3 Secrets to Fast Tracking Your IT Priorities

Small and medium businesses know that the road to success is filled with distractions and roadblocks. According to IDC, the three major IT priorities for small and medium businesses are improving efficiency, improving revenue growth, and reducing expenses. Most small to medium businesses don’t have dedicated IT personnel on hand to tackle these priorities.

You are a business owner and already wear too many hats. And when it comes to IT, that hat is often worn by either you or the most technical individual on your team.

Luckily, you can put your IT hat back on the shelf with the entry-level PowerEdge T140 and PowerEdge T340 tower servers. These servers are specifically built for your small and medium businesses’ everyday needs. Here’s how they help you accomplish your three major IT priorities.

1. Easy efficiency

PowerEdge tower servers are built to process and transmit data quickly. This will enable your everyday business applications to run faster and reduce the amount of interruptions. They simplify team collaboration, giving you peace of mind that you are working on the latest revision. They also save data automatically, reducing the threat of re-work.

PowerEdge towers are ideal for on-site, remote, and branch office use. By managing multiple remote servers via one intuitive platform, you can save a trip across town, states, or even countries, depending on your office locations. Additionally, you can choose to conveniently receive alerts and access hardware remotely anytime and anywhere, saving you time and money.

With the ProDeploy suite of services, you can let Dell EMC do the heavy lifting while you focus on your business. Simply tell Dell EMC what applications you’d like to run, and we’ll configure and deploy the server in your office. Set up as much as 66% faster with our ProDeploy suite of services. Our team is here to answer any questions and help you plan for your future growth.

PowerEdge towers offer automated proactive and predictive support technology. Resolve potential issues with up to 72% less IT effort using ProSupport Plus and SupportAssist. This technology can automatically notify Dell EMC of a potential threat to get a jump start on a solution.

2. Revenue growth made easier

You run critical business applications that enable you to connect with your customers, prospective customers, and your team. The PowerEdge towers are ideal for most business applications such as file and print, point of sale, collaboration/sharing, databases, mail, and messaging.

PowerEdge towers enable business applications to run quickly with powerful computing capability. These tower servers enable multiple team members to work on the same file and print multiple documents efficiently. The servers also enable faster and reliable payment processing with a secure infrastructure. It allows you to collaborate and connect quickly and efficiently with customers and colleagues around the world.

Time is money. As a business, you never want any of your business applications to stop working. PowerEdge servers are reliable and can reduce the risk of downtime with a hot plug drive option. This would enable your server to work while being serviced. This will keep your business operating around the clock, allowing you additional opportunity to drive your business.

3. The easy choice for expense reduction

One of the key IT business priorities is to reduce expenses. Among many important things to consider while reducing expense, IT security is imperative. It’s important to not take IT security for granted given all the recent data breaches. One of the best ways to keep expenses down and customer loyalty up is to avoid a security breach.

The average total cost of a data breach in the United States is $7.9 million. The global average total cost of a data breach increased 6.4% from the previous year to $3.86 million.

With the purpose of protecting our customers, every PowerEdge server come with built-in security. Simply bolting security on after the fact doesn’t work. PowerEdge towers can protect your server from malicious changes with iDRAC9 Enterprise Server Lockdown mode. You can also have peace of mind that your data is backed up automatically.

PowerEdge tower servers can be safer and cheaper than public cloud alternatives. As a matter of fact, Independent research commissioned by Dell EMC uncovered that over 50% of midmarket organizations that have moved a workload from a public cloud service back to on-premise infrastructure cited security and/or cost as a reason for this decision.

Additionally, PowerEdge tower servers help with future expense reduction because they are made to grow with your business over time. As you continue to scale your business with more demanding business applications, more customers, and more employees, your servers’ will also be able to scale with you.

If you are a small business that requires an easy to use and affordable server for everyday business applications like file and print and point of sale, explore the PowerEdge T140 tower server and associated services. If you are a growing business or have remote/branch offices that require reliability and scalability for your everyday business applications like collaboration/sharing and databases, take a look at the PowerEdge T340 tower server and associated services.

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ITaaS can Increase Efficiency and Reduce Cost While also Supporting IT Transformation

Discover how implementing automated IT service delivery can help organizations to realize significant business benefits as they work towards transforming their IT infrastructure.

In the last of a series of blogs inspired by influential research published by industry analyst ESG, we explore the impact that implementing automated IT service delivery can have on an organization’s ability to achieve IT Transformation. 

Of all the ways an organization can modernize and automate its IT infrastructure, opting to adopt an IT as a Service cloud operating model is one of the most effective in terms of making progress towards full IT Transformation.

With IT as a Service (ITaaS), much of the infrastructure provisioning, configuration and change management is automated. This means that line of business end-users and developers are largely able to self-serve and manage on-premises IT resources as and when their needs and workload demands change.

In an organization that’s successfully running ITaaS, management and orchestration software and API workflows combine to automate the delivery of services through hybrid and multi-cloud architectures ­– delivering a user experience that’s timely, responsive, cost transparent and sufficiently agile to fuel innovation.

The advantages of automated IT service delivery

While successfully leveraging automated IT service delivery is a key measurement of broader IT Transformation, it also offers major operational benefits on its own.

New research by industry analyst ESG1 has shown that there’s a positive correlation between running an ITaaS cloud operating model and increased IT and business agility, more streamlined operations, improved end-user satisfaction and – perhaps most importantly – greater business success.

One of the core functions of a cloud operations model is to reduce IT operational ‘friction’ – in everything from defining workload requirements and procuring infrastructure, all the way through to integrating and deploying systems. At organizations running ITaaS, requirements come straight from end-users; they select what they need from an IT-vetted service catalog. The infrastructure to fulfill their ‘orders’ is allocated from the organization’s highly virtualized and automated data center resources. It’s an approach that eliminates meetings, wait times and deployment times – leading to both greater IT agility and improved business agility.

Running ITaaS also removes manual IT-related bottlenecks to service delivery, which yields significant efficiency benefits across an organization. These include IT projects being completed under budget and IT staff being freed up from routine tasks such as deploying, managing, and monitoring infrastructure to focus on higher-value activities such as IT architecting, planning, and application development.

But that’s not all. To top it off, organizations running ITaaS also report higher levels of business success and being more optimistic about their competitive positions compared with companies that are yet to explore the advantages of automated IT service delivery.

How does implementing ITaaS affect IT maturity?

The new research study demonstrates that making the move to automated IT service delivery can play a key role in increasing an organization’s operational agility as well as its ability to achieve full IT Transformation.

Earlier this year, ESG conducted a survey of 4,000 IT executives from private- and public-sector organizations across 16 countries to evaluate their progress in embracing IT Transformation2 – and rank them as ‘Legacy’, ‘Emerging’, ‘Evolving’ or ‘Transformed’.

It discovered that ‘Transformed’ companies were nearly 10X more likely to be running ITaaS than ‘Evolving’ organizations (58% versus 6%). Of particular note was the fact that not one of the ‘Emerging’ and ‘Legacy’ organizations surveyed by ESG reported using ITaaS.

These statistics are now detailed in ESG’s Research Insights Brief on the fundamental role that automated IT service delivery plays in IT Transformation1.

ITaaS delivers clear benefits and supports IT Transformation

Overall, the ESG research found that moving to automated IT service delivery delivers significant operational and wider business benefits.

Compared with ‘Legacy’ organizations, the ‘Transformed’ organizations in the study – those companies that are leveraging ITaaS – are typically:

◈ 5X more likely to be ahead of their competitors in time to market (76% versus 14%).

◈ Nearly 15X more likely to report completing application deployments ahead of schedule (44% versus 3%).

◈ 5X more likely to operate an on-site infrastructure that’s as cost-effective (or more so) than the public cloud (71% versus 27%).

◈ 5X more likely to exceed their revenue goals by more than 10%.

◈ Completing 13% more projects ahead of schedule.

Do you have customers and prospects who would be interested in achieving this level of business success and operational efficiency? Of course you do! Take the time to introduce them to the business benefits that automated IT service delivery can bring to their organizations.

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Dell Helps Prepare Texas A&M Students for the Digital Era

To prepare students for a constantly changing, connected world, higher education is creating more personalized and collaborative learning environments. Colleges and universities are in the middle of a significant shift in educational models, delivering both unique learning models and student campus experiences through digital transformation. Students are increasingly taking advantage of technology on demand to meet their own learning needs and chart their own path to workforce readiness.

With the likelihood of a workforce shortages in many industries, we need to be looking for new ways to help build a future-ready workforce. Today’s students–who are digital natives–are the key to solving real world problems. According to a recent Dell Technologies study on Generation Z, 80% of Gen Z (those born after 1996) aspire to work with cutting-edge technology and more than a third are interested in IT careers. Yet, 94% of the Gen Zers are worried about having the right skills and experience. Universities are finding a way to tap the potential of budding innovators and by giving them an opportunity to show off their tech savvy, while also giving students the soft skills to make them more confident as they prepare to enter the workforce.

Specifically, Texas A&M engages students with immersive learning with Aggies Invent, a 48-hour intensive design experience which engages 60+ students in multidiscipline/multi-level teams in hands-on projects that will push their innovation, creativity, and communication skills. The end goal is to provide students the opportunity to acquire skills essential to becoming successful innovation leaders and support them in founding startup companies.  These events are held monthly during the academic year and have different themes. This past weekend, I had the opportunity to participate as a mentor as Dell with Intel and Nvidia supported the Augmented Reality (AR) and Virtual Reality (VR) competition.

Participating students were asked to address challenges using AR and VR solutions, in a wide range of industries including healthcare, first responders, education, military and designers. To reinforce the immersive experience at the event, students were provided with Dell Precision 7730 workstations, VR technology (HTC Vive headsets) and AR technologies including Microsoft Hololens, Magic Leap headsets and Meta headsets. In addition, Dell and supporting sponsors lent their expertise to assist students all weekend long with mentoring and assistance with the technology solutions, product development as well as marketing.

Over the course of 48 hours, students self-organize into teams and selected a challenge that they would like to  solve.  In the first few hours of the competition, the teams identified the specific need to address, developed three different options to solve the challenge and presented to a panel on how their plan will deliver a unique solution to address their challenge. From there the teams worked to develop the concept, produce a 90 second video describing their idea and a final 10 minute presentation in which they presented to the judges.

For me, the most of exciting part of the challenge was the ability to work as a mentor with the student teams.  Students wanted guidance on a number of different activities.  Technical guidance included helping them understand the different uses of AR and VR technology and how to determine which might be the best fit for their solution and what development platforms are being used today for content creation.  As they presented their plans, the Dell team provided feedback on presenting their solution, including Powerpoint and presentation best practices.  It was exciting to see how much the students progressed as a team over the course of 48 hours from their initial concepts to the presentations to the judges.

Each member of the winning team, which created a VR solution to address the fear of speaking in public, received a Dell 5530 Mobile Precision Workstation. The second place team developed an AR solution for improving the experience of purchasing clothes online and the third place team developed a VR application to teach students materials science. The placing teams all received monetary prizes as well.

Today, higher education is at a pivotal moment. College and universities are looking for new ways to provide learning experiences and prepare their students for the future. I am proud to work for an organization that helps higher education with digital transformation through innovative and affordable solutions delivering enhanced learning experiences, improving student outcomes and exploring important research initiatives. Dell is helping universities prepare for students for their digital future.

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Lights, Camera, Action! The new OEM PowerEdge R740xd2 Makes its Debut

When we say that we listen to our customers, it’s not empty marketing hype. In fact, we generally do way more than listen – we follow through. Let me share a great example. A few months ago, a large OEM customer told the team that it needed a customized solution to bridge the gap between compute and storage. Unfortunately, none of our existing products fit the exact bill. We listened, got together all the right people within Dell EMC and effectively designed a brand-new product to meet the customer’s needs.

Responding to customer needs

And so, hot off the press, I’m delighted to present the PowerEdge R740xd2 (LINK), one of my favorite products of all time! What’s so special about the latest addition to our server range? How does it address that customer’s needs and what other customers is this product likely to appeal to?

Data never sleeps

Before I answer, look around! Data is everywhere. In the last few years, more data has been created than in the previous 5,000 years of humanity put together. It’s mind-blowing but apparently we now create more than 2.5 quintillion bytes of data every single day. Get this – every three days, the amount of data we produce is equivalent to the number of grains of sand on planet earth. By 2020, it’s estimated that for every person on earth, 1.7Mb of data will be produced every single second.

Our world continues to transform

We’re all witnesses and players in this dynamic. Just think of our own lives. You don’t have to be old to remember when photos were hard copy and stored in albums that sat on the shelf in your living room. That was the case less than 20 years ago. Compare that to the present. Just think of the huge volume of photos taken now, all day, every day, via mobile phones. Not only has the volume increased dramatically – so too has the resolution. We used to watch DVDs – now it’s HD TV on demand. Instead of being a content consumer, many of us now create our own videos to post on YouTube. Video surveillance used to feature analog cameras – increasingly, the world is using IP digital cameras with different, higher resolutions and various aspect ratios.

A continual loop

The list goes on but you get my point. The way that pictures and video are now being created, managed, distributed and viewed is causing a seismic shift in the industry. 3D rendering and video content creation, including acquisition, transcoding and distribution, are hungry and need huge amounts of server processing power. Multi-device consumption and ultra-high definition are driving increased demand and generating even more data, which, guess what, needs to be stored!

Customer expectations are high

Meanwhile, user experience has taken central stage – we expect delivery to be instantaneous, anywhere, anytime, on any device. The big take-away is these data-heavy workloads demand huge computing power plus vast, vast amounts of storage. Looking ahead, I believe that demand will ramp even higher with trends like AI, 5G networks, 8K, HDR,IPv6 protocols, virtual and augmented reality plus, of course, IoT.

The bridge between compute and storage

The good news is that the PowerEdge R740xd2 has been designed to deal with this data deluge. It’s all about bringing compute closer to storage in order to deliver high performance results. Let me give a flavor of what you can expect.

Up to 364TB of storage

Picture, flexible storage and performance resources in a space-saving 2U rack server. Capacity wise, the PowerEdge R740xd2 can accommodate 24 x 3.5 inch front-serviceable, hot-swappable drives, delivering an amazing 364TB of storage with fast connection and response times. Of course, you can also add flash and 2S performance as your workload requirements evolve.

Eliminate bottlenecks

In terms of power, this little beauty packs a punch, delivering two-socket performance with up to two Intel® Xeon® scalable processors and up to 44 cores. With fast networking options and up to 16 DIMMS of memory, you can kiss bottlenecks goodbye. And of course, a cyber-resilient architecture ensures your data stays safe and available.

Inspired by our OEM customers

To all our OEM partners and customers in the video surveillance and media and entertainment markets – the PowerEdge R740xd2 is for you! During the test phase, OEM customers in these vertical industries told us they loved this product, describing it as “perfect for purpose”, “flexible”, “reliable”, “high quality”, and “rock solid.”

And, of course, from our perspective, the PowerEdge 740xd2 rounds out our already extensive OEM server and storage portfolio, allowing us to address the needs of our video surveillance customers plus enter and disrupt new markets, like media and entertainment.

What’s your reaction? I would love to hear your comments and questions. Remember, we’re listening and will continue to expand our portfolio to allow you get to market faster!

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AI Winter is Not Coming

One of the most popular shows is Game of Thrones. Ever since the first season characters have been warning that Winter is coming. Around this time of year as the leaves change colors, we know that Winter is coming. What about in the technology world is AI Winter coming? I think not.

Since the 1950’s we have had periods of AI Summers and AI Winters. These AI Summers are times of amazing hope of what AI will do for our future. During these phases Enterprise are investing in the technologies powering AI to stay relevant in the market. In the past these AI Summers have typically been followed by an AI Winter where investments in these projects dry up because of lack of ability to execute in the summer phases. For over half a century we have been through 3 phases of AI Winter. However, since around 2000 we have been in the longest AI summer to date and this time there will be no AI Winter. Let’s look at the top 3 reasons why AI Winter is not coming.

Increased Computing Power

The first element preventing another AI Winter is the continuation of Moore’s Law where we have increased the ability to boost compute power. For years we watched as Moore’s Law has allowed for computing processing to double every 2 years and dropping the cost of that computing power for both CPU and GPU. Building and training models with Deep Learning involves large amounts of processing. Now dream projects like driverless cars (ADAS) are finally coming true because the cost to train cars to drive themselves is starting to make financial sense. In the past the investment would have been astronomical to train a car to drive itself. Remember Deep Learning has been around since the 80’s it just the cost to compute wasn’t there for massive data projects. However, the continuation of Moore’s Law is only one component for why AI Winter isn’t coming.

Digital Transformation

The second factor in holding off winter is the digitization of everything. The digital transformation is real and the data that powers it is massive. In fact, IDC predicts that by 2025 the planet will have 163 ZB of data. Mind-blowing numbers but most transaction now takes place in the digital world. For example, last night I ordered pizza from my Mobile Application, then paid for it through an online money transfer. Never once during that process did I speak to a human until the pizza arrived at my door. Every part of this process created a digital footprint of data. The data from simple transactions such as pizza ordering or GPS mapping help Data Scientist and Machine Learning Engineers build models for the next generation of AI applications in the Enterprise. Massive amounts of data ready to train models can now be can captured, accessed, and analyzed to unlock the value of this data will help hold off AI Winter.

Deep Learning Open-source

The final solution to guarding against AI Winter is the advance in Deep Learning and Machine Learning Frameworks. Today’s innovation is accelerated by the advances in the open-source data science world with frameworks like Caffe and Tensorflow. In a previous post we talked about the importance that frameworks like these were built by the world’s largest data companies on the planet and yet they decided to release these into the open-source community. Understanding the real competitive advantages comes in the massive data they have collected over years to train these models. Now these powerful frameworks are part of the open-source community where an army of developers around the globe helping to improve this technology. Open-source Deep Learning and Machine Learning Frameworks will deal the final blow to AI Winter.

How AI Transformation Begins?

Understanding that AI Winter is not coming; how can you accelerate AI innovation? Start by unlocking the value of your Enterprise data by implementing a high performance AI solution that allows for Data Scientist to capitalize on that data. This will accelerate innovation by giving Data Engineers more time back in their day with faster model training and simplified software integration.

Dell EMC has been at the forefront of AI providing the technology that makes tomorrow possible. Working with NVIDIA we have solutions that provide the foundation for successful AI solutions which combine best of breed NVIDIA GPU accelerated compute complemented with high-performance scale-out Isilon storage. As the only venders on the market who offer flexibility and informed choice in this space, we offer Build Your Own options with Isilon and the ultra-dense GPU accelerated PowerEdge C-series, and for organizations that prefer to Buy solutions we have the prepackaged Dell EMC Ready Solutions for AI: Deep Learning with NVIDIA which was launched this past August. Most recently, earlier this month we announced, a new reference architecture for AI featuring the Isilon All-Flash F800 and NVIDIA DGX-1 servers. This delivers a 3rd high-performance AI deployment option that reduces risk and compresses the time needed for training and testing analytical models for multi-petabyte data sets on AI platforms.

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Leadership: A Commitment to Our Customers

Depending on who you ask, leadership means a number of different things. For many (including Merriam Webster), the defining attribute of a leader is simply holding an office or position of leadership. And sure, Dell EMC—#1 in global hyper-converged systems revenue1—is by all accounts a leader. But the true impact of leadership cannot be measured in the absolutes of a chart or balance sheet, rather in the degree to which they empower the people—and businesses—they work with. In this spirit, I am thrilled to share the results of Gartner’s November 2018 Magic Quadrant and companion Critical Capabilities report for Hyper-converged Infrastructure (HCI).

We believe Gartner has recognized Dell EMC for continued HCI leadership, reflecting both our Ability to Execute and Completeness of Vision. To evaluate Dell EMC Critical Capabilities for HCI, Gartner again selected VxRail, our flagship HCI offering. Our overall Critical Capabilities rating for HCI increased over last year’s report. In particular, this year Dell EMC scored higher than any other HCI vendor in the VDI use case, and for the 2nd year in a row, highest in Business-Critical and Cloud use cases.

A recent IDG survey shows that 50% of IT leaders are already running or planning to run business-critical applications on hyper-converged infrastructure, with another 20% considering it2. VxRail is the only fully integrated, pre-configured, and pre-tested HCI appliance on the market powered by VMware vSAN, the industry leading software defined storage solution designed for virtualized business-critical workloads and applications. Powered by the latest generation of Dell EMC PowerEdge servers, VxRail is fully loaded with enterprise data services and configurable to meet any business critical use case—even floating active-active data centers aboard hospital ships (just ask Mercy Ships, a non-profit VxRail customer that provides free lifesaving surgeries to people where medical care is nearly non-existent). VxRail speeds time to value in the core data center (powering applications such as SAP HANA), at the edge, and importantly in the cloud as well.

According to Gartner’s own research, “In 2019, hybrid IT will be the standard. Technical professionals focused on cloud must continue to advance cloud-first strategies, embrace multicloud and maintain on-premises environments”3. As an integrated cloud platform, VxRail offers multiple options to simplify the path to a VMware hybrid cloud environment, including VMware Validated Design (VVD) and, coming soon, VMware Cloud Foundation, with a focus on integration and brokering, which will deliver a seamless customer experience with automated deployment of a VMware SDDC architecture and LCM of the full end-to-end hardware/software stack along with choice of networking.

As the leader of HCI Product Marketing, on behalf of the entire Dell EMC HCI team, I am proud that Gartner has recognized Dell EMC in a continued HCI Leaders position. But more importantly, I am excited about what lies ahead for our customers. Dell EMC and VMware are continuing to increase our level of collaboration on VxRail—and it is our customers that will benefit from these ongoing joint investments. The less time IT spends on administration, routine maintenance, and support, the more time they can dedicate to innovation that drives business value—and ultimately leadership within their industry. Which brings me back to the theme of this blog: leadership. My definition of a leader is someone—or some business—that empowers and creates new leaders. When I speak with VxRail customers, I am consistently inspired by the creative, impactful ways they are leveraging hyper-converged infrastructure to make a difference for their businesses, and the world—from powering the next disruptive innovation to providing free lifesaving surgeries. I can’t wait to see what comes next.

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