Dell’s Storage Software-driven Innovation Continues with AppSync 4.5

Every department in the organization will tell you they need a copy (or more) of data. Dell’s latest release of AppSync v4.5 software for Copy Data Management (CDM) allows multiple copies of data to be issued to users and when it’s needed without impacting business operations. AppSync software is designed to automate the distribution of application data in a self-served and enterprise application-aware manner with several storage and application integrations, broad infrastructure support and serviceability features. When you use AppSync, you’ll put advanced software in motion that eliminates unnecessary duplication of production and backup data to reduce storage consumption and increase utilization rates saving time and money.

Research indicates that the Copy Data Management Software Market is growing at a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of approximately 11% through 2027. Other research has shown that approximately 90% of global data growth is a result of replicated data for multi-purposing efforts throughout the organization, generally found to be higher than production data amounts and usually accompanied by increased data management costs.

This dynamic occurs because of the need to distribute redundant copies of the same data that quickly wastes storage space, slows network performance and makes accessing or restoring important business data more difficult. AppSync enables copy data management with deep application integrations, coupled with the abstraction of underlying Dell storage replication technologies. In doing so, AppSync eliminates these problems by simplifying, orchestrating and automating the process of generating and consuming copies of production data.

Storage administrators only need to perform initial setup and manage policies, resulting in agile and transformative application workflows. AppSync will automatically discover your application databases, learn the database structure, and map it through the virtualization layer to the underlying storage. It then simplifies the admin job by orchestrating all activities required from copy creation and validation through mounting at the target host and launching or recovering the application. Those in your organization needing to achieve application-consistent snapshots can deploy AppSync with supported configurations for Dell storage platforms.

This software release provides additional CDM capabilities for Dell customers with multi-array deployments and use cases such as data re-purposing, operational recovery and backup acceleration to address application copy demands and lower capex/opex. These are a few of the AppSync 4.5 innovative software features that you’ll be able to take immediate advantage of:

◉ Deeper platform support

◉ New application integrations

◉ Improved Total Customer Experience (TCE) features

◉ Improved infrastructure features

AppSync v4.5 is available to order today for use with Dell PowerMax, VMAX AFAs, Unity/Unity XT, PowerStore, PowerFlex, SC Series, and XtremIO storage solutions running VMware, Oracle, Microsoft SQL/Exchange, SAP HANA, file systems and Kubernetes. You can choose between three AppSync licensing models that makes sense for your business, including:

◉ 90-day full feature free trial of AppSync

◉ AppSync Basic license (this ships with most arrays)

◉ AppSync Advanced license that’s fully featured and available for purchase with Dell primary storage arrays

Source: dell.com

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Technology Investments are Key to Customers’ Competitive Advantage

Today, our Q2 financial results showed another strong quarter, with record revenue of $26.4 billion driven by growth across our Client Solutions Group (CSG) and Infrastructure Solutions Group (ISG). CSG and ISG grew 12% and 9% respectively. We executed well despite an increasingly challenging environment. And we continue to deliver on our strategy of growing our core business and innovating for our customers to help them seize opportunities in the data era.

Globally, organizations are facing a range of challenges – inflation, slowing economic growth and ongoing supply constraints. Many companies are struggling to predict what’s on the immediate horizon for their business. However, in my discussions with customers around the world, one thing is clear: they continue to see technology investments as key to their competitive advantage. They need a partner who can work with them and deliver in any environment. Our overarching goal is to be that trusted partner, helping our customers and partners compete and succeed now, and in the years ahead.

The innovations and the solutions we develop help our customers and partners compete and win. Recently, we joined forces with T-Mobile to pair a private 5G network with Dell edge-computing technologies so data can be processed, stored and acted upon at locations like large business campuses, factories or universities. T-Mobile’s 5G Private Mobile Network will bring customers 5G connectivity on-premises where they need it, as well as the speeds, ultra-low latency and control they need to use new apps that can help to increase revenue and lower costs.

Our innovations in edge and telecom have never been stronger. Dell’s edge computing technologies, along with PowerStore and PowerEdge servers, also helped The Kraft Group, one of the largest privately held companies in the United States and holding company for the New England Patriots, to capture data at the edge and use real-time insights to create an immersive and secure experience for fans at Gillette Stadium. DISH marked a major milestone in building the world’s most advanced cloud-native 5G Open RAN network when it announced offering 5G broadband service to over 20% of the U.S. population. With its cloud-native network built with Dell’s open IT infrastructure, software and services, DISH can continue to scale its deployment while helping organizations tap into the possibilities of 5G and edge computing.

APEX is another innovation engine enabling our customers’ multicloud future. Our customers are looking to buy infrastructure as a subscription. Our APEX annual recurring revenue is now more than $1 billion and we grew orders 78% year over year in Q2 while adding almost 200 new customers. The Federal Home Loan Bank of San Francisco is using APEX to support its growth and cloud strategy while offering significant cost savings as the financial institution serves its members. Montage Health, which delivers care to a half-million individuals annually, is using APEX to provide clinicians with better access to critical applications and information for patient care and staff collaboration.

Across the globe, our customers are using technology in incredible ways to advance healthcare, education and opportunity.

Rijksmuseum in the Netherlands is one of the first in the world to completely digitize its collection, making it accessible to all while also preserving cultural heritage for future generations. Teams used high-resolution photography and artificial-intelligence techniques, powered by Dell Technologies storage and services, to learn how Rembrandt put paint on canvas and to determine the best treatment plan for restoration. The museum worked with Dell and channel partner IT Creation to provide employees working remotely with Dell laptops.

Caja Morelia Valladolid, Mexico’s second-largest membership savings and credit cooperative, is working with Dell to modernize its data centers. Together, we’re bringing greater speed, security and efficiency to many IT processes as the bank expands its online and mobile banking capabilities – including a new mobile app and new functionality that allows members to make payments on other banks’ credit cards without standing in line.

GEO SEARCH investigates under-road cavities across Japan to identify and address risks to the infrastructure. Using Dell PowerEdge AI-enabled server, GEO SEARCH can expand the distance it can survey by six times, from 20,000 km to 120,000 km, contributing toward greater protection and mitigating disasters.

This past quarter is proof that in today’s environment, technology is a universal competitive advantage, and we are delivering innovative solutions for our customers in a big way. That’s our commitment to our customers and partners, and we are confident in our long-term opportunity.

Source: dell.com

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Charting the Path Forward for a New School Year

In my 25 years as an elementary school teacher, supporting teacher professional learning and now leading the Education Strategy team at Dell Technologies, my favorite time of the year has always been ‘back to school’. It’s the prospect of a fresh start, a full year of chances to learn and new opportunities to impact learners.

Since the onset of the pandemic, we’ve worked hard to help our schools, students and teachers adjust to the unfamiliar realities of digital learning and remain connected in school districts from New York City to Albuquerque to Toronto and everywhere in between. This year, that work will continue, and it’s exciting. The opportunity to make an impact on young people’s lives through education is what keeps me engaged with school systems. As we prepare for the continued progression, let’s take a moment to reflect on what will ensure a successful year.

It might come as a shock to you, but Dell has been leading learner-centered professional learning for over 18 years and we have worked with thousands of school systems in North America. The need for this service will be even more important as the models of learning shift to more hybrid and blended. To that end, our education strategists and partners recognize first-hand how essential professional learning is as teachers continue to adjust to diverse learning environments.

That’s why we’ve continued to prioritize professional learning to equip our educators with the right tools and resources needed to transform teaching and learning. To meet this ongoing and pressing need, Dell has invested more than five million U.S. dollars over the last three years in professional learning for teachers– investments that ensured our students continued learning and will remain a priority in the years ahead.

In navigating the global technological shift, one thing has become clear: security and data privacy have emerged as significant challenges in the K-12 world. Our students’ and educators’ data and safety must be at the forefront of all of our conversations. Just this year, the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Agency (CISA) released a new K-12 school security guide that helps schools create safe and secure learning environments without burdening teachers and administrators. Dell’s security solutions, including content filters, end-user management and cyberattack prevention/monitoring tools, build on that important work. It takes balancing access management and threat protection to ensure student and faculty safety and success.

Data privacy and security are important, but digital literacy will also be a defining skill and topic for the foreseeable future. As a technology company, we’re committed to driving towards the goal of all individuals and communities having the technical capacity needed to fully participate in society. That’s why we’ve partnered with ISTE to develop resources needed to advance digital literacy skills within communities.

Digital Skills for a Global Society provides resources to guide learners, educators and caregivers in getting the skills they need by taking a 30-minute customized questionnaire to evaluate their skills. After completing the questionnaire, resources are provided to guide their digital journey. 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. These resources and many more are free to the education community to support this very important topic.

We remain committed to helping education systems as they transform teaching and learning. That is why Dell continues to invest in education strategists to support school systems in their transformation journey. For example, Berkeley County Schools, in West Virginia, collaborated with our Senior Education Strategist, Dr. Tara Nattrass, ensured that the district was preparing both its educators and students for the shift to a digital future. “Dr. Nattrass’ collaborative, unassuming approach allowed us to redefine ourselves through developing a new mission, vision and set of core beliefs. She educated, listened and internalized what was said by our team and guided us to a final, lasting product,” said Robyn Lopez, Director of Assessment and Accountability. As our education system continues to evolve, it’s our strong partnerships––similar to our relationship with Berkeley County Schools––that allow us to collectively meet education needs.

As our teachers and students return for another school year, we must build upon the progress we’ve made, lessons we have learned, and the emerging research to continue making new strides in improving the overall educational experience. We’ve begun to adapt and redefine the classroom and now it’s time to enable learning to happen anywhere, anytime.

Source: dell.com

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Managing E-waste Responsibly: Critical Steps Towards a Circular Economy

E-waste not only poses health and environmental hazards, it’s also an untapped value that businesses of all sizes, across all sectors, could return to the circular economy.

According to the Global E-waste Monitor 2020, only 17.4 percent of e-waste is formally documented as being collected and recycled. The report estimates that globally, e-waste will reach 74 metric tons by 2030, nearly double the amount since 2014. According to UNESCAP, Asia generated the greatest volume of e-waste in 2019 — some 24.9 metric tons, followed by the Americas (13.1 mt) and Europe (12 mt), while Africa and Oceania generated 2.9 mt and 0.7 mt respectively.

The rapidly increasing rate is another concern for planning future e-waste management. The annual growth rate of e-waste was estimated to be 3-5%, which is about three times larger than other types of waste.

Good for Bottom Line, Better for Environment

The business case to protect our planet couldn’t be more evident. The global IT asset disposition market size was valued at 18.57 million USD in 2021. It is expected to increase to 51.38 million USD by 2030 at a CAGR of 12% during the forecast period of 2022–2030. The Asia Pacific market is projected to account for 25.44 USD million by 2030, expanding at a CAGR of 14%.

The same Global E-waste Monitor 2020 report also addresses financial implications. The report shows that the amount of iron, copper, gold and other minerals discarded in e-waste is valued at over 57 billion USD. Recovering those materials through proper recycling benefits the planet and businesses.

Start to Adopt Circular IT Strategies to Extend Product Life Cycles

Accelerating the circular economy is at the core of Dell Technologies Environmental, Social and Governance (ESG) goals. By moving away from the linear economy and embracing a circular one, we can design to reduce and reuse waste, and extend the useful life of products and materials to reduce environmental impact. At Dell, we believe technology will play a key role in this shift, and we see the circular economy as a critical business model for our collective future. As a global technology leader, we have a strong opportunity to minimize waste and as a result, emissions by driving circularity through everything we do.

When a product reaches its end of life, the materials can be reused and recycled, creating sustainable value within the circular economy. Supporting this model reduces environmental impact while giving businesses opportunities to increase competitiveness, stimulate innovation and revenue, reduce operating costs and create jobs.

We are also walking the talk. Since 1996, Dell has been offering secure recovery solutions for customers around the world. Since 2007, we have recovered more than 2.6 billion pounds (1.2 billion kilograms) of used electronics. Asset Recovery Services, for example, helps businesses securely and responsibly retire their IT equipment. Earlier this year, Dell expanded its support for Asset Recovery Services, which is now available in 36 countries.

Retire your IT Equipment Securely and Sustainably with Asset Recovery Services

When selecting a partner to help reduce your organization’s environmental impact and improve your sustainability practices, consider Dell’s Asset Recovery Services. By leveraging Dell’s long-standing security expertise and commitment to sustainability, you can responsibly resell, recycle or return to lease your legacy IT equipment and shift your focus to what’s next.

Here’s how it works:

◉ Return any brand. We’ll take back all of your owned or leased hardware, no matter where it came from.

◉ Leave the logistics to us. We’ll handle every detail from pick up to final reporting, so you can stay focused on your core business.

◉ Keep your data safe. We’ll sanitize devices in strict alignment with the NIST SP 800-88r1 standard to ensure data doesn’t fall into the wrong hands.

◉ Unlock value. Your aging asset may have more value than you think. Our goal is always to reuse, extending the life of the product as our first priority. We’ll resell your equipment and send the money back to you.

◉ Protect the planet. If your asset has no value, we’ll dispose of it in compliance with local regulatory guidelines.

◉ Peace of mind, on-demand. Customize and download status reports to keep track of your services from anywhere. Data sanitization, confirmation of disposal, and resell/recycle reports are at your fingertips.

Source: dell.com

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Why Dell IT Went All In on Workforce Personas

When it comes to providing tools and technology to today’s increasingly hybrid workforce, one size doesn’t fit all. And what does fit the needs of your team members today, may not fit tomorrow.

It is a realization that inspired Dell IT’s Team Member Experience organization (TMX) to transform the way we serve our 130,000 team members across Dell Technologies, from the workforce personas we use to define their needs to the way we leverage data to respond when those needs change—as they have dramatically in the past few years.

Of course, knowing your workforce is the key to delivering the ultimate team member experience. And since personas are the cornerstone of knowing your workforce, we started our transformation by honing this critical design tool. 

Keeping Workforce Personas Evergreen

A persona is a fictional character that IT creates based on research to represent the different types of users of IT services and products.

After years of team member surveys, focus groups and shadowing people in their jobs, Dell Digital, Dell’s IT organization, became proficient at using personas to determine the right set of tools and technologies to best meet team member needs in their roles. When COVID-19  prompted a sudden shift to a home-based workforce,  we learned that business needs and workforce needs can change with the snap of a finger.

We have since returned to a flexible hybrid workforce where team members still work from home more often, but the office remains an essential environment. That means we need to ensure we provide the tools that meet the way people work, wherever they are.

We needed a better way to let TMX personas keep pace with changing demands and priorities. We leveraged a comprehensive study by Dell’s Client Solutions Group (CSG) and insights from Dell Services to tap into hybrid workforce trends and redefine our personas. We then invested in telemetry tools to create a proactive support model that would correlate systems and satisfaction data to keep our persona practice evergreen and relevant going forward.

The result is a modern set of tools and processes, for not only equipping team members with the right devices, but also monitoring their experiences to identify and correct any challenges that arise. TMX is now able to recognize emerging trends for each worker persona and be more proactive and agile in addressing business teams’ needs.

A little more than a year into this transformation, we have garnered some of the highest team member satisfaction scores for technology services and products that we have ever achieved in the five years that TMX began measuring CSAT. The overall CSAT score climbed from 50 to 80 percent after deploying the new solution. We expect to see even greater team member satisfaction as we continue to deploy persona-driven technology through its normal life cycle processes.

Our TMX Evolution 

Over the years, TMX has evolved our use of personas to determine the equipment we supply to team members, as workforce trends, user roles and demands have changed.

Several years ago, the TMX team realized we needed to develop a framework in which we could better understand our workforce to more effectively serve their technology needs. Prior to that, we followed industry practices by supplying each team member with a single standard device, regardless of what they did or what they needed. Applications were also constrained and standardized. The resulting team member satisfaction ratings were low.

As a global company, Dell had many different roles, responsibilities, functions and locations to accommodate. TMX began its effort with team member surveys, then added focus groups and first-hand observation of various jobs to gain insights into categories, needs and friction points. Our original personas were focused around executive and outside sales, inside sales and core knowledge workers and backbone corporate services. Location and mobility were important factors.

Instead of giving everybody the same PC, we began to match PCs and peripherals with individuals based on their function, role and location.

We realized that if people have the right-fitted technology, their satisfaction will be higher, no matter what system, low-end or high-end, as long as it is suitable. We refined the process and gained positive team member feedback.

In partnership with HR, TMX also incorporated personas into its onboarding process to automatically provide the right hardware to new hires and those assuming new roles. Using personas has also improved cost management since it eliminated the need to field custom requests and service nonstandard equipment.

Keeping Pace with Today’s Changes 

Despite our previous success, the sudden shift to a remote workforce and the subsequent reintroduction of the office environment significantly altered our team members’ priorities. We realized we needed to revise our persona strategy.

Our research underscored the fact that those previously agreed-on personas had changed in this hybrid, flexible working environment that we’re now in.

Home-based workers, for example, required more video capability support but less mobility. Battery life was no longer as important. As the workforce subsequently became more hybrid, team member priorities shifted yet again to technologies and tools that accommodate a mix of home, office and mobile work.

TMX continues to review our personas to modernize and update them as ways of working evolve. We have also established a Voice of the Team Member Center of Excellence, which features listening posts to enable us drive changes based on what we hear. We have also combined in-house and third-party telemetry tools to gather and analyze data and feedback.

TMX became an early adopter of modern personas developed by the CSG team, which had researched evolving workforce roles and macro trends happening across many customers as part of a two-year study. We also worked closely with Dell Services on aligning personas with consultancy offerings.

TMX both simplified and refined our personas, removing location as a factor. Our ongoing goal is to provide a set of tools that offer every single employee the optimal experience, from the right PC and peripherals to the overall work ecosystem.

We are now able to get ahead of evolving workforce needs before they become critical and before our competitors can find the same trend, a capability we can use to our competitive advantage. 

Source: dell.com

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APEX: Delivering Customer Choice and Partner Opportunity

Customers want outcome-based solutions, with a cloud-like simplified experience, while maintaining both flexibility and control. With Dell Technologies APEX, we deliver just that, with a growing set of offers, delivering modern consumption models and addressing the growing need of customers’ desire to purchase technology as a service.

Dell has always been about customer choice. Sometimes customers want to purchase products; but increasingly they want the benefits of an IT solution via a subscription to the product or service. The important thing is the outcome, and we know that one size does not fit all.

What started over two years ago, when APEX was announced, continues today with a steady drumbeat of “always on” enhancements and expansions. We’ve just extended our global availability of our APEX solutions to resell, which is expanding the opportunity for our partners around the world.

APEX offers more consumption choices for customers and more options for our partners to increase customer stickiness. It represents an amazing growth opportunity for our partners because it enables and empowers them to meet our customers’ increasing requests with choice and differentiation.

APEX enables partners to continue being responsive and agile to meet market demand. It also simplifies consumption, purchase and overall engagement with Dell, as well as an amazing opportunity to extend and enhance their own services.

Our entire partner ecosystem is key to our mutual success. Our APEX solutions offer them increased flexibility, agility and positions them to address the rapid growth opportunity of multicloud. The Partner ecosystem continues to assist customers with the increased complexity of navigating the current computing environment.

We continue working to enable the entire partner community to complement APEX solutions. Partners are incredibly well positioned with critical skills, capabilities and valuable industry and vertical expertise. Together, we are assisting customers to assess and determine the best place for specific workloads to be deployed, whether in public or private clouds, on-premise, or in a colocation data center.

APEX resell capability continues to expand for partners, as we march toward global expansion. It’s now available in the United States along with select countries in the EMEA and APJ regions. In addition, we continue adding new features to the console for an improved partner experience. Both custom and outcome-based offers, including APEX Flex on Demand, are available through the console.

The hallmarks of the APEX strategy for partners are continued momentum of enhancements and expansion, optimism for future growth and consistency in delivering on our promises.

Source: dell.com

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The OTEL Secret Sauce: Take a Sip

While I have always enjoyed cooking, one thing was always clear, my wife is a better cook than I am. She can take any recipe and make it better. Is there something extra or unique she does to amplify the recipe’s flavor? Maybe adding a little extra bouillon or seasoning salt and the right kind of tomato paste? Managing the optimal amount of garlic and mixing in each ingredient at the right time?

So, what does this have to do with Dell Technologies Open Telecom Ecosystem Lab (OTEL as we call it)? At MWC Barcelona this past year, we announced our OTEL Solution Integration Platform. The Solution Integration Platform is that “something extra” that makes OTEL unique. It uses the latest DevOps techniques to bring Communication Service Providers (CSPs) and partners in the telecom ecosystem together to conduct integration, testing, and ongoing lifecycle management of Open RAN, 5G, and edge services and applications.

It is a platform that automates workflows to run on any test environment within the OTEL, as well as connected customer and partner labs. The OTEL Solution Integration Platform accelerates analysis on the back end, post-execution, by giving nuanced results of test execution rather than the simple analysis that a test has passed or failed. The platform securely connects CSP and partner resources to the Dell Technologies lab and infrastructure to develop and bring 5G and telecom edge services to market more quickly. In short, it is OTEL’s secret sauce.

Over the past six months, we have been preparing the unique ingredients that go into the OTEL Solution Integration Platform:

 

◉ Implementing the foundational services required to orchestrate and provision any solution integration and validation workflow

◉ Developing a solution that can support multi-vendor system integration at scale, cloud operations modeling, multiple test-line configurations and user-defined end-to-end and on-demand validation at varying scopes

◉ Designing a result management system to provide insights and analytics derived from validation results. This will enable integration teams to further optimize end-to-end solutions

◉ Integrating with customer topology, labs, reporting, and data collection

◉ Developing interfaces with various reporting, bug tracking, metrics and telemetry collection systems

The master chefs of the Dell Technologies OTEL engineering team combined the flavor ingredients of continuous integration, deployment, testing and validation with the cooking prep of a plug-and-play model, driven by an agnostic test automation framework to make a feast. This helps CSPs address key operator challenges by providing a fully cloud-native and container-based architecture for the development, deployment and integration of 5G Open RAN and cloud-native telecom networks at scale. And now the secret sauce that is the OTEL Solution Integration Platform is ready to be served so you can increase your appetite for integration testing.

Source: dell.com

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Celebrating 25 Years of Precision Workstations Pushing the Boundaries

As we celebrate a quarter-century of Dell Precision innovations this year, we’ve unveiled some of the industry’s most powerful workstations. Since our first Precision workstation in 1997, Dell engineers have stepped up time and again, providing solutions for some of the most innovative minds in some of the most complex, ever-evolving professions. Driving many industry firsts, we introduced the world’s first mobile workstation in 2001 and the world’s first rackmount workstation in 2008.

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

One of this year’s firsts was featured in the launch of the Precision 7670 & 7770—the 7670 is the first 16” Precision mobile workstation and also the first to feature two chassis options, allowing professionals more options to scale according to their power needs. When our engineers identified impending transfer speed limitations in the current memory technology, SoDIMMs, we developed and presented an all-new Dell-patented innovation called CAMM (Compression Attached Memory Module). We are in discussions with the industry standards committee to help make CAMM a new standard, providing modularity and supporting repairability.

Dell Precision 7670 and 7770 mobile workstations.

Dell Precision 5470 mobile workstation and Precision 7865 Tower workstation.

This banner year also saw Precision unveil the world’s most powerful 14” mobile workstation, for truly portable performance, and Precision’s first-ever AMD-powered fixed workstation featuring the AMD Ryzen™ Threadripper™ Pro, bringing new levels of multi-threaded performance for the increasing workload demands.

These elite workstations help power creators across a multitude of industries including architects, engineers, AI and ML workloads, graphical processors, the medical community, media and entertainment industry creatives and many more that are using cutting-edge technologies to shape their work and its impact on the world. And we’re not stopping here.

Precision At Work: Now and to Come

Core to Precision’s DNA is the ability to anticipate our customers’ needs  and how technological advancements can revolutionize their work. Through the years, we’ve adapted our systems so the medical community can prepare high-resolution renderings that guide surgical plans. We’re empowering robotic technology that helps first responders detect people in danger and visualize a fire before they enter a building. As the concept of digital twins crystalizes and takes root in multiple industries, we’ll be there to help those at the forefront.

One such vanguard is fashion designer Lui Iarocheski, 3D fashion design and innovation director at VALACLAVA, an online apparel brand. Iarocheski uses his Precision 7760 workstation to create digital twins of fabric and garment samples, then incorporates 3D software to visualize, tailor and perfect the designs. The company can then create on-demand garments, reducing time-to-market, expenses and waste from samples and unsold products.

VALACLAVA digital design. Image courtesy of Lui Iarocheski.

“With digital twins, fabric and patterns can be manipulated in the virtual space to fit an avatar rather than on the body,” Iarocheski explained. “Cloth simulation is super demanding, and the Precision handles this task in a speedy manner without the software crashing. This power helped us to reduce our design process (for one digital garment) by 67%. It also gives me the portability that I need for visiting factories and meeting with the team, while the 17” screen means I can still share projects clearly without a separate monitor.”

Iarocheski says the 3D design process has implications for the larger fashion and retail industries. “Using digital twins, retailers can incorporate AR to allow customers to interact first with hyper-realistic products before purchase, and fashion brands can sell designs in digital channels and only start production when an order is placed. Such on-demand operations will help lead fashion toward more sustainable practices in the future.”

We’re continually inspired by the groundbreaking work we see from Precision users and strive to support the future of what can be achieved in their numerous fields of expertise.

What Other Experts are Saying

Drew Geraci, leading photographer and cinematographer who produced the closing title/credits for Steven Spielberg’s award-winning film West Side Story using his Precision 7920 said, “The new Precision 5770 expertly delivers a professional-level platform that mirrors the latest in technology advancements while being as lightweight as it is powerful – which is incredibly important to me as a cinematographer and editor. I was able to throw incredibly complex high-resolution content, view it all back in real-time and on a true 8k timeline with absolutely no stuttering or playback issues. I was also able to view those files back on the desktop natively without having playback issues in 8k, which I’ve never seen from any laptop I’ve ever used.”

Tim McLaughlin, head of the Department of Visualization at Texas A&M University said, “When the program began in the late 80s, it was grounded in design and computer science with most students using 3D graphics in entertainment media such as feature animation, visual effects and games. But as the power of computer graphics has grown, our students’ interests have evolved into areas like AR/VR in healthcare applications, real-time collaborative design in engineering, data-driven design for urban planning and simulation training. Having Dell Precision workstations has helped our students work with a variety of applications needed to bring their ideas to life, and their work output is on par with professionals already working in the field.”

Celebrate With Us

From award-winning filmmakers and animators to architects and engineers, Precision has been at the core of some incredible work over the last quarter century and to celebrate, we have commissioned a one-of-a-kind exhibition of bespoke digital artwork created using Precision workstations. Industry-leading creatives from around the globe will pull back the curtain on both their creative and technical processes, culminating in a digital gallery including 3D sculptures, animated videos, still illustrations and more. Meet the creators and check out the full gallery below.

Additionally, the Precision team heads to SIGGRAPH 2022 from August 8-11, to showcase some of the newest systems and how they handle complex, demanding workflows and applications with ease and reliability. We’ll also provide a peek at the new Precision 7865 Tower, which will be available later this summer. At SIGGRAPH, we’re inviting attendees to join us for the wrap of Precision’s 25th anniversary celebrations on August 9: register here.

Our Precision teams around the globe will also be celebrating this milestone, with events planned in Asia, Europe and Latin America. Reach out to a local Dell sales representative for events in your region!

Final Words

As professional compute solutions and workstreams continue to evolve, so will Precision. We thank you for 25 years of being your trusted partner and we look forward to all that’s left to accomplish in the next 25.

Source: dell.com

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Predictive Maintenance: Reduce Downtime and Increase Profits

Over the past few years, companies have been focusing on leveraging their data to drive business insights. Internet of things (IoT) and sensors generate valuable information that can be used to reduce downtime and the costs associated with it. This can prove to be vital considering that 82% of companies have experienced at least one unplanned downtime incident over the past three years. Unplanned downtime costs as much as $50 billion a year to industrial manufacturers.

Companies aiming to reduce downtime have been implementing different maintenance strategies, which have been evolving through time. These can mostly be either reactive, preventive, or predictive.

Reactive maintenance occurs when a failure has already happened, unexpectedly, and it needs to be resolved. This usually means increased downtime and lost productivity.

Preventive maintenance refers to maintenance activities that are planned and executed at a regular interval. An example of this is a monthly maintenance of a machinery. This practice can potentially incur unnecessary costs, as perhaps there was no current or emerging issue that needed to be taken care of. It is done regardless because that’s the frequency that was estimated to be optimal.

Then the third type is called predictive maintenance. This refers to the maintenance in which companies leverage their past performance data and all the information that is generated by IoT or sensors. In predictive maintenance, machine learning – fueled by data-driven insights and real-time operating conditions monitoring and diagnosis – is used to optimize when and how to execute maintenance. Leveraging this type of predictive analysis can help avoid costly unnecessary repairs, while optimizing the utilization of the equipment and drastically reducing downtime.

Organizations identifying its value have started to shift from preventive to predictive maintenance. Predictive maintenance, based on IoT and sensor data, has the potential to transform business operations. Companies that understand and implement this technology will have a clear competitive advantage.

Dell Technologies realized significant cost savings from the use of a predictive maintenance application run in the Dell IT data lake, an agile storage platform that can be easily configured for any given data model, structure, application or query. This application leveraged data from sensors on connected devices, lab test results, and vendor technical specifications to determine the likelihood of a system drive failure based on factors ranging from usage to data center environmental conditions. Dell used this information to proactively replace drives that were predicted to fail in the near future. The company avoided more than $100 million in costs associated with repeatedly bringing technicians into its data centers for one-off fixes on failed drives.

To remain competitive and achieve higher margins, exploring how to implement predictive maintenance is likely the right call for most businesses. Learn how you can leverage your data to derive valuable business insights by visiting our Analytics Solutions page.

Source: dell.com

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Streamlining Azure Hybrid Cloud with Dell Azure Stack HCI

We are excited to bring the latest updates to the Dell Integrated System for Microsoft Azure Stack HCI. This May 2022 release is designed to streamline Azure hybrid cloud for our users by providing tools to deliver a seamless Azure experience across distributed locations while optimizing and simplifying Azure operations on-premises and accelerating innovation that fuel their business.

Delivering Seamless Azure Experience

Our latest release adds unique software-driven integrations with Azure that simplify operations across distributed locations, whether in the core datacenters or dispersed edge locations.

Through enhancements to Dell Open Manage Integration for Windows Admin Center, this release enables Azure Arc to serve as the centralized control plane for distributed on-premises Azure Stack HCI deployments. Customers can now monitor the health of the Azure Stack HCI infrastructure, perform operational tasks such as cluster creation and expansion, enforce consistent compliance policies across locations and remediate any drift from the defined policies in the event of non-compliance – all through the central Azure Arc control plane.

These are important capabilities for our customers who often must manage their Azure Stack HCI assets deployed at multiple locations. By providing these capabilities, Dell brings consistency and predictability to these deployments while reducing operational overhead and complexity in managing multiple locations.

Optimizing Azure Infrastructure On-premises

While many of our users have adopted Cloud as a strategic imperative for building agile, flexible, responsive IT operations, they often take a hybrid and multi-cloud approach to infrastructure. Many of the workloads continue to reside on-premises due to the requirements around performance, data locality, security and compliance. The Integrated System approach Dell has taken to delivering Azure Stack HCI infrastructure on-premises eliminates many of the common pit falls of assembling their own systems.

The Dell Azure Stack HCI infrastructure is delivered as a fully engineered, integrated solution that is supported and updated as an integrated system, simplifying deployments, day-to-day operations and ongoing lifecycle management. This release further adds robust security capabilities, some native to Dell hardware while others through integration with and support for new capabilities Microsoft introduced in their latest Azure Stack HCI release. These capabilities include:

◉ Dell HCI Configuration Profile Policies for Azure Arc and Windows Admin Center (WAC) that prevent malicious threats and inadvertent changes to operating system, BIOS, and network settings.

◉ Dell Infrastructure Lock that protects system and configuration changes from unauthorized users

◉ Secured Core server by Microsoft software suite that provides added hardware security of infrastructure is fully implemented in Dell Integrated Systems.

◉ Azure Stack HCI adds Azure Arc’s policy and compliance services across all locations. Azure Virtual Desktop (AVD) service for Azure Stack HCI allows IT to have their data on-premises for regulatory and data sovereignty requirements.

These new capabilities demonstrate Dell’s continued commitment to delivering simplicity and robust infrastructure outcomes for the on-premises deployments that are an integral part of our customers’ multi-cloud strategy.

Accelerating Innovation and Workload Execution

Lastly, Dell has added new capabilities and configuration options to help our customers deploy and optimize workloads that drive organizational innovation. This release adds GPU node configurations with support for NVIDIA A30 GPUs. With this, customers can optimize and right-size their deployments that benefit from GPU resources. Artificial Intelligence (AI), Machine Learning (ML), analytics and Virtual Desktop Infrastructure (VDI) are some of the important use cases for our customers, now GPU support will accelerate these workloads.

Dell has also recently validated Microsoft Azure Virtual Desktop (AVD) solution with Login VSI benchmark tool. The benchmark results validate that a three node Dell Azure Stack HCI system is able to deliver 1200 concurrent user sessions. With the support for AVD, customers can now optimize infrastructure for their distributed workforce while utilizing this hybrid service delivered via Azure Cloud to on-premises virtual desktops, eliminating many complex configuration tasks involved in traditional VDI deployments.

This release adds a broad set of capabilities that help our customers realize a seamless Azure experience across locations, while optimizing on-premises infrastructure and accelerating workloads that drive innovation. Please review the solution brief and the video above for more details on Azure Stack HCI AVD solution.

Source: dell.com

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Bringing Self-Service Server Decommissioning to Dell IT

Server decommissioning is an essential part of the equipment lifecycle process for any organization—and Dell Technologies is no exception. Like many companies, we wanted to find a faster, smarter, more efficient way to do this.

That was the goal as our IT teams took on the challenge of managing the lifecycles of more than 120,000 servers in use across Dell Technologies, to ensure they are efficiently shut down when they need to be.

When the Dell Digital Server Decommissioning Product Team started this effort, Dell Digital, Dell’s IT organization, had a mix of decommissioning processes. We saw an opportunity to standardize processes and apply automation to increase efficiency and decrease decommissioning time.

Decommissioning a server means disconnecting it from the network and scrubbing all the data it contains. This requires involving a host of internal teams including storage, network, security and IT engineering, undertaking an array of manual steps.

If server decommissioning cleanup isn’t fully completed, it can lead to unused servers cluttering data centers and unnecessarily tying up resources such as power and IP addresses. There can also be instances where servers might get turned back on and become “orphan” servers, disassociated from their applications, but still occupying space in our environment.

After working with application owners, developers and multiple IT teams to analyze our server environment, the Server Decommissioning team created an automated, self-service process to improve this crucial task of properly decommissioning our servers. The team designed and implemented the Self-Service Decommissioning tool (SSD) that completes the server decommissioning process end-to-end in one tenth the time of previous manual processes.

In the first six months of the tool’s deployment, we’ve expedited our server decommissioning and saved millions of dollars in resource costs.

Here are some insights on our server decommissioning effort that might help your organization avoid server clutter in your IT environment.

Collaborating with Stakeholders to Hone the Process

The team began our decommissioning analysis by spending several quarters researching records, processes and collaborating with stakeholders to get a picture of our server environment and the existing process.

We found that it took an average of 64 days to perform the manual server decommissioning process spanning across various teams.

In the old days, server owners had to submit a request to get approval to decommission their devices within limited windows of time. Our Change Management Team would review requests weekly to ensure there were no moratoriums or production conflicts and then authorize owners to begin the server shutdown activities. Various factors could lead to requesters waiting weeks or even months before they could start the process.

Decommissioning was a very manual process and involved various teams  to tackle the many tasks, such as reclaiming storage volume, removing backup data associated with the server, deleting associated virtual machines from our VM console, and more. Dell Digital Domain Name Service recycled valuable IP addresses which are always in limited supply.

Once we determined the existing process, the Server Decommissioning Team began working with IT, Change Management and the Dell Digital Zero Touch Engineering Teams to create an automated decommissioning process. Our ultimate goal was to make it easier and more efficient for teams to retire hardware from our environment.

We adopted a hybrid approach, where decommissioning requests would go through a newly created workflow that automatically checks for conflicts and authorizations. If it found no conflicts, the process then issues decommissioning approval. Our new automated decommission tool (ADT), developed by the Zero Touch Engineering Team, handles the actual decommissioning process, including self-service server shutdown, server status validation and the deletion of VMs.

Under the new process, once a request goes through the auto approval workflow, service shutdown is automatically triggered. Since there are no longer restricted windows of time for decommissioning, a server can now be shut down in as little as 24 hours.

The SSD tracks each request’s progress, keeping requesters informed on the status of their applications. The simplified, seamless and faster process has vastly improved SLAs for our team members and makes server owners a

Building a Self-service Path

ccountable for the fate of their devices.

By applying automation, we’ve decommissioned more servers, faster, and rectified the orphan servers matter. It has resulted in reclaiming 53K TB of disk and 364 TB of memory. This has led to millions of dollars in savings.

If your organization is looking to improve its server decommissioning process, my strongest advice is to not be afraid of dealing with the complexity of your existing environment. Do the analysis to determine your ecosystem’s current status. Work with stakeholders and your IT teams to resolve this nagging problem that otherwise will continue to grow.

Creating a self-service, automated server decommissioning process can free up team members to focus on what matters, gain cost savings through resource reclamation and, perhaps most importantly, help decrease cybersecurity vulnerabilities for your company.

Source: dell.com

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Why the Hybrid Workplace Needs a Hybrid IT Model

Hybrid work— people working seamlessly from both the office and a remote location— has been happening for years, but the COVID-19 pandemic accelerated the shift in ways few people anticipated. Ironically, while IT’s efforts to support these environments boosted business agility worker productivity, it also further complicated already complex IT portfolios.

Here’s the issue: This glut, comprising a hodge-podge of public cloud, private cloud and edge solutions from several vendors and homegrown on-premises tools, is proliferating as companies lean more heavily into their digital transformations. We call this phenomenon multicloud by default: portfolio sprawl that makes it difficult to be thoughtful and strategic with your multicloud approach.

Fortunately, a solution exists; embracing multicloud by design to form a more intentional approach to building and operating hybrid cloud systems. Before we delve more into this opportunity, it’s important to understand how we landed here.

Carried By the Cloud

People have been splitting time between their home and corporate work offices for years. What has changed is the number of people working remotely has vastly increased since the pandemic emerged the world over two years ago. And that has made IT systems more complicated.

Recall when in 2020 IT leaders tackled the unprecedented challenge of enabling thousands of employees to work from home. Some IT teams created new work personas to ensure that employees typically working from desktops in an office daily could work from home via laptops—overnight. Some companies even established customer service call centers in workers’ homes—ensuring their staff had the appropriate monitors, headsets and other necessary peripherals to serve customers—in days.

Cloud applications, led by video conferencing, team collaboration and virtual whiteboarding tools, made this shift possible. As corporations began allowing employees back into the offices, a cottage industry of pandemic-inspired digital experience applications sprang up to ease this transition to a hybrid workplace.

Cloud infrastructure largely fueled these tools, computing and storing data nimbly from the bottom of intricate software stacks. IT also built or subscribed to several connectors, or APIs, to ensure these tools communicated properly. 

The Sprawl Struggle is Real

Most companies were already using Zoom, Teams and other collaboration and productivity tools to connect with colleagues. But as the pandemic deepened many organizations have found they’ve needed to add additional SaaS apps, including software that allows workers to reserve “hot desks,” COVID-19 screening apps and other tools to make office visits safer. In fact, many of those have become permanent solutions even as team members resume returning to corporate offices. And the new digital workforce tools continue to increase already dense IT portfolios to bloat.

Seventy-five percent of respondents surveyed by Enterprise Strategy Group in 2021 said that IT is more complex than it was just two years ago, with 38% identifying higher data volumes as a top driver of that increased complexity. The survey results also revealed 29% identifying increases in the number and types of applications as a driver.

And because many of these apps are connected to other apps running in public clouds or in other locations, their interdependencies grow—significantly, in some cases. All this incremental software adoption—again, much of it cloud-based—has yielded an even more unwieldy—and costly—IT portfolio. In many cases, these are challenges facing IT leaders on top of a full plate of digital transformation initiatives, and the need to reduce or eliminate technical debt. 

Preparing for Future Trends

If it wasn’t enough for IT leaders to think about digital transformation and managing a broadening cloud portfolio, they also need to think about what’s to come. For example, leaders should expect greater IT challenges as companies began experimenting with context-aware computing, which relies on intelligent software and sensors. Context-aware computing provide workers real-time information at the right moment and in the appropriate location, often through a series of digital hand-offs, to employees working remotely or the office.

For example, we’re exploring concepts for seamless work experiences that let employees quickly log onto their computers, peripheral devices and applications simply by entering an intelligent workspace. In such an environment, a wireless dock could sense an employee’s PC, connect them to the network and adjust to their preferred display, while keeping the computer charged wirelessly throughout the day. No need to fuss with cables or cords.

Such computing can reduce friction and make it easier to transition from home to office, or vice-versa. Of course, while this new hybrid workplace is designed to deliver outcomes, it also portends greater complexity. It’s prudent for leaders to consider not just today’s IT requirements but what tomorrow’s environment may require.

You Need a More Agile Infrastructure

Regardless of what shape your context-aware computing profile takes, these outcomes are achieved through agile infrastructure that is also predicated on outcomes. This is best enabled via an as-a-service approach to infrastructure that affords IT leaders simplicity and control.

The idea is that your organization will realize the benefits afforded by the public cloud–elasticity and automation—but from the comfort of their own data center or a co-location facility. Ostensibly, you’ll have the cloud experience where you want it—private cloud, public cloud or edge.

Consider the context-aware computing case studies. As sensors and applications relay API calls to automatically control computers, monitors, camera and other connected, the digital hand-offs will occur seamlessly, thanks to the agile, as-a-service model.

What Will This Look Like?

You’ll rent, rather than buy, servers and storage in a self-service fashion, procuring them from a single, digital dashboard that puts the control at your fingertips, rather than entrusting someone else to make the decisions. You’ll pay for these services in a subscription model that will count as OPEX, helping you shed more of that CAPEX model you’ve already been fleeing as you embraced cloud services.

Consuming IT services via an on-demand model while retaining data on-premises to mitigate security, compliance, and performance concerns is attractive to many organizations. But don’t take our word for it. Try it out for yourself. 

Source: dell.com

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Revolutionizing Integrated Security: Modern Storage Experience

Digitalization has ushered in a data explosion in all organizations across all industries. Data volumes have continued to grow at a breakneck pace with no signs of abatement, thereby significantly altering the storage industry and its priorities. The disruption with cloud, cyber resiliency, application-driven economy and demands for transformation, are driving organizational strategy focused on management of storage solutions. IT leaders welcome this new world order as their organizations have benefited from improved business operations, personalized customer experience and agile innovation

But benefits often come hand-in-hand with challenges.

The increased reliance on data meant that organizations and their IT infrastructure are at greater risk from malicious attacks, human errors and negligent behaviors. Researcher ESG reported that 79% of companies globally had experienced a ransomware attack over the past year. Yet, according to our Global Data Protection Index Survey, 67% of IT decision-makers are not confident that their business-critical data can be recovered in the event of a cyberattack.

Furthermore, the permanence of digital transformation, accelerated by the pandemic, meant that data storage would require greater attention and investment; and cyber resiliency could no longer be an afterthought.

A Matter of When, Not If

In 2017, the WannaCry malware attack grabbed global headlines, and the man on the street quickly learned of a new word: ransomware. Today, threat of a cyberattack is real; unfortunately, no organization is immune to these bad actors. Cyberattacks are increasingly sophisticated, malicious and expensive. In a survey by Accenture, 81% of leaders think that staying ahead of attackers is a constant battle, and the cost is unsustainable. That is because the cost implications are even greater if we consider the negative impact on an organization’s reputation and stakeholder confidence. Here’s the bottom line: enterprise data is the golden goose, and protecting it is a business imperative. IT leaders need to think of storage as a part of a surround-sound security strategy.

Pivot to Software-defined Storage

Software-defined innovation paves the way for a continuously modern storage experience, as organizations try to find ways to manage the data explosion while keeping costs low. At this year’s Dell Technologies World conference, we announced a suite of upgrades to our storage portfolio that will enable our customers to win in the multicloud ecosystem. The benefits are incontestable: simplicity, cost savings and efficiency.

Take Dell’s VxRail as an example – we partnered with Cianbro Corporation to transform their storage capacity and bolster their disaster recovery capabilities. The result is simplified management and up to 80% cost savings compared to tape-based backup and recovery. Ultimately, software-defined storage enables organizations to efficiently and effectively manage data.

Air-gapped Cyber Vaults: What’s Not Connected Can’t Be Attacked

With the paradigm shift to a multicloud environment, we are seeing our customers move critical data away from the attack surface by logically isolating it from access within public clouds. This creates an “air gap” that provides an additional layer of defense by reducing the attack surface. This ensures that even when there is a sophisticated malware attack, organizations are still able to fulfill the three tenets of a purposeful recovery framework: isolation, immutability and intelligence.

Founders Federal Credit Union needed an air-gapped cyber security solution with AI, machine learning and automation that would integrate seamlessly with their IT environment. By deploying the PowerProtect Cyber Recovery solution, they could have 10 petabytes “mini-data center” protected in an isolated cyber vault and reduce the average server restore time from backups to 35 minutes while enabling automated cybersecurity reporting for IT audits.

Move from Cybersecurity to Cyber Resilience

The adage that prevention is better than cure is no longer relevant in today’s heightened threat landscape. In a cyber resilient mindset, the focus shifts from defense to mitigation. This ensures minimal disruption and loss. It is important to note that resiliency is not a technology but a strategy or, better yet, an outcome.

IDEC Corporation in Japan implemented the Dell EMC PowerMax 2000 to enhance its storage infrastructure reliability, availability and performance while supporting current applications and operating systems. Likewise, the University of Pisa leveraged the PowerMax for its mission-critical applications such as admin functions, teaching and labs, ensuring that these workloads run in a highly resilient and cost-efficient environment that will continue to operate, even in event of a breach.

Integrated security is a key pillar in the modern storage experience. Protecting data and infrastructure calls for a software-defined approach that leverages innovation for scale, agility and intelligence, aligns around outcomes rather than threats and is proactive in recovery planning.

Source: dell.com

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Taking DevOps Productivity to New Heights with AIOps Automation

AIOps applications are a hot topic, and their ability to integrate with other tools in the IT management ecosystem has big implications about how to step-up daily operations productivity.

As Stephen Elliott from the IDC analyst group explains in the video below, AIOps is a new class of application that applies knowledge, based on machine learning and analytics, to provide insights and recommendations that improve and accelerate IT Operations. Leveraging automation, AIOps can further accelerate positive IT, DevOps and, ultimately, business outcomes.

CloudIQ is Dell’s AIOps proactive monitoring and predictive analytics application for Dell servers, storage, data protection and network systems. With hundreds of software engineers continuously churning out new CloudIQ features, we’re constantly soliciting feedback from the thousands of CloudIQ users.

AIOps Users Speak Out

User surveys show that CloudIQ’s AI/ML-driven capabilities result in 2X to 10X faster time-to-resolution of issues and saves IT specialists an average workday (nine hours) per week. CloudIQ user surveys also reveal how IT teams are thinking about ways to leverage AIOps insights with automation and increase gains. While nearly a third of users are undecided about how to leverage AIOps insights with automation, more than two-thirds want to use them to automate actions, but with various degrees of oversight and control.

CloudIQ Webhook and the CloudIQ REST API are new features that will address those needs by enabling your ITOps, DevOps and SRE (Site Reliability Engineering) teams to integrate data and insights from CloudIQ into your IT Monitoring and Orchestration application ecosystem. CloudIQ’s trusted data and insights become the intelligence that will drive IT automation to further reduce toil.  

CloudIQ User Survey: AIOps Automation Preferences

Why AIOps Integration?

The CloudIQ AIOps application for proactively managing infrastructure health, performance, capacity and cybersecurity was extended over the past twelve months to integrate with other tools via Webhook and REST API. During a three-month technical preview for each feature, we took users’ feedback into account before releasing them into production. We were amazed by the large number of participants and huge appetite to leverage CloudIQ insights through automation.

Integration with ITSM (IT Service Management), collaboration and orchestration tools, to name a few use cases, allows customers to reduce toil and streamline processes and flows. Based on CloudIQ’s reliable data and intelligent insights, DevOps and SRE (Site Reliability Engineering) teams can now automate the creation of incident tickets and the remediation of well-known and repetitive issues. They can also integrate CloudIQ with mechanisms other than email (such as Teams and Slack) to communicate with team members.

The key here, in terms of user experience, is that we’ve built our Webhook and REST API with consistency in mind: consistency in the way you interact with them and consistency in the way they work across Dell’s server, storage, data protection, storage area networking and IP networking systems.

Webhook

Considering system health as the most pressing issue, we started with the CloudIQ Webhook, sending health issue occurrences to remote endpoints via a simple HTTP POST and in an easy to parse JSON payload. Webhook endpoints can only be managed by users with the right role, and Webhook messages are signed (HMAC-SHA256) and sent over HTTPS.

Leveraging Webhook, you can create incident tickets in your favorite ITSM tool, pre-populating fields with data coming from CloudIQ and avoiding manual steps. You can also send health issue occurrences to a collaboration tool to notify the SRE team that there’s something wrong to look at. In both cases, flows can be designed to ask for the user’s approval before allowing automated remediation to be launched.

This will reduce time to restore service or to mitigate risks and is especially suited for common, repeatable tasks such as:

◉ Storage capacity is rapidly approaching full; automate a storage object (e.g., file system) expansion

◉ A server component is not responding; automate a re-boot to potentially resolve the issue

CloudIQ Webhook is available today for the full range Dell infrastructure systems that CloudIQ monitors.

REST API

Dell recently introduced a CloudIQ public REST API, based on a Dell standard REST API style for Dell’s infrastructure products. Dell API standards enable all Dell product APIs to look and behave consistently so that you don’t have to re-invent the wheel when integrating with various Dell products.

The CloudIQ REST API uses a common model across Dell infrastructure products to expose systems, components, attributes and metrics, making the life of our customers easier to list all objects across products. For example, listing all volumes across storage systems allows DevOps team to automate chargeback or showback flows, without having to rely on multiple element managers and integration points.

Three typical use cases we heard from our customers during our REST API tech preview were:

◉ ITSM integration to synchronize system inventory from CloudIQ with a CMDB (Configuration Management Database)

◉ Enterprise Manager of Manager integration to pull key metrics and KPIs from CloudIQ into a central repository for creating dashboards that include systems monitored by CloudIQ with non-CloudIQ monitored systems

◉ Showback dashboard integration to pull capacity utilization metrics at the storage object and compute level from CloudIQ so stakeholders can see what’s in use

CloudIQ REST API is read-only today, and we’re working on additional key features to enable even more use cases.

As of this writing, CloudIQ REST API supports the Dell storage portfolio (PowerStore, PowerMax, PowerScale, PowerVault, Unity/Unity XT, SC Series, XtremIO), Dell Connectrix SAN switches and Dell PowerEdge servers. As well, our strategy is to extend REST API support to the other Dell products that CloudIQ monitors.

Source: dell.com

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