobs in the field of data science are seeing a steady upward trend, there is a noticeable shortage of data scientists with the right skills.

The good news is that it is a lucrative switch if you have your heart set on data science. To make this switch, those with a technical background, like engineering, can pursue a Master's or doctorate in their preferred data science stream, as experts are in high demand right now.

While data science is primarily looked at as a number-crunching field, it requires leaders to work and drive teams. This has also created vacancies for experts from other fields wanting to switch over. Marketing professionals passionate about technology can also find a place in the industry, especially in areas where futuristic technology breaks into the market.

Conclusion

Data Science has the power to transform industries and our society. It gives meaning to raw data and converts it into meaningful insights that can be used to grow the business and recognize market trends.

It is the most requested job of this decade and will be even for next. With growing awareness of the field, competition in securing jobs between professionals is also at its peak. Just remember; selecting the right career path is just a beginning; your journey starts from there.

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Move File Data to PowerStore with Datadobi’s Software DobiMigrate

Due to overwhelming demand, Dell is now offering Datadobi’s software DobiMigrate for file migrations to PowerStore at no additional cost to customers.

PowerStore’s revolutionary software architecture helps customers around the world support both traditional Enterprise file workloads and modern applications with flexibility, efficiency and performance. PowerStore’s all-NVMe architecture scales up and out to over 18PB effective capacity, with built-in intelligence and automation that helps customers serve both block and file from a single unified platform, bringing block-like performance to NFS and SMB workloads.

Using the Power of Software to Deliver Continued PowerStore File Innovation

Dell is focused on delivering continuous storage software innovation to its customers that increases intelligence, automation, data mobility and security. The company recently announced PowerStoreOS 3.0, the platform’s third major software release in two years. New software updates as part of PowerStoreOS 3.0 deliver significant enhancements in data mobility, ecosystem integrations, cybersecurity – and enterprise file support.

These new file capabilities will drive increased adoption of PowerStore for file solutions, along with additional demand for file migration projects.

DobiMigrate is now included in the package with every PowerStore appliance. Regardless of how much data needs to be migrated, it is free of charge. Fully tested and compatible with PowerStore, DobiMigrate enables users from non-Dell arrays to efficiently migrate their data to PowerStore technology.

Customers can use DobiMigrate to achieve fast and accurate file migration with minimal effort due to DobiMigrate’s scalable architecture and ease-of-use. If a customer opts to take advantage of Datadobi service (also included), they can simply a Starter Pack to get the ball rolling on the project.The IT teams behind the world’s largest and most complex migration projects rely on DobiMigrate. The software is ideally suited to mid-market and enterprise organizations adopting PowerStore to optimize their storage strategy across today’s varied and complex use cases.

Dell has a long-standing and successful history with Datadobi, and our continued collaboration will help organizations modernize their infrastructure while meeting demanding storage requirements.

Source: dell.com

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Newest Precision Powerhouse Features AMD Ryzen Threadripper PRO

It’s no coincidence that in our 25th anniversary year of Dell Precision, we’ve unveiled some of the most powerful workstations ever – with no signs of slowing. It began earlier this year when we introduced the world’s most powerful 14-inch mobile workstation, followed by last month’s unveiling of the new Precision 7000 Series mobile workstations. Not only do these offer the latest technological advancements, the Precision 7000 Series features a new form factor for DDR5 memory that we anticipate will become a new industry standard.

Which brings us to today, and the introduction of the Precision 7865 Tower, featuring the AMD Ryzen™ Threadripper™ PRO 5000 WX-Series processors. Whether you’re creating the next animated blockbuster, developing trend-setting AR initiatives or analyzing massive data sets, this professional workstation brings together immense power, flexibility and reliability in one system.

Meet the New Precision 7865 Tower

The Dell Precision 7865 Tower workstation.

Today, getting more done in less time–and seamlessly–is the name of the game. This new high-performance tower offers full-spectrum performance for a variety of demanding professional applications, powered by the latest AMD Ryzen™ Threadripper™ PRO processors. The Precision 7865 Tower is maximized for demanding, multi-application workloads and empowers users to tackle intensive, complex workstreams more efficiently. Bridging clock speed (valuable in interactive workflows such as computer-aided design) and multi-core computation (needed for workflows such as rendering or simulation), the Precision 7865 Tower powers data science, graphic design, engineering, imaging, and VR and AI initiatives without compromise.

Designed for engineers, architects, creators and designers who depend on mixed-use workflows, the Precision 7865 Tower comes with up to 64 CPU cores, up to 56TB storage, optional Thunderbolt™ 3, up to 1TB of DDR4 ECC memory with RMT Pro and a full suite of professional graphics options (up to 32GB AMD Radeon™ PRO W6800 or up to 48GB NVIDIA RTX A6000 graphics). The Precision 7865 Tower allows you to create and render simultaneously, without sacrificing performance.

More power shouldn’t mean more heat. The newly designed chassis features a hexagonal venting pattern that supports dedicated air channels for critical components. This enhances both thermal efficiency and acoustic performance, meaning you can focus on work while the system runs smoothly and quietly. This is all packed into a chassis that’s 14% smaller than the Precision 7820 Tower.

Users will see Dell’s longtime and ever-growing commitment to serviceability reflected in the Precision 7865 workstation. Servicing and upgrading are made simpler with convenient front and side access. A look inside reveals tool-less interiors and organized, color-coded components that make it more intuitive to upgrade memory, storage or graphics cards as power demands increase. Looking to the future, Dell engineers prioritized upgradability and scalability to not only meet the performance needs of today but also to grow and evolve alongside the pros who use them.

Dell Precision 7865 Tower workstation with Dell 38-inch U3821DW monitor, Dell Wireless Keyboard and Mouse KM7321W and Dell Pro Webcam WB7022.

Mission Critical Reliability Meets Enhanced Experience

Because performance and productivity across a variety of applications and multi-threaded workflows need to be at an all-time high, reliability and security are vital. Professional software certifications backed by rigorous testing and benchmarks help ensure applications are optimized and fully functional. Elite partners, including leading film and video technology company Blackmagic Design, provide an exceptional and expanded user experience.

“We are seeing customers, from first time filmmakers to huge studios, using DaVinci Resolve Studio with increasingly intricate and high-res video workflows. The technology they need to create must be reliable as well as powerful,” said Dan May, President, Blackmagic Design. “The new Precision 7865 Tower, with the AMD Ryzen™ Threadripper™ PRO, provides high performance and complex computation, giving our customers a powerful and configurable system to run Blackmagic Design Resolve Studio.”

Additionally, Dell Optimizer for Precision software makes the system smarter, using AI to learn your work style and respond to your needs, automatically improving application performance, and presenting specialized reporting and analytics.

The Precision 7865 Tower features a thoughtful design that makes it easy to access the inside of the machine, while the lockable chassis with intrusion detection helps keep it secure. TPM 2.0 (trusted platform module) and self-encrypting drives create a comprehensive solution that users can depend on to help protect sensitive data, intellectual property and confidential projects. Rounding out the ease of use, frequently used USB Type-C and A ports are conveniently located on the front of the tower, and carrying handles make the tower more portable when needed.

Continuing our focus on providing solutions to fit a variety of work environments and teams, the Precision 7865 Tower delivers fast network speeds (1Gb and 10Gb native), supporting work from home and allowing multiple users on one tower virtually. With the help of AMD PRO Manageability, the Precision 7865 delivers secure out-of-band and remote management, giving IT administrators the ability to support employees’ needs regardless of location so they can be and work wherever they want.

Final Words

The Dell Precision 7865 Tower will be available this summer globally, with prices announced closer to shipping. There’s no better way to celebrate our 25th anniversary than by continuing to push boundaries and creating the tools our customers need to do the same. And the Precision 7865 Tower is just that.

Source: dell.com

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Take Control of Server Cybersecurity with Intelligent Cloud-Based Monitoring

You’ve read the headlines: cybersecurity threats and losses for businesses have grown precipitously. According to the United States FBI Internet Crime Complaint Center, in 2021 Americans had over 850,000 cybercrime reports and related losses estimated at $6.9 billion, nearly double from the FBI’s report from just 3 years ago. Globally, Check Point Research reported a 50% increase in attacks on corporate networks per week from 2020 to 2021 and a peak of 900-plus attacks per week per organization by the end of 2021.

As the worldwide threat of ransomware and cybercrime is ever evolving, businesses must adopt stricter cybersecurity policies to close any exploitable vulnerabilities. There are plenty of cybersecurity standards and frameworks that organizations can conform to for protecting their servers, but how can this be tracked?

To answer that question, I’m excited to share a new feature in CloudIQ, Dell’s cloud-based, AIOps monitoring and analytics application for IT infrastructure systems, that enables PowerEdge server users to set and track cybersecurity configuration settings. This includes a powerful new capability that will enhance your cyber-defenses, as well as two other important new CloudIQ features for servers: Performance Anomaly Detection and REST API/Webhook support.

Cloud-based Intelligent Infrastructure Insights

CloudIQ for PowerEdge was introduced in August of 2021, and our product team is continuously releasing new features that help server administrators reduce risk, plan ahead and improve productivity. To date, CloudIQ is connected to hundreds of thousands of servers, storage, data protection and networking systems, giving IT organizations a single easy-to-use portal that provides system health, remediation recommendations and powerful performance monitoring capabilities. In fact, CloudIQ has accelerated time to these kinds of valuable insights for our server customers by over 3x, drastically improving IT operations and IT situational awareness.

PowerEdge customers with ProSupport or higher contracts can connect today at no additional cost via OpenManage Enterprise (OME) and the CloudIQ Plugin, which establishes a secure, encrypted connection from your on-prem infrastructure to Dell’s secure private cloud. Because CloudIQ is cloud-based and is accessible through a web browser, you don’t have to host, maintain, or upgrade CloudIQ software on your premises – we do it for you in our cloud.

CloudIQ Cybersecurity in Action

CloudIQ Cybersecurity for PowerEdge servers with OME 3.9 and the CloudIQ Plugin version 1.1 debuted in May 2022. To ensure servers are locked down and hardened against growing cyberthreats, you will be able to track and monitor over 30 different server configuration settings. This list of settings is derived from the NIST cybersecurity framework and Dell’s best practices. Once policies are set and enabled, CloudIQ continuously tests your servers’ cybersecurity settings and provides a powerful mechanism for notifying server administrators and security specialists about non-compliant settings and risks.

Want to make sure USB ports are disabled on a select group of servers? Want to confirm if Access Control settings like Active Directory authentication or LDAP authentication are enabled across a group of servers? With this new feature, PowerEdge users will be notified of risks when servers deviate from policy criteria, will be able to see the date these risks occur and provided with recommended actions to eliminate risks. A complete listing of configuration settings tracked for PowerEdge is available in the CloudIQ white paper. 

New CloudIQ Anomaly Detection and REST API / Webhook Capabilities

Other major CloudIQ for PowerEdge features are Performance Anomaly Detection, REST API and Webhook.

CloudIQ continuously and securely collects server performance metrics, and you can see that data plotted over time on the CloudIQ Performance page. With Performance Anomaly Detection, you can view a historical normal range of values based on the distribution of data points collected of the past 22 days.

Server Performance page graphs are called historical seasonality, and they show what is an expected value for CPU, memory, or other metrics at a specific time in the day. When metrics fall outside of what is expected, an anomaly is detected in CloudIQ. Anomalies in CloudIQ are defined as behavior outside of the norm, and do not always point to issues that need further troubleshooting. Rather, Anomaly Detection serves as a springboard to conduct more troubleshooting when issues arise.

Our strategy is to build upon this feature to tie anomalies to performance impacts, which CloudIQ already supports for storage systems, and serves as a more proactive means of detecting and notifying customers of system issues.

Integrating Insights with Other IT Tools

Other new CloudIQ for PowerEdge features are REST API and Webhook. All the valuable data presented in the CloudIQ GUI can now be retrieved via API or pushed via Webhook to make IT management more efficient and seamless across different applications.

A short list of examples includes sending CloudIQ notifications and data to third-party applications such as ServiceNow (for ticketing), Slack (for DevOps notifications); Microsoft Teams (for escalation), plus Ansible and VMware vRealize (for automating corrective actions in the infrastructure). There is an abundant number of possibilities with API support.

CloudIQ – Evolving Fast for PowerEdge

CloudIQ is a business-critical tool for IT teams large and small. We are continuously evolving it, with new features seamlessly available every week. PowerEdge users with ProSupport or higher contracts can leverage these and many upcoming features at no additional cost. Getting started with CloudIQ for PowerEdge is easy. Download and install the CloudIQ plugin for OpenManage Enterprise today to benefit from these great new features.

Source: dell.com

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Building More Scalable and Reliable eCommerce Sites With SRE

It you want to delight customers, SRE is not an option, it’s a business imperative.

SRE, or Site Reliability Engineering, is a software engineering approach to IT operations that ensures scalable and highly reliable software systems. Websites—such as the one you’re reading right now—have to be reliable and consistent to provide the user experience customers want, which is why SRE is so important to delighting customers.

I see SRE as the thread that connects everything that we do from an eCommerce ecosystem standpoint. It spans hundreds of applications, thousands of services, many different boundaries and ensures that if anything goes wrong in our ecosystem, there are frameworks, instrumentation, monitoring and alerting, so that we can notify the teams that need to react as quickly as possible. And in turn, it reduces the mean time to resolve (MTTR) service incidents.

Using SRE, we have substantially reduced the amount of downtime for our Global eCommerce Experience and Commerce Platform experiences and lowered MTTR across the commerce ecosystem. This meant, for example, we had 100% availability during our five-day Black Friday/Cyber Monday Holiday period in 2021, a time when customers rely on our sites to be there for them. 

An Immune System for IT Operations

Our SRE efforts began with a push to improve our site reliability by not only making sure our eCommerce systems were reliable but also achieving faster incident response to reduce downtime. We set an initial goal of 99.9 percent availability or 8.77 hours of downtime a year and looked for what we could do differently.

A key strategy was to move away from our traditional, siloed operation support process where various levels of support engineers (L1, L2, etc.) responded to incidents for individual services that were not connected. Support teams generally learned of issues through customer complaints. Investigating the problem, determining the cause and then fixing the issue could go through several service levels and took far too much time. We also lacked a cohesive view of the customer experience across our organization and beyond.

As a result, we began to explore an SRE methodology. Using third-party vendor tools and customizations, we built instrumentation and dashboards to form a single pane of glass. We reduced L1 and L2 support and had dashboards alert our engineering teams directly to reduce the number of hand-offs.

Once we were able to flag incidents in real-time, we looked at whether there were infrastructure issues that could be healed automatically without human intervention. The team built out technologies, processes and systems to self-heal where possible. If a virtual machine went down, for example, we created a solution to automatically fix it using technology.

As our team created an SRE network, we linked into numerous other IT functions. The application services and systems that come together to provide our customer experience are distributed. That means they’re owned by multiple different organizations. So, while I own the experience, other teams own the platform, the underlying services, the infrastructure, databases, etc. Anything can go wrong at any point in any of these areas. SRE’s number one job is to make sure that our mechanisms and instrumentation are in place to alert the right team, as fast as possible, to reduce the downtime.

Think of SRE as being similar to the body’s immune system. Whether you have a cut or a virus, it basically detects the change and responds to it. SRE monitoring looks for changes that cause disturbances across an organization’s entire ecosystem and reacts to them. Just like an immune system would do, once we identify changes that cause disturbances, we learn from those outages and implement things that will proactively prevent them.

The other thing that SRE does is manage our infrastructure, automation and migration. For example, SRE is responsible for moving our workloads. Last year, we moved everything from our old data center to our modern software-defined data center. We are talking about thousands of virtual machines, hundreds of applications and hundreds of microservices. And SRE did that with zero downtime. 

SRE Benefits and Insights

Several years into our SRE transformation, we have gotten to 99.9 percent in availability and, in a lot of cases, 99.95. Overall, we gained our highest availability ever, highest customer satisfaction ever and lowest MTTR. It has also helped us increase the website’s speed because we moved to a much better infrastructure. And, of course, we have better alerting and can find and fix issues faster. We are still striving to improve some self-healing capabilities.

These are all worthy reasons why SRE is critical to pursue, but it does have challenges.

Interested in adopting SRE in your organization? The biggest hurdle you will likely face will be cultural, not technical. SRE means your organization is less reliant on traditional support, which requires shifting away from longstanding IT roles and skillsets. Our L1 and L2 critical operation team members are empowered by monitoring and observability and have refocused on building software and tools to give insight to our SRE team.

As with most transitions, you need to begin your SRE effort by setting goals across the organizations in your ecosystem. Will you strive for 99.9 percent availability or 99.99? You then need specialized SRE engineers for this unique practice. From there, you need to establish and empower SRE leaders to drive the change, which will require executive support.

And you have to do all these things without losing empathy for people who have helped you get so far with traditional support. You need to drive this change with the understanding that you are offering reskilling options and taking those teams along with you on this journey.

But the results are worth it. SRE not only makes the systems we rely on more resilient, it also helps us get ahead of potential issues in the future. SRE makes us better every day, creating more delighted customers and building lifetime value with them.

Source: dell.com

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Five Ways Modern Retailers Can Win Using Edge

It’s Friday afternoon. I’m preparing for a dinner party with friends at my home that evening. As I prep the dessert course, I realize I have forgotten two key ingredients; I need to go to the store and quickly pick them up. I race to the store, breeze through the aisles and grab my items. Success! As I walk to the checkout line, I receive a text from one of my dinner guests stating they are en route to my home. I see a line of people at the store checkout. My mind races… until I remember that this store has cashier-less checkout. I pick up my pace as I push my cart through the exit, knowing the charges will automatically be paid from my account. I place my items into the car and head out. I arrive five minutes before my first dinner guest arrives.

In the last two years, the retail experience has totally changed — and its transformation continues. New customer expectations, spending patterns, savings priorities and shopping behavior are completely redefining the retail experience.

To keep up, retailers are rethinking everything. They are using technology for breakthrough capabilities such as meeting customer expectations for convenient, seamless interactions. These include streamlining retail operations, overcoming supply chain disruptions and establishing efficient retail systems in order to stay competitive or even outpace the relentless retail competition.

For retailers, digital transformation is especially critical at the edge. Bringing compute to where data is created and acted on can enhance operational efficiencies and provide shoppers with excellent in-store experiences. While edge computing opportunities abound, retailers can deploy and gain a competitive advantage today with five trending use cases.

1. Autonomous/Cashier-less checkout technology simplifies and speeds transactions. Autonomous store technology placed at the edge enables fully cashier-less stores, where selected items are added to an app-enabled shopping cart, similar to an online experience. Shoppers can then confirm their cart, pay the bill through the app and leave without ever interacting with an associate. Self-checkout or cashier-less stores use sensors and cameras placed throughout the store to scan items as shoppers add them to their carts. This technology uses computer vision and deep learning running at the edge to detect prices and calculate the bill In turn, this allows shoppers to pay and exit without visiting a cashier, and staff can be refocused to improve customer service and inventory management.

2. Customer behavior analytics informs customer-centric offers. Advanced analytics at the edge helps retailers understand metrics, such as how frequently a shopper visits a store, the products they prefer and how they respond to marketing, sales and customer service. This helps retailers create more targeted offers.

3. Checkout accuracy decreases customer wait times and reduces shrinkage. Advanced artificial intelligence (AI)–enabled video and scanning systems placed at the edge can increase self-checkout accuracy to make the experience faster for customers, flag errors and suspicious transactions to reduce loss.

4. Loss prevention helps preserve profits. Monitoring at the edge, powered by AI and analytics, can prevent loss, catch pricing errors and help retailers analyze where loss is occurring so they can prompt cashiers, stockers and customer service to take appropriate actions.

5. Computer vision boosts operations and enhances customer experience. Image recognition enables shoppers to scan a product with an app and see current inventory and similar product suggestions and even buy the product and have it brought to them by a store associate. This can help retailers retain sales from shoppers who compare prices online.

Sensor or camera-based customer analytics can detect in-store traffic patterns to help retailers see which promotions are most successful. Known as computer vision, this capability can also count shoppers and study customer behavior anonymously, tracking the customer journey throughout the physical store and enhancing it to improve the in-store experience.

These five use cases are transformational to customer experiences and help retailers win the hearts, minds and loyalty of customers. As a result, digital transformation at the edge holds enormous opportunities for the retail industry. Dell Technologies offers a range of solutions that enable business intelligence and data-driven decisions at the retail edge to help enhance the customer experience and increase operational efficiency to gain an edge over competitors.

Source: dell.com

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Taking Open Source Networking Mainstream with Enterprise SONiC

Traditional networking products over the last several decades consisted of rigid and inflexible architectures of closed solutions that combined hardware + network operating system (NOS) + network management into one platform. These closed networking solutions were built around proprietary, non-standard and hardware-based technologies that tied customers to a single vendor and long development release cycles – resulting in costly rip-and-replace upgrades.

Dell Technologies took the market by storm in 2014 with our introduction of a new paradigm for networking – the disaggregation of hardware from software through our Open Networking initiative. Our vision consisted of giving customers a choice of NOS that best met their unique data center networking needs, while ensuring investment protection in their hardware purchases – a first step towards a true software-defined networking environment.

In 2016, Microsoft’s announced their contribution of Software for Open Networking in the Cloud (SONiC) to the Open Source community through which the networking technology took a revolutionary step forward with yet another level of disaggregation by breaking monolithic NOS into multiple containerized components. Through the use of containerization, SONiC provides network managers with plug and play extensibility and the ability to run third party, proprietary, or open-sourced application containers and update and perform in-service upgrades with zero downtime.

SONiC is changing the way customers look at networking – just like how Linux and Hadoop changed the world of operating systems and databases. And just like Red Hat who offers commercialized support for Linux, Dell Technologies offers a finely-tuned, enterprise ready and globally supported distribution of SONiC – called Enterprise SONiC Distribution by Dell Technologies – to help bring the benefits of hyper-scale-focused SONiC contributions to rest of the Enterprise and Telco markets and use cases.

Since our announcement and launch of the Enterprise SONiC Distribution by Dell Technologies in June 2021, we have continued to evolve this platform with feature additions for enterprise data center use cases, improving the manageability and validation of SONiC and creating a consistent API and CLI support for all features. Dell Technologies is one of the largest contributors to the SONiC community, contributing the design and implementation of several features including sFlow, Management VRF, Zero Touch Provisioning, NTP, PIM-SSM, Platform APIs, Streaming Telemetry and an intuitive CLI framework, called Management Framework. To further the SONiC momentum, Dell Technologies has built a landscape of eco-system partnerships with organizations like Apstra-Juniper, Augtera, and Dorado that offer solutions that simplify the management and monitoring of massive and complex networks. As we continue to evolve Enterprise SONiC, customers are responding positively.

“We need a way to upgrade and adopt the latest technologies and capitalize our existing infrastructure, ” commented one Enterprise customer. “Enterprise SONiC Distribution by Dell Technologies provides us with the means to create a common denominator across our network infrastructure, creating an environment that’s easier to use, allowing for quicker upgrades and faster deployment of mission-critical applications and services.”

Although SONiC originated in the cloud-scale datacenter network of a hyperscaler, its evolution has dovetailed with emerging market needs and trends to make it increasingly applicable to enterprise customers. Brad Casemore, Research Vice President, Datacenter Networks, reported that IDC is seeing growing demand for switches that ship with or will run SONiC, and forecasts a SONIC data center switch market that will reach $2.5 billion by 2025. 

Today, we are introducing Enterprise SONiC Distribution by Dell Technologies 4.0, which extends SONiC capabilities from Data Center to Data Center, and out to the Edge, specifically for Retail and Branch use. This enables a unified fabric through a single NOS, from Data Center to Edge, allowing customers to streamline network deployment, operations and monitoring, all while using the same familiar network management tools they’ve grown accustomed to. In addition, this release brings support for datacenter interconnect (DCI), allowing management of SONiC installations across disparate sites and supporting an active-standby approach allowing business continuity, disaster recovery, increased application availability and simplified operations.

Simply said, Enterprise SONiC distribution by Dell Technologies 4.0 enables an end-to-end fabric with a lower total cost of ownership, streamlined operations, and reduced risk of disruption and downtime from unplanned outages or network performance issues, all supported through Dell’s Global 24×7 Enterprise support.

It’s been an exciting journey since our introduction of Open Networking over 8 years ago, Enterprise SONiC Distribution by Dell Technologies takes us into the next phase of open source networking and allows us to continue delivering on our promise of empowering customers with the networking choice and flexibility they need to help accelerate innovation, digital transformation, and grow new services within their businesses.

Source: dell.com

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