Breakthrough Simplicity and Performance in Enterprise S3 Object Storage

Dell ObjectScale is the next evolution in object storage from Dell Technologies. Built with a software-defined, containerized architecture, ObjectScale delivers enterprise-class, high-performance S3 object storage that leverages the best of microservices and Kubernetes orchestration.

With ObjectScale, you can deliver cloud-scale storage services with the reliability and control of a private-cloud infrastructure. Developers enjoy on-demand, self-service storage via deployment APIs, accelerating application innovation, lowering TCO and empowering a true DevOps culture.

ObjectScale builds on the trusted, proven Dell ECS codebase and takes it to the next level. With over 20 years of experience delivering object storage systems, it is technology you can trust from the #1 object storage vendor.

ObjectScale Release 1.2: What’s New

This new major code update advances your DevOps initiatives with a simpler out-of-the box and management experience, breakthrough performance for emerging workloads and further enhanced Zero Trust features. More than ever, you’re ready to power emerging application and analytics projects backed by the global scale and assurance only available from Dell Technologies.

Our priority is to keep making your object storage experience easier and more flexible. ObjectScale 1.2 takes this to heart with some important enhancements.

Deployment Your Way

Simplify your experience with an expanded choice of deployment models. With a new faster “software bundle” deployment option, Dell can take care of managing the entire software stack for you, including Kubernetes.

We continue to offer an “as-an-Application” option that provides seamless integration with Red Hat OpenShift, now including the latest 4.12 release. Our jointly developed integrated solution with Red Hat gives you the flexibility to run ObjectScale alongside traditional applications on a full-stack Dell infrastructure that includes servers, primary storage and supporting software. This compatibility ensures users can leverage the power of ObjectScale within their existing OpenShift environments.

CloudIQ AIOps for ObjectScale

Now you can monitor your ObjectScale systems, even across multiple locations, with one easy-to-use interface from CloudIQ. CloudIQ is Dell’s cloud-based AIOps application that uses artificial intelligence and machine learning to proactively monitor and predictively analyze Dell infrastructure products together: storage, server, data protection, hyperconverged and network. More advanced than traditional monitoring, CloudIQ’s algorithms and rich visualization help IT staff speed time to resolution of infrastructure issues by two to 10 times faster and save one workday per week on average.  It’s also included with Dell ProSupport agreements.

Power Emerging Workloads with Breakthrough Performance 

ObjectScale 1.2 features breakthrough performance and efficiency enhancements to support the most demanding, high-throughput workloads at scale.

Your development and IT teams can rely on large write performance up to 2GB per node, which enables faster data ingestion and storage. ObjectScale now supports objects as large as 30TB, including replication of these huge objects. This six-fold increase in the maximum object size surpasses the limits set by Amazon S3, making ObjectScale an ideal choice for large-scale projects such as HPC, analytics, AI and their associated backups.

ObjectScale also now provides reporting of logical capacity usage for Dell APEX, facilitating better resource management and planning.

Protect at Scale with Enhanced Zero Trust Features

ObjectScale features data protection and security features that keep your data safe. ObjectScale Lock protects data in a WORM model. Data-at-rest encryption (D@RE) prevents unwanted data access. Global identity and access management (IAM) controls who can perform what actions on which resources under what conditions. And the list goes on.

With the new ObjectScale release, we’re further expanding ObjectScale security and access protocol capabilities. System users now benefit from Active Directory and LDAP support that enables seamless integration with existing user management systems, simplifying user administration and enhancing security. ObjectScale further expands its IAM model with more flexibility and control over access management.

In addition, more flexible erasure coding (EC) options include support for a minimum of four nodes with a 12+4 EC policy, enabling greater data protection and fault tolerance.

Source: dell.com

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New Enhancements Keep You Safe from Ransomware Attacks

In today’s digital landscape, businesses face a growing number of cyberthreats and data breaches. Cyberattacks are becoming more sophisticated and frequent, making it more important than ever for businesses to have a comprehensive data protection solution. According to the 2022 Global Data Protection Index, 1000 IT decision-makers revealed that 67% are concerned their organization’s existing data protection measures may not be sufficient to cope with malware and ransomware threats. In the same survey, 55% of ITDMs noted that they are not very confident that their organization is meeting its backup and recovery service level objectives.

In response to this shift in the IT landscape, we’ve focused on enhancing Dell APEX Backup Services to protect critical business data from cyberattacks.

Strengthen and Accelerate Ransomware Protection and Recovery

Dell APEX Backup Services offers two ransomware protection options to help businesses avoid costly downtime and lost revenue.

Introducing Core Ransomware Protection, an entry-level option that provides insights into security events and unusual data activity. This option lets IT teams quickly identify and dashboard suspicious activity in real-time.

Updated Advanced Ransomware Protection and Recovery helps businesses with expanded features to quarantine and stop the spread, and quickly recover clean, comprehensive data sets. This delivers comprehensive and enhanced data protection features that include data backup, recovery and compliance management. When customers choose the advanced ransomware recovery option, the core ransomware features are included. 

Dell APEX Backup Services has also expanded its Ransomware Recovery feature to include SaaS applications such as Microsoft 365 and Google Workspace. This enhancement provides peace of mind to businesses by helping them protect their Microsoft 365 and Google Workspace application data from ransomware attacks.

Scale Storage Capacity as Data Needs Grow While Protecting Critical Data 

New high-capacity storage tiers are now available for businesses to upgrade their storage for SaaS applications and endpoints. These options provide businesses with additional capacity beyond 50GB per user, enabling expansion to 300GB per user. Additionally, businesses can purchase 10TB storage add-on packs to address their endpoints’ storage needs and provide peace of mind that their data is safe and secure. With these new options, businesses can easily scale their storage capacity as their data needs grow while protecting their critical data.

Reduce Storage Costs and Improve Performance with Salesforce Archiver

To reduce storage requirements for aging data, Salesforce Archiver enables the ability to archive data from Salesforce active storage to Dell APEX Backup Services Cloud.  The Salesforce Archiver feature offers several advantages to Salesforce customers. It can enhance the speed and performance of Salesforce organizations, reduce storage costs, ensure compliance with regulatory and governance requirements and securely archive sensitive legacy data.

New U.S.-based Educational Institutions Bundle to Protect SaaS Apps 

Dell APEX Backup Services offers a new custom offer for U.S.-based educational institutions to protect SaaS applications such as Microsoft 365 and Google Workspace. For every license purchased for staff and teachers, users get four additional user licenses provisioned free for students accessing the same shared storage.

Comprehensive, SaaS-based Data Protection with Dell APEX Backup Services

These enhancements reflect Dell’s commitment to providing cyber and ransomware protection solutions that are affordable, flexible and ensure regulatory compliance. With new ransomware protection options, add-on features and an industry-specific custom bundle, Dell APEX Backup Services continues to meet the evolving data protection needs of businesses in today’s digital landscape.

Source: dell.com

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Four AIOps Advances in Self-service Intelligence for PowerEdge Servers

Artificial intelligence for IT operations (AIOps) software provides IT administrators and DevSecOps teams with the insights to resolve many infrastructure issues without having to escalate them within their organization or make equipment vendor service requests.

CloudIQ is the AIOps application for Dell’s full range of infrastructure systems. Its artificial intelligence/machine learning (AI/ML) and other algorithms empower IT administrators with system health and cybersecurity notifications and recommendations, and other insights, to resolve issues proactively and quickly.

Over the past few months, we’ve expanded CloudIQ with four self-service-enabling features for Dell PowerEdge servers: VMware virtualization view, performance forecasting, maintenance operations and server systems needing updates. 

VMware Virtualization View

VMware virtualization view identifies the relationship of virtual and physical infrastructure and their status with an interface similar to VMware vCenter, which is popular with VMware administrators. This is designed to maximize server administrators’ virtual machine (VM) management productivity. 

At a glance, CloudIQ displays all vCenter instances, their locations, which servers are associated with each local vCenter and the VMs. This intuitive view lets you quickly check server health status and metrics, such CPU, memory and capacity usage – a first step in ensuring VMs are getting the server resources they need. To troubleshoot this further, you can click from the virtualization view directly into CloudIQ’s deep host server analytics with anomaly detection, as well as vCenter itself.

CloudIQ also provides the same vCenter-like view for Dell storage and hyperconverged systems to maximize their administrators’ VM management productivity.

Performance Metrics Forecasting

Performance forecasting predicts server utilization for proactively avoiding outages, handling surge events, planning system upgrades or rebalancing workloads as necessary. 

Need to plan a maintenance window for a server? See the performance forecast to find possible times of low utilization. Curious if systems will be approaching high utilization or will max out sometime in the future? Performance forecasting also enables users to forecast if or when they should expand their infrastructure footprint by adding more servers and to identify opportunities for balancing workloads onto other systems.

Performance forecasting for servers is supported for CPU, memory, system and IO usage.

Maintenance Operations

Maintenance operations enable privileged users to blink server LEDs, power servers on or off and execute server firmware updates to speed repair and lifecycle management.

Actions are initiated in CloudIQ (hosted in Dell’s highly secure data center) and are executed by Dell OpenManage Enterprise software instances deployed on-premises at your organization’s sites and connected to iDRAC controllers in each of your servers.

For example, server administrators can blink LEDs on a server to facilitate physical discovery and identification within a data center for hardware replacement. If servers are nonresponsive and have undesirable behavior, server administrators can power off and power on servers. If administrators suspect that data in CloudIQ is stale for servers, they can initiate a data refresh. Lastly, server administrators improve their productivity by performing firmware updates for multiple servers at once, even across locations, directly from CloudIQ.

Server Systems Needing Updates

CloudIQ’s systems updates page helps you organize and efficiently manage the process of keeping servers across all your locations optimized and secure with the latest firmware releases. The page indicates which servers and components are compliant with the latest firmware releases, which servers need firmware updates and each firmware release’s criticality (e.g., urgent, recommended or optional). Administrators with the required permission can simultaneously initiate firmware updates for up to 200 servers with a single command directly from CloudIQ’s systems update page.

With increased awareness that CloudIQ brings, administrators can make more timely and proactive firmware updates to your fleet of servers across all your locations. Updating many servers at once provides a simple and fast process to ensure they are consistent with the firmware versions you expect.

Figure 1. CloudIQ provides multi-system, multi-site server monitoring and management operations from a single user interface through seamless integration with OpenManage Enterprise deployed at each site and iDRAC controllers in each server.

See the New Features in Action

Because CloudIQ is SaaS-based, a constant flow of new features like those introduced here become instantly available whenever users log into CloudIQ UI via their browsers – no download required. First-time users can get started with CloudIQ today, because it is included with Dell ProSupport/ProSupport Plus contracts and is easy to initiate.

Source: dell.com

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Optimizing for Analytics, Machine Learning Experimentation

As artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) are becoming part of our daily lives, we hear about the importance of data and data science almost daily, as we have for over a decade now. Data is often called “fuel”— for economic growth, innovation and even AI itself. And while data may be the fuel, it still takes science and engineering to build the rocket ship.

One of the keys to that science and engineering is optimization. Specifically, optimizing processes and methods for analytics and ML: experimentation and modeling. So, while data powers your rocket ship, optimizing analytics ensures its design and performance are state-of-the-art. And while working with machine learning isn’t rocket science (anymore), it still requires a bit of paradigm shift – one that realizes the importance of data and a data-driven enterprise.

Plumber, Engineer, or Scientist?

In both data science and plumbing, functional pipelines are essential to optimal performance and results. Both disciplines also often require a person to roll up their sleeves. For many data scientists, most of their time is still spent accessing, integrating and wrangling data to clean it and transform it for their day-to-day needs. What if there was a way to automate this “plumbing?” Data engineers should be up for that task!

By leveraging modern data infrastructure to speed up the exploration and data preparation phases, we can enable quick access to data across multiple systems as needed to explore and experiment. Data engineers can do their work focusing on the infrastructure and data pipelines and keep all consumers – including the data scientists – happy and productive.

Doing it All Over Again

Furthermore, in science, to get to the right answer, a team needs to run various explorations and experiments, including multiple iterations. These experiments exist to find relevant “features” –essentially the relevant data fields or their transformed values directly impacting the quality of the ML model – and to select the right methods, fine-tuning all parameters and hyperparameters required. Speed of experimentation is also critical. (No wonder hardware accelerators are so popular.)

To be even more effective, teams should track their experiments to make the results and models reproducible. Parameters and result metrics are key, to be captured and made available for comparison to understand how the team got to a specific model or conclusion.

Finally, these experiments and the follow-up model training might require managing various artifacts – sometimes very large data sets. To work seamlessly between data and code, these teams could utilize data versioning to capture a point-in-time version of those large data sets and make them easily available. 

Pushing the Limits

As more and more successful AI/ML use cases (or rocket ships) are built, we will keep pushing the frontiers and applicability of machine learning use cases. Whether to target huge or low-latency models, deploying in true edge locations, using large language models or Generative AI, the real starting point of innovation is to realize the importance of data and work toward a data-driven enterprise. This will help analysts and data scientists focus on what they are good at: effectively iterating to resolve complex data science problems and helping drive those to production. When done correctly, this type of optimization creates real business value and can take your productivity and use cases (rocket ship) to new heights.

Let Dell Data Management Lead the Way

Learn more about the data management journey with our interactive infographic here. And stay on the lookout for our blog on step four of the data management journey, coming next month. You can also learn more about Dell Data Management solutions on our Enterprise Data Management page.

Source: dell.com

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Automation-as-a Service: Transforming Business and IT Organizations

Artificial intelligence is a rapidly growing field with applications across industries, focused on creating intelligent machines that can perform tasks typically requiring human intelligence. Transformation in technology, including the burgeoning field of AI, has delivered ever-increasing value to our digital world, and it would be hard to imagine life without it. However, advancements in technology also create complex ecosystems with numerous dependencies. In order to keep complex ecosystems running with high availability and zero business impact, many still require human intervention to monitor and support around the clock. As ecosystems grow in scale and complexity, larger teams often become necessary to provide support. Furthermore, there are other IT challenges that organizations must address such as manual processes, cybersecurity threats and legacy systems, among others.

This is where automation can play a beneficial role and be a game changer for IT and business organizations. By leveraging automation technologies and implementing robust security measures, organizations can become more efficient, secure, agile and better positioned for business success. Automation-as-a-Service is a concept that involves providing automation solutions as a service to businesses. It integrates automated solutions for a staggering number of use cases – quickly and efficiently. This allows businesses to easily implement automation without the need for significant investment or technical expertise.

When Should we Automate?

Automation can vary in scope from simple scripting to fully autonomous systems. Typically, repetitive tasks like manual work require a lot of time to complete or are mission-critical for the company and cannot risk human errors. These tasks are good candidates for the lowest level of automation, which involves the use of programming languages.

Semi-autonomous automation involves the use of machine learning algorithms and other advanced technologies to automate more complex tasks. Humans still play a role in supervising automated processes, but the system can make decisions and take actions on its own based on pre-defined rules.

On the other hand, fully autonomous automation involves systems that can operate independently without any human intervention. This type of automation requires advanced AI and ML technologies that can learn and adapt to changes.

The extent of automation that is appropriate for a particular task depends on many factors, such as available technologies, complexity of the task and level of human oversight required. In some cases, a combination of different levels of automation may be used to improve efficiency and reduce errors. While these technologies can be incredibly powerful and effective, it is important to mention they are not fail-safe, and human oversight and intervention are necessary to avoid unexpected behavior.

What’s Next? Automation as-a-Service

When organizations have a team or multiple teams that create automation, we usually see similar automation requests from different IT and business teams. Instead of creating one-off automation processes for each individual team, organizations should consider automation-as-as-Service.

To get started, it’s important to define your automation goals and identify the manual processes you want to automate. This will help determine which automation tools to research and analyze for their features and ability to be offered as-as-Service. Afterward, consider build your automation workflows by developing a set of automations you can easily integrate for your clients. That way, they can quickly and easily begin seeing the benefits of your automation-as-a-Service offering.

When you develop and deploy one automation in production environments, observability is a key aspect to include as part of automation lifecycle management. This is also a useful practice to identify bugs not found during the testing phase. With monitoring, the automation team can identify issues more proactively than waiting for the business team to report them. The goal is to expand automation utilization, though customers need to trust it works as designed.

Embracing a services-oriented approach to your own IT delivery also brings many benefits to organizations.

While we recognize what organic IT teams can accomplish, there may be limits to what they can handle on their own, not to mention the difficulty in finding and hiring qualified employees to support a growing workload. To address the IT challenges, it is also important to find a balance between IT workload and automation processes to ensure employees can maintain a healthy work-life balance.

Furthermore, adding different products can aid in automation. For example, ChatGPT can enable different automation capabilities quickly and efficiently. ChatGPT can be used in conjunction with automation-as-a-Service to provide natural language processing, text generation capabilities, content creation, e-mail automation, sentiment analysis and more. It’s a valuable tool for automating routine tasks and improving customer experiences through automation-as-a-Service.

Unlock the Power of Automation and Take Your Business to the Next Level with Automation-as-a-Service

Automation is quickly transforming the way we work, and this trend will only continue. With the development of AI and ML, many tasks that were once exclusively in the domain of humans will soon be automated. This will lead to a shift in the nature of work, with a greater emphasis on tasks that require human skills such as critical thinking, emotional intelligence and creativity.

Organizations should consider having one or more dedicated automation teams. Automation professionals are responsible for solving complex problems in many aspects of the industry.

Automation is a key process for company success, and offering automation-as-a-Service delivers automation options and dynamic approaches that improve day-to-day work, drive business and create a fruitful environment for innovation.

Source: dell.com

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Dell APEX Storage for Public Cloud Simplifies Multicloud Complexity

Dell Technologies World 2023 is in full swing, and we couldn’t be more excited about the multicloud announcements we’re making this year. The siloed nature of multicloud environments makes it difficult to realize their full innovation potential due to a range of challenges including lack of control and visibility, unpredictable costs, siloed management experiences, difficult application and data mobility processes and inconsistent security and compliance. Last year we introduced Project Alpine to help solve for these challenges – an initiative to bring the unique software IP of our leading storage platforms to major public clouds, enriching the public cloud storage experience and providing operational consistency for our customers. This year we’re delivering on the promise of Project Alpine with Dell APEX Storage for Public Cloud, a brand new portfolio of software-defined, customer-managed storage offers that bring Dell’s enterprise-class performance, scale and cyber resiliency to major hyperscalers along with new management tools that centralize management activities across clouds in the Dell APEX Console.  

Operational Consistency from Ground to Cloud 

Offers in the Dell APEX Storage for Public Cloud portfolio provide operational consistency from on-premises to public cloud, giving you the extreme flexibility to seamlessly move data and workloads between on-premises and public cloud as your strategy evolves. Consolidated management across public clouds in Dell APEX Console provides enhanced productivity for IT teams, as they use the same skills, APIs, management experiences and enterprise-class storage services wherever Dell storage is deployed.  

Enterprise-class Storage 

We have an extensive data protection footprint in the cloud, and we’re now extending our cloud offers with the addition of Dell APEX Block Storage for AWS, Dell APEX Block Storage for Microsoft Azure and Dell APEX File Storage for AWS to address a broad range of workloads and use cases. 

For those looking to support large databases and containerized database workloads, analytics workloads or multiple container deployments, or those who want to consolidate workloads in the public cloud, there’s Dell APEX Block Storage for AWS. This brings the high performance, linear scalability and advanced data services of Dell’s software-defined block storage, PowerFlex, to AWS. This offer’s scale-out architecture provides extreme performance by aggregating data access across a cluster, leading to high IOPs and low latency. This offer also features unique multi-access zone (AZ) availability, ensuring data access without replication or loss of performance by federating our storage protection across three AZs. Later this year, we’re bringing these same capabilities to Microsoft Azure with Dell APEX Block Storage for Microsoft Azure.  

Bring your file-based workloads to public cloud, whether it’s IT workloads like file shares or home directories, industry workloads like M&E, health care and financial services, or emerging workloads like AI/ML and analytics. Dell APEX File Storage for AWS brings PowerScale OneFS, our leading file storage software, to AWS. Using the same software that powers our #1 Global NAS solution, this offer provides seamless data mobility between on-prem and cloud with native replication, consistent user experiences with familiar OneFS web UI, CLI and API interfaces and the same identity management with built-in security features as the on-prem proven platform, trusted by more than 17,000 customers worldwide. Dell APEX File Storage for AWS provides high performance in the cloud in a scale-out architecture and includes the same enterprise-class features our customers enjoy on-premises today like multi-protocol support (NFS, SMB, S3), SyncIQ native replication, snapshots, CloudPools and data reduction.  

As an added layer of protection for your data, Dell APEX Protection Storage for Public Cloud brings in-cloud instances of Dell PowerProtect DD Virtual Edition into the Dell APEX Portfolio. This offer already delivers industry-leading data protection storage for AWS, Microsoft Azure, Google Cloud and Alibaba Cloud with more than 17 exabytes of data protected in the cloud to date. Scalable up to 256TB per instance, Dell APEX Protection Storage supports a broad ecosystem of backup applications and enables users to maintain control and ensure data immutability, with the ability to replicate data between cloud and on-premises or between clouds. 

A Centrally Managed Multicloud Future

Centralized management in the Dell APEX Console.

Arriving in the second half of this year, our two new SaaS-based management tools collapse multicloud sprawl and centrally manage activities in the Dell APEX console. Dell APEX Navigator for Multicloud Storage makes it easy to manage Dell Storage across multiple public clouds. Get up and running fast with easy configuration and automated provisioning and deployment that only takes four steps. Make decisions based on intelligent insights from CloudIQ, move data between on-premises and public cloud from a single UI while accelerating Zero Trust, with capabilities like role-based access control, single sign-on and federated identity. This tool can also be integrated with your preferred IT automation tools like Ansible and Terraform thanks to our API-first architecture.  

Improve your container management experience with Dell APEX Navigator for Kubernetes – a unified user experience that simplifies Kubernetes persistence management across multicloud, multisite environments. Storage admins and DevOps organizations can leverage complete storage services management at scale for their Kubernetes ecosystem. This provides access to advanced data services, such as application mobility, authorization and more through the easy deployment and management of Dell Container Storage Modules. As a result, enterprises can streamline Kubernetes persistence management, empower their DevOps teams and govern and protect across environments (both on-premises and in the cloud). 

Source: dell.com

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Opening the Path Forward for Communications Service Providers

We’ve all heard the phrase “change is the only constant.” But what we don’t often hear is the other constant: Change is always accelerating. Today, communications service providers (CSPs) compete in a world where change is happening faster than ever, as 5G takes hold and customers in enterprise organizations look for ways to connect and act on data being generated literally everywhere so they can make faster, more accurate business decisions. In fact, the opportunity at the edge – all the places outside of the data center where data is generated and consumed – has been estimated to be worth $700 billion by 2030. With their global networks and points of presence, CSPs are poised to seize this edge opportunity with innovative new services, but first they need to address their network flexibility challenges.

Transformational Services Require Network Transformation

For decades, CSPs have relied on networks built with vertically integrated systems comprising tightly aggregated hardware and software. Updating and upgrading these systems have been historically slow and costly. While not optimal, CSPs have tolerated the rigid nature of telecom networks for mission-critical reasons, but the demand for agility is growing fast. With more and more data being generated and consumed everywhere – hospitals, factories, energy plants, retail stores – enterprise organizations want to capture and act on this data, often in real time, to create new value. CSPs are aware of this opportunity and know they need to launch new services, but their current networks lack the flexibility required to rapidly power up and deliver innovative new capabilities. The solution is clear: Networks need to transform from vertically integrated systems to open, disaggregated architectures that enable the flexibility and agility CSPs need to keep pace with emerging use cases and customer demands.

Where the Action is: Catalyzing the Open Telecom Ecosystem

CSPs know that open, disaggregated networks are critical to their growth, but an open network is only half the story. What’s also required is an open telecom ecosystem where CSPs can find the kinds of technologies they need to enable innovative, differentiated digital services. This ecosystem is already forming, but it’s still nascent and somewhat chaotic, making it hard for CSPs to consume the solutions emerging from it. At Dell Technologies, we’re fully committed to helping the open telecom ecosystem gain traction and become a comprehensive, practical resource that not only provides our CSP customers with the innovations they need, but also simplifies and accelerates the integration of new technologies into their network environments.

Collaborate. Create. Activate. Grow.

As we help catalyze the open telecom ecosystem, we have four areas of focus. First, we’ve launched the Open Telecom Ecosystem Community (OTEC) to foster collaboration among innovative telecom thinkers. Through this community, telecom partners and CSPs can come together to drive innovation and actionable outcomes and make the open ecosystem a reality.

Second, we’ll enable the creation of new offerings via the Dell Open Telecom Ecosystem Lab (OTEL), a secure environment where new products and solutions can be integrated, built, tested and certified, leveraging ideas from the community, as well as from across the telecom landscape. In addition, we offer self-certification through OTEL, as well as our Lab Validation Services, which leverage OTEL and enable CSPs to embrace the open telecom ecosystem with confidence and rapidly develop 5G solutions.

Third, building on our collaboration and creation efforts, we’re committed to activating new products and solutions across core, edge and RAN to enable greater choice and flexibility in network architectures so CSPs can operate with more agility and efficiency.

Finally, we’re laser-focused on helping CSPs identify and capitalize on new revenue opportunities in enterprise organizations. By partnering with Dell Technologies, CSPs will be able to integrate, deploy and leverage the latest technologies at market speed to fully capitalize on the massive opportunities emerging at the edge. Our extensive enterprise expertise enables us to help CSPs identify use cases ripe for new services. Further, we offer Solution Co-creation Services so CSPs can work directly with Dell on quickly developing innovative solutions for the enterprise market, including connected laptops, cyber recovery, private wireless and edge security.

The Future is Wide Open

Since March 10, 1876, when Alexander Graham Bell said to his assistant Thomas Watson over the very first telephone line, “Mr. Watson, come here, I want to see you,” telecommunications networks have changed and evolved from a single wire carrying a modulated voice signal to global fiber and 4G/5G wireless networks carrying terabytes of packet data to virtually everywhere on the planet. Change has been relentless but so has progress. And today, with the advent of the open telecom ecosystem and the innovation it will unleash, progress is poised to make a giant leap forward and enable CSPs to transform not only their networks, but also their role in the human network.

Source: dell.com

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Dell and NVIDIA: Bringing Generative AI to the Enterprise

The tremendous upsurge of popularity around ChatGPT and Generative AI is peaking customer and business’ interests alike. Enterprises see the potential for real productivity increases with Generative AI (GenAI), unlocking data value that accelerates their business, from decision-making to digital transformation. That’s why Dell Technologies is working with NVIDIA together to simplify and accelerate Generative AI deployment.

Today, the companies announced a collaboration to deliver Project Helix, an integrated approach to enable faster, full-stack GenAI deployments so organizations of all sizes can accelerate their business transformation, scale their AI consistently and deliver trusted AI outcomes.

Evolving Enterprise Use Cases

Businesses have already experienced the value of traditional AI, scaling many initiatives into production to automate complex processes, increase productivity and accelerate results and outcomes in specific use cases around fraud detection, data, analytics and medical scientific research.

Now comes the potential of GenAI applications like ChatGPT and numerous open-source options, revealing even greater potential opportunities for AI to extract and produce new forms of value and richer insights from existing data, enable faster decision-making and increase productivity. In fact, what were once potential use cases for traditional AI are becoming real with Generative AI, and this is just the tip of the iceberg:

• Digital assistants including retail, business operations, sales, legal, HR and hiring services help accelerate and facilitate insights and recommendations
• Customer support and call centers advance customer support resolution with knowledge base data, reducing response times and improving customer satisfaction (such as net promoter score)
• Developers, code generation and code efficiency and UI/UX design drive faster IP development to reuse and deliver better features and customer purchase experience
• Creative, sales and marketing scripting and creative content generation automate on-demand needs to improve the customer experience, with insights into purchase history and richer B2C collaboration
• Healthcare, research sciences and medicine are already transforming and advancing health care and sciences with new breakthroughs in medicine, and numerous other use cases are rapidly emerging to automate more functions across organizations

Addressing Enterprise Needs

As with traditional AI, enterprises have unique needs to determine how new technologies like GenAI can improve their ROI and deliver value for emerging use cases.

• Customers want to accelerate their time to results from Generative AI strategies, infrastructure and expertise that will increase value for the business direction and support their continued transformation.
• They want to secure their data, reduce data risk and compromise and enable trusted AI outcomes that will impact their business. This requires a two-prong strategy, to first ensure data operations remain on-premises for GenAI treatment (and mitigate risks of company IP sent to the cloud) and secondly, to activate trusted methods that refine responses with guardrails and tuning procedures.
• Businesses want to restore agility, become leaders in their own market and leverage a more skilled AI workforce that readily converts company-specific or proprietary data into faster recommendations for the enterprise and competitive outcomes.
• They want to achieve more automation, which drives faster, higher-value outcomes from their operations and leverage repeatable processes and scalable growth of their business.
• They want to control and manage their infrastructure and operations, so they can drive higher ROI with on-premises, owned approaches.

Move the Needle: Transform Your Business Faster with Project Helix

GenAI is revolutionizing the traditional ways that businesses leverage AI in a game-changing approach and is supported by a fast-growing set of solutions and library of models. And with new levels of AI compute performance making huge strides this year, the availability of mainstream solutions and services deliver to enterprises the ability to fast-track GenAI and connect all areas of the business.

Project Helix is the answer for enterprise GenAI, served with best-in-class full-stack solutions featuring Dell infrastructure, software and services, coupled with NVIDIA accelerated computing and software innovation, including a comprehensive AI framework with models for Generative AI, enabling customers to drive GenAI initiatives rapidly into value.

Project Helix delivers a full-stack GenAI solution and includes:

Dell Technologies

• Validated design blueprint for Generative AI, optimizing right-sized configurations, guidance and deployment for enterprises of all sizes with best-in-class infrastructure and expert advisors
• High-performance AI-optimized servers like the Dell PowerEdge XE9680, which delivers the industry’s best AI performance and the PowerEdge R760xa
• Resilient and scalable unstructured data storage including Dell PowerScale and ECS Object Storage
• Artificial intelligence-enabled cloud-based monitoring with CloudIQ
• Award-winning Dell ProSupport and ProDeploy services

NVIDIA

• NVIDIA H100 Tensor Core GPUs integrated into Dell PowerEdge platforms
• High-performance NVIDIA Networking
• NVIDIA AI Enterprise software which includes the full-stack AI software required for GenAI deployments including NeMo large language model frameworks
• NVIDIA Base Command Manager to deploy and reliably manage the AI clusters from edge to core to cloud

Project Helix includes security and privacy built into foundational components, such as Secured Component Verification. Protecting data on-premises reduces inherent risk and meets government standards such as Global Data Protection Regulations (GDPR).

Using large language models and new performance platforms, enterprises can now extract amazing outcomes from mountains of proprietary data.

Dell and NVIDIA enable enterprises with a foundation of expertise and advisors to kick-start GenAI initiatives at a business-wide and global scale.

Activate Generative AI in the Enterprise Now

Working with trusted IT partners to align resources is the quickest way to enable the right strategic GenAI approach for the enterprise. Project Helix delivers the integrated approach for enterprises and will be available as validated designs starting in July 2023. Customers can now review the design guide available here. Dell Technologies servers and platforms are available now.

Together, Dell and NVIDIA are leading the way in driving the next wave of innovation in the enterprise AI landscape with AI-grade enterprise solutions.

Source: dell.com

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