Dell 'Excited' About Partners Selling New PowerEdge, Analytics for the Edge

As more data gets processed at the edge, and outside of the data center, Dell Technologies on Tuesday announced a new edge portfolio including PowerEdge servers, analytics, and new security and control capabilities.

The new products and services address the compute, network and storage needs within the edge. They include the PowerEdge XE2420, new Data Center Micro 415, and an updated PowerEdge XR2.

Dell’s Matt Baker

“We see the edge as one part of a broader system and a system that’s defined by constraints that make it a little more difficult to deliver than a traditional unrestrained or clean data center,” said Matt Baker, senior vice president, strategy and planning at Dell Technologies.

The PowerEdge XE2420 is designed for harsh environments and dimensionally constrained environments. The XE2420 is a compact, high-performance server for edge deployments, that delivers the performance, availability and security required for telecommunications customers who are building out edge networks required for the 5G implementation, for example.

It’s a low-latency, two-socket system that accommodates up to four accelerators and 92TB of storage per server. The new device has Network Equipment-Building System certification with extended operating temperature tolerance.

In cases where customers need to deploy solutions in environments where no facility exists, the Dell EMC Modular Data Center Micro 415 (MDC Micro) is designed to fit the bill.

“These are modular data centers that are quite small – the size of a refrigerator for example – that allow us to build a controlled environment out into the harshest places in the world,” said Baker.

The updated version of the PowerEdge XR2 is a more ruggedized device with more GPUs.

Dell also announced two new offerings for edge analytics, designed to work cooperatively with one another. They are the Dell EMC Streaming Data Platform and the Dell EMC HPC Ready Architecture for AI and Data Analytics.

The Dell EMC Streaming Data Platform is designed to take real-time streaming data from the edge, process and analyze the data and return real-time insights. The enterprise-ready platform delivers a single solution for all customers’ data, whether streaming or not, that provides auto-scaling ingestion, tiered storage with historical recall on-demand and unified analytics for both real-time and historical business insights.

“This is something that our customers have been looking for and complements the Dell EMC storage portfolio quite well, particularly our Isilon unstructured portfolio where much of this new class of real-time data is landing,” said Baker.

The Dell EMC HPC Ready Architecture for AI and Data Analytics is designed for many AI and data analytics frameworks.

“It’s important to observe that this is an end-to-end system, and in order to develop a real-time inferencing application, it typically requires that you train it against a large set of data. This is designed to complement and be deployed, not physically alongside, but logically alongside the Streaming Data Platform,” said Baker.

Designed to provide security and control to the edge, the vendor also introduced the Dell EMC iDRAC9 Datacenter, a new Dell remote access controller that adds streaming data-analytics capabilities critical for understanding edge operations to all Dell EMC PowerEdge servers.

iDRAC 9 Datacenter helps customers meet the requirements for deploying, securing and operating edge environments. iDRAC 9 Datacenter helps with data security, edge management and control. It provides remote and automated data security with centralized key management, automated SSL certificate renewal, and real-time FIOS scanning for malicious firmware. There are capabilities around zero-touch configuration and simple, two-factor authentication, among other features. Additionally, there’s full-access management from core to edge for comprehensive control.

Initially availability for the Dell EMC PowerEdge XE2420 will begin in the second quarter; the Dell EMC Modular Data Center Micro is expected to be available beginning in the second half of 2020; and the Dell EMC iDRAC9 Datacenter and the Dell EMC Streaming Data Platform are available globally today.

The new offers will be available to partners, who Baker said critical to delivering edge solutions to customers.

“In many cases, when you find yourself in edge environments, you’re going from a relatively unconstrained and, in many ways, a vanilla environment – it’s standard racks, a big building somewhere – and increasingly, edge environments are really reflective of the core business of the customer. In many cases, our channel partners specialize in that business. So, we’re excited about the role that channel partners can play in helping us build and deliver edge solutions designed for their customer,” he said.