Michael Dell has set his sights, and that of his multi-billion dollar technology infrastructure company, on the future. One that he says evolves when powerful ideas come along to spawn entire ecosystems of innovations. All of which result in new industries and endeavors emerging and new opportunities coming along for an enterprise.
Delivering the Dell Technologies World keynote last week, Dell said the world has power, more than ever before, to turn ideas into innovations that fundamentally improve businesses, lives and the entire humankind. And he believes that generative AI, edge computing, zero trust, 5G and multi-cloud ecosystems are the buzzwords for this change.
And the way Dell Technologies plans to prepare for the future of innovations is to focus on several new products, platforms and collaborations. Some of the announcements that tech giant made during the event last week are presented below:
The shift towards a multi-cloud universe
Enterprises have set multi-cloud as the end goal but achieving it first and then managing it could be tough as the ecosystem gets sprawled and unwieldy. Michael Dell said the company aims to make “multi-cloud real” and turn the idea into real innovation. Towards this end, the company announced the following:
- An expansion of the Dell APEX cloud platforms through collaborations with VMWare, Red Hat and Microsoft. The storage for public cloud includes customer-managed storage offerings with Dell’s performance, scale and cyber resiliency to hyperscalers such as Microsoft Azure and AWS with centralized management activities. It would help customers resolve challenges of infrastructure ownership and upfront budgeting and also simplify cloud experiences.
- Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella highlighted in his recorded interview for the event that customers want seamlessness of the edge and public cloud coming together so that enterprises can deploy sensitive workflows when and where they want with a seamless control panel. Dell’s multi-cloud architecture is built around a common storage layer that connects cloud, workflow and data that enables data mobility and creates a connective tissue from the public cloud to the on-premises cloud.
The power of edge and a zero-trust journey
Dell is moving at a frenetic pace on this as customers seek the capability to act on the edge in order to minimize latency and fuel new workloads including AI. This is where the Dell NativeEdge edge software platform comes into play. Moving beyond the company’s Project Frontier, this aims to enable centralized deployment of containerized and virtualized apps. Clarke described it as “multi-cloud by design.
The platform can help reduce operational complexity at scale via centralized management, zero touch deployment, onboarding and automated infrastructure operations. An open design works with software applications, IoT frameworks, multi-vendor operations technology tools and multi-cloud environments. Dell NativeEdge also helps ensure security across the supply chain through zero trust security.
Dell also announced the Project Fort Zero that will be embedded throughout its apps and products. The capability comes to market within 2023 and will be validated by the US Department of Defense.
Creating a level-playing field for generative AI
Given that generative AI has been the flavor of the season, Dell is teaming up with Nvidia on Project Helix, a platform that allows businesses to easily create and run custom AI models. Nvidia president Jensen Huang said it is easy to use and understands almost any language or input so that every enterprise can use it to revolutionize their products.
As generative AI gets more data and processing power, enterprises need new architectures with greater orders of magnitude of speed and performance to realize its full potential while securing data and ensuring its integrity through the journey of regulatory compliance. Project Helix has a design blueprint for generative AI with configurations, guidance and deployment with support from a panel of experts. NVIDIA H100 tensor core GPUs are integrated into Dell PowerEdge platforms and NVIDIA AI enterprise includes the full-stack AI software for GenAI deployments.
Private wireless networks and SONiC to the fore
Dell Private Wireless is an enterprise-level tool that uses 5G technologies to deliver standalone private wireless networks with dedicated bandwidth and infrastructure to meet the diverse connectivity needs of enterprise edge applications. The private wireless tool is powered by Dell VxRail and PowerEdge servers and built in partnership with mobile technology providers Airspan and Druid. It allows enterprises to benefit from 5G wireless across edge deployments without having to move data outside their network or compromising data control, sovereignty or governance requirements.
Dell also came up with Enterprise SONiC (Software for Open Networking in the Cloud) distribution, a unified network operating system (NOS) across cloud, core and edge use cases supported by multi-vendor platforms. It helps companies build high-performance fabrics with choice and flexibility; gain ease of management and greater insights with customizable options for edge deployments; and enhanced data center capabilities that enable the building of more feature-rich, enterprise-level fabric.
