Snap Decision: How Digital Transformation Helps Us Get There First

We are engaged in a war of algorithms; a battle fought in cyber space that also plays out across air, land, and sea every day. Digital transformation is the key to winning because it gives us a critical advantage: the ability to execute before the adversary can.

This “decision advantage” comes, in part, from embedding technology into the mission at the service of the warfighter. Technology transformation at the kinetic level, for example, makes efforts at the tip of the spear more successful. Imagine real-time AI-processed reconnaissance information optimizing ordinance activity on-target. Or turning our ships at sea into floating data centers: optimizing communication, battlefield insights, ship defenses, onboard maintenance, and medical care for our wounded warriors.

Today, across the department and in all branches of the U.S. military, IT leaders are looking for solutions to turn their legacy IT footprint into a modern multi-cloud environment.  This transformation will also bring sweeping changes to our workforce.  Tomorrow’s pilot will need to be as good at multi-mode IT systems management as actually flying an aircraft.

Technology transformation with the Department of Defense (DoD) means looking at where computer activity needs to take place. This could include activity in a data center, or on a sensor, drone, mobile device, aircraft, and even an office-based workstation. Where this processing activity, called a ‘workload’ takes place should be optimized for the mission – and not optimized for the convenience of the IT purchasing process. Mission-optimized IT includes Domestic DOD-managed cloud environments and data centers, ad hoc IT networks in forward operating positions with disadvantaged communication, or on the battlefield itself.

In support of this transformation, a multi-cloud approach allows the military to deploy infrastructure that is secure and flexible for mission-critical projects. One such example is a recent Defense Department effort to build out a secure, on-premise cloud solution within its existing data center footprint. Outdated and unsupported legacy IT systems were eating up already-scarce funding and leaving our warfighters and their mission exposed to the adversary.

Dell EMC is honored to have partnered with DoD in this effort, known as the On-Site Managed Services (OMS) program. It provides high-availability, high-performance, mission-critical compute services. This cutting-edge IT transformation program allows the DoD to manage their most sensitive workloads and provide compute and processing wherever the mission requires.

OMS illustrates the point that mission success is all about operation and accessibility, requiring different approaches for each unique workload. With a complex map of challenges and mission-critical considerations, the DoD must continue to approach cloud on a workload-by-workload basis for IT modernization success, appreciating cloud as an operating model.

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Meet the New Members of the Dell EMC PowerEdge Server Portfolio

The launch of five new Dell EMC PowerEdge servers presents fantastic opportunities for your business – see how you can use them to help your customers solve their IT challenges…

Are you up to speed with this month’s launch of the new exciting Dell EMC PowerEdge servers?

The five new servers have all been purpose-designed to help meet organizations’ specific workload needs while also enabling IT Transformation – and there’s something to suit every typical customer segment.

There are three brand new Dell EMC PowerEdge rack servers and two tower options for you to now introduce to your prospects and customers:

◈ PowerEdge R740xd2
◈ PowerEdge R340
◈ PowerEdge R240*
◈ PowerEdge T340*
◈ PowerEdge T140

All these new products are now ready to ship – so it’s time for an end-of-year push to make sure all your customers are aware of their capabilities.

Introducing our new enterprise content server

The new Dell EMC PowerEdge R740xd2 is being marketed as ‘the enterprise content server’.  The R740xd2 offers a high-capacity design that is ideal for organizations with data-intensive workloads like media streaming, messaging and software-defined storage (SDS).

The PowerEdge R740xd2 was developed to enable your customers to:

◈ Respond effectively to data growth;
◈ Simplify management across the data center;
◈ Help ensure uptime and data security.

It offers large internal storage in a 2S/2U rack content server that’s purpose-built to support demanding, data-heavy workloads – everything from streaming media like video surveillance and content delivery networks to Exchange and SDS – all in a high-capacity space-saving design.

Built from the ground up to enable IT Transformation and featuring the latest generation Intel® Xeon® Scalable processors, the Dell EMC PowerEdge R740xd2 was developed to help enterprises compete in today’s fast-moving business environment.

It includes automated intelligence to simplify management and enable rapid deployment of new servers and updates. Automating server administration in this way helps your customers to reduce the time required to manage mid-to-large scale environments.

The PowerEdge R740xd2 helps deliver continuous reliability and uptime with enterprise-class drives and integrated security features – so your customers can use it to fortify their server operations.

In short, this new server is the perfect choice for customers looking for:

◈ Cost-effective, high-capacity storage with two-socket server performance
◈ Automated administration that’s easy to manage with proactive and predictive support options
◈ High availability features (front-serviceable, hot-swappable drives) and built-in security to help protect critical data

Superb new single-socket 1U rack solutions

For organizations seeking single-socket solutions, the two new 1U rack servers now added to the PowerEdge portfolio are great options to start promoting.

The Dell EMC PowerEdge R240 is the perfect choice for budget-conscious small businesses and service providers looking for an affordable and simple-to-use dense server that they can rely on for web hosting and remote tasks. Marketed as ‘compute made easy’, it offers your customers affordability, versatility and simplicity.

Meanwhile, the Dell EMC PowerEdge R340 is an ideal entry-level option for medium-sized businesses that require an efficient, scalable, dense server to address productivity and maximum uptime. Combining efficiency and scalability with automation, it’s designed to accelerate business growth.

Take a look at our new tower options too

The all-new availability of two impressive tower format servers rounds out the expanded PowerEdge portfolio.

The Dell EMC PowerEdge T140 is a great entry-level option for small business owners who need an affordable and simple-to-use server – it’s perfect for file and print management and point of sale activity. This server is specifically designed to support a growing business, making the IT infrastructure easy and worry-free while also keeping data safe and secure.

For growing small or medium businesses with remote employees, the PowerEdge T340 provides high availability and storage – making it the ideal choice for collaboration and sharing needs. It enables your customers to run their operations reliably, manage their IT easily and to scale dynamically, so they can grow their business without limits.**

These exciting new products are all now RTS

The addition of these new servers to the already impressive Dell EMC PowerEdge portfolio presents fantastic opportunities for you and your business.

They’re all now RTS – so make sure you get up to speed and explore all the sales opportunities with customers looking for high-capacity and entry-level options.

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Best Practices for Robust VMware Data Protection in an Ever Growing Data Environment

Everyone has heard the numbers.  There is more and more data and it keeps growing at an ever increasing rate.  According to the latest IDC estimates, the amount of data is expected to grow tenfold by 2025 to 163 zettabytes.  To thrive in today’s economy, organizations must make the most of their data and must also ensure that the data is protected and can be recovered quickly and cost effectively. And, since majority of enterprise workloads run on virtualized environments, with most of those workloads running on VMware, having robust VMware data protection is essential to the success of most organizations.

A number of best practices deployed as part of your data protection strategy can help you achieve this:

1. Automate protection of virtual workloads

With more data and more VMs being spun up at an ever increasing rate, you cannot rely on manual processes to ensure that all your new applications and VMs are protected.  You do not want busy application owners or vAdmins to have to manually create new protection policies or assign new workloads or VMs to existing policies.  And, you certainly do not want the lag time from the creation of a workload to raising a request with a backup or storage admin to configure backups of the workload.

Modern data protection solutions automate protection processes with support for dynamic mapping of vSphere objects to existing protection policies.  This means that your new VMs, based on criteria you define (such as DS cluster, data center, tags, VMname, etc.), are automatically assigned and protected upon creation with no human intervention necessary.

2. Self-service data protection

Your application owners and vAdmins are busy making sure that your business and mission critical applications are up and performing as intended.

They do not want any delays with respect to data protection related tasks (backup policy changes, file and/or VM recoveries, etc.) by going through a backup or infrastructure admin and they certainly do not want to learn or log into another system or UI to do it on their own.  Enabling your application and vAdmins to perform data protection tasks directly from the native vSphere UI they are familiar with can go a long way in making their jobs, with respect to data protection, easier.

Modern data protection solutions provide deep integration with vSpehre to deliver self-service data protection workflows, enabling application owners and vAdmins the freedom to perform the vast majority of data protection related tasks directly from the native and familiar vSphere UI.

3. Distributing data across Software Defined Data Center nodes

Most data protection solutions handle data deduplication and distribution of data at the edge of the SDDC, after the data has been transferred from the source storage to the target backup storage.  This results in extensive network traffic and bandwidth usage.  It can also lead to the requirement of a separate expensive backup network and inefficient use of storage space.

Modern data protection solutions perform deduplication processing within the SDDC before the data is transferred to backup storage.  This allows the solution to scale-out with the SDDC and ensures data processing requirements do not fall behind as the SDDC scales. In addition, an ideal data protection solution should also utilize horizontally scaled out pools of protection storage, which results in more efficient allocation of software defined storage.  The result is less bandwidth usage and less storage capacity consumed for backing up your data.

4. Change block tracking restore capabilities

Change block tracking for backups is very common among today’s data protection solutions.  This means that for each subsequent VM backup, the solution only copies data blocks that have changed since the last backup.  This results in faster backups and less bandwidth consumed.

What is not very common, but important is change block tracking restore.  This allows the solution to track the difference between the current version of the VM and the version you are trying to restore.  It then only restores the changed blocks between the two.  The result is much faster VM restores and much less bandwidth consumed for those restores.  A solution that supports change block tracking restore enables new architectures without compromising recovery time objectives. One such architecture is the ability to backup and restore VMs across wide area networks. A modern data protection solution will have support for change block tracking restores.

5. Performance disaggregated from capacity

There is a trend in data protection solutions towards simplicity in the form of converged appliances that combine data protection software and backup storage, along with all the ancillary compute and networking, in a single converged appliance.  While this trend towards simplicity is admirable, for many data protection solutions, it has come at the expense of capacity and/or performance efficiency.

For many of these simple, converged solutions capacity and processing are linked.  Once you run out of processing power on an appliance – too many VMs to backup, too many backup streams needed to comply with SLAs, etc. – you need another appliance to add more processing even if you did not need the additional storage capacity.  Similarly, if you run out of storage capacity, you need another appliance and end up paying for the additional processing that you did not need. This is a common dilemma of architectures that scale capacity and performance linearly.

A modern data protection solution, whether it is in the traditional HW/SW form factor, SDDC or a converged appliance, disaggregates performance from capacity and allows each to scale independently.  Ideally, the backup processes should be load balanced across your entire SDDC environment and there should be no need to add or pay for additional processing if you need more capacity.

Dell EMC delivers software defined, automated data protection

With Dell EMC Data Protection, you don’t have to compromise on performance, automation, architecture or efficiency for the sake of simplicity.  Our solutions, whether you are deploying our Data Protection software and Data Domain backup storage or our new Integrated Data Protection Appliances, each utilize our software defined data protection architecture to deliver on each of the above best practices.

Dell EMC Data Protection solutions deliver:

◈ Automation of VM protection with dynamic mapping to protection policies

◈ Leading self-service data protection for VMware environments with our native vSphere integration

◈ Minimal bandwidth usage and maximum storage efficiency with our industry leading edge and target deduplication technology that delivers up to 55:1 storage efficiency and up to 98% bandwidth efficiency

◈ Change block restore for lighting fast VM recovery

◈ Disaggregated performance from capacity with distributed virtual proxies that are automatically provisioned, deployed, and load balanced across the SDDC environment

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Simplifying Surveillance in the Age of More

Why an integrated, enterprise approach to IoT surveillance is the way forward

More cameras, more sensors, more intelligence―today’s advanced video surveillance systems do more than ever before to protect people and property, with applications far beyond perimeter monitoring and access control.

However, as a recent IDC white paper points out, putting new surveillance technologies to work quickly gets complex. More devices, more data, and more connections mean more potential security risk and more integration and management challenges.

With widespread digitization, surveillance moves from what was once an essentially self-contained function to one that spans the larger enterprise IT/IoT environment―with implications for infrastructure, security, data management, analytics, operations, software development, and workplace tools.

More “things”

In many ways, video surveillance via the first IP (Internet Protocol) cameras in the mid-90s was the original IoT use case, where digital cameras collected and centralized information about the physical world. Fast-forward twenty plus years to today. The ecosystem of digital IP cameras has extended outward to a web of interconnected “things” in surveillance, including not only more advanced imaging sensors but also other types of IoT sensors capable of detecting and digitizing information about the physical environment ranging from chemical signatures to temperature to pressure to sound to vibration. The growth of this market is continuing its upwards trajectory. By 2021, IDC predicts that annual shipments of fixed IP/network surveillance cameras will exceed 130 million and mobile surveillance cameras (e.g.,  drones, vehicles, body wear) will top 73 million.

A more complete picture

The ability to combine digital video data with other IoT-sensor surveillance data as well as with other data sources (e.g., employee records, building schematics, campus maps) and powerful analytics (e.g., telemetry, facial recognition, machine learning, artificial intelligence) enables a new kind of computer vision. Security officers gain a more immediate, complete, and accurate picture of situations as they unfold. The likelihood of useful machine-recommended responses grows. And investigators gain digital search and analysis tools that make inquiries into past incidents much faster and easier.

More data

One of the biggest challenges is storing, aggregating, analyzing, and protecting the massive amounts of data generated by a greater number of cameras with higher resolution, multiple modalities, and additional IoT sensors. Security departments are turning to IT organizations for expertise in how best to meet the demands of compute performance, storage, and backend analytics as well as with how to comply with the longer retention periods being set by regulatory bodies and institutional policies. New storage technologies and tiered storage approaches are needed to achieve efficiency and resiliency. And many enterprises are looking to hybrid or private cloud storage, especially for archiving video data, for the flexibility and scalability it offers.

More vulnerabilities

Each IP camera and IoT device in the surveillance network is a potential attack vector, making advanced security methods critical—from software-defined network micro-segmentation to edge compute security to over-the-air updates.

More complexities, more opportunities

The buildout of advanced surveillance systems presents significant challenges in terms of hardware, software and network integration, deployment and onboarding of new devices over time, and ongoing management. But rather than addressing these challenges at the solution or even application level, organizations should tackle these challenges using a broader enterprise-wide lens—more specifically, by looking at how the solution can be leveraged to help drive future growth and transformation, including:

◈ Digital transformation: Determine how surveillance data and other enterprise and external data can be leveraged with advanced analytics, machine learning, and AI not just to address safety and security objectives but also to advance other objectives in areas such as product quality, customer experience, and market differentiation.

◈ IT/OT transformation: Achieve new agility and efficiencies through architectural and operational alignment of IT and OT investments.

◈ Workforce transformation: Address changes in roles and responsibilities and provide the right type of display and dashboard tools.

◈ Security transformation: Take a more proactive, built-in software-defined approach to secure enterprise data and systems to better handle the increased number of threat vectors.

A more open, holistic, and integrated approach―from camera to core to cloud

According to IDC, the best approach to deploying advanced surveillance systems and integrating them into the greater IT environment is with an open, integrated, and holistic platform.

As the number one global infrastructure provider for surveillance solutions today, Dell Technologies has done just that with our new Dell Technologies IoT Solution for Surveillance platform. IoT Solution for Surveillance is an end-to-end surveillance platform built on Dell and Intel® technologies―with the customer’s choice of devices, software, and analytics―all validated in one of our three global Surveillance Validation Labs. The open architecture includes designed-in security and scalability that reduces risk, cost, and complexity while providing the flexibility to adapt to future innovations and needs.

Dell Technologies IoT Solution for Surveillance combined with our expert strategic consulting services and backed by the Dell EMC Global Services and Support team equips organizations with the right solutions, skill sets, and services needed to meet their surveillance needs today while preparing for what’s coming tomorrow. If we can be sure of one thing, there will always be more.

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Say Hello to Test Drive for PowerMax, Unity, Isilon and DP4400 – 10 Things to Know!

The VxRail Test Drive™ program has been a big hit. Now, it’s expanding to include the storage and data protection portfolios. Say hello to Test Drive for PowerMax, Unity, Isilon and IDPA DP4400.

The Dell EMC Test Drive program consists of pipeline accelerator events for the Dell EMC Enterprise product portfolio. For partners looking to grow deals (and potentially win them faster), here are 10 things you need to know.

1. Test Drives are designed to increase sales closure rates. Getting a prospect into the Test Drive seat offers a chance to accelerate and close deals.
2. They can potentially lead to higher-value deals. The experience is designed to build familiarity and trust in the product—potentially opening the door to bigger and better deals within an account.
3. They can potentially lower the cost of sale. Test Drives are designed to significantly reduce the time and resources needed to close a typical opportunity by helping to simplify and shorten the sales cycle.
4. It’s a hands-on experience for the prospect. Test Drives are one-day, immersive experiences for your prospects. It lets them “get behind the wheel” of an infrastructure product to better understand their use case and prove viability.
5. These events are for the technical crowd. When you reach out to prospective Test Drive accounts, make sure they can send technical decision makers and/or influencers. The experience is focused on the end user.
6. The ideal time: Consideration and Evaluation stages. Test Drives offer a deeper, practical exploration of a product for prospects that have been researching their options and are nearing a decision.
7. They can happen anywhere in the world. Test Drive events are accessible to just about any prospect. Events can take place at a Dell EMC site, a partner site, or at a prospect’s office—across the globe and available in 10 languages.
8. Up to 16 prospects can attend. You can bring a maximum of 16 prospects to any one Test Drive. Ideally, you’ll have at least eight unique prospects with a maximum of two attendees per company.
9. It’s an event in a box. Leave it to the pros to drive the right curriculum and logistics behind the scenes for your key prospects.
10. It’s all about building confidence. The most important potential outcome of a Test Drive is, in one word, confidence—in the product, in making the right decision and in value of the investment.

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Don’t be Basic – Why You Should Automate IT Starting NOW

Picture this. You’ve arrived at work in the morning, ready to get going on an important strategic initiative you talked about with your boss last week. It’s a project that energizes you and has huge potential to impact the business. Yet somehow, hours later, you still haven’t started it. Email, mundane reports, repetitive everyday tasks, and unexpected fire drills kept you from the work that really matters.

We’ve all been there. IT professionals struggle with this problem just like everyone else. Perhaps even more so. The everyday task to an IT pro carries additional significance. Managing IT infrastructure so that the LOB and customers have a seamless digital experience is paramount. Now that all business is digital, it’s not enough for IT to just “keep the lights on.” They’re expected to contribute to business strategy and drive innovation.

The Benefits of IT Infrastructure Automation

Automation is a key component to freeing up IT staff time, reducing outages, and speeding time to delivery for new apps and services. In short, automation is the key to modernizing IT. Most IT managers know this. Yet, even the most mundane IT management tasks reflect low levels of automation. Forrester research proves it. In a recent study from Forrester, 50% or less of survey respondents say any one of nine server management tasks are more automated than manual. The figure below from Forrester shows the data.

There’s clearly an opportunity to get ahead of competitors by advancing IT infrastructure automation. Despite low levels of IT infrastructure automation currently, the benefits are many. Furthermore, the greatest benefits are experienced by those with high levels of automation AND modern server infrastructure. Forrester calls these organizations “Modernized IT.” Compared to less automated IT organizations with outdated server hardware, Modernized IT experiences:

◈ 1x greater reduction in service outages
◈ 3x greater reduction in operating expenditures
◈ 5x more reduction in IT staff dedicated to routine, repetitive tasks
◈ 3x greater reduction in capital expenditures

Additional benefits of IT infrastructure automation include: faster deployment/delivery of services, faster application updates, faster system stack updates, more efficient IT staffing, improved asset tracking, less time spent on troubleshooting, and reduced infrastructure complexity. In fact the list of benefits from Forrester’s research is even longer! Have I convinced you yet? IT infrastructure automation and modern servers really do pack a one-two punch. And we have the data to prove it.

Another key benefit to automating IT is that it can clear the path for IT to focus on next-generation workloads like Artificial Intelligence. 71% of IT organizations surveyed report that a lack of server automation is a key barrier to implementing AI initiatives. AI is an increasingly important tool, leading to better customer experiences and driving business strategy. To remain competitive and avoid the rise of shadow IT, IT departments need to lead AI initiatives. Not follow. IT infrastructure automation can help you do that.

How Dell EMC can help you Automate

Once you’re ready to modernize IT with automation, the best place to start is automating server management. After all, servers are the foundational element of your data center. With modern PowerEdge servers offering scalable business architecture, integrated security, and intelligent automation, your IT organization is poised for business success. Plus, Dell EMC offers a full portfolio of systems management solutions with a wide range of automation capabilities.

Those simple server management tasks like monitoring, deployment, troubleshooting, and provisioning? We can automate that. For example, with OpenManage Mobile and Quick Sync 2, reduce the time to view server inventory, firmware, and network details by 77%. With the same tools, you can reduce the time spent on troubleshooting by up to 28%. It’s also faster to perform a basic server setup with OpenManage Mobile and Quick Sync 2 (up to 145 fewer steps).

Dell EMC has the tools and the expertise to help you start with the basic and accelerate to the advanced. IT infrastructure automation doesn’t have to be so hard. With Dell EMC it can be simple. It’s time for IT to start focusing on strategic business priorities, not just keeping the lights on.

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