Dell Technologies World Gives Ecosystem a Broad View of Multicloud Strategy
Many partners and customers learned more about what’s new from Dell and its ecosystem partners in the exhibit hall.
May 9, 2022
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The new Apex Cyber Recovery Services are subscription services that provide a Dell-managed isolated security vault. Dell said it is built using the intelligence gained from deploying more than 1,900 cyber recovery vaults. Building on Dell’s recently launched PowerProtect Cyber Recovery for AWS, the company launched PowerProtect Cyber Recovery for Microsoft Azure. Dell said it will be available in Microsoft’s Azure marketplace next month. The offering creates a sandboxed data center hosted in an isolated cyber recovery vault.
“The vault components are never accessible from production and access to the vault target during replication is extremely limited,” Dell co-COO Chuck Whitten said. In the event of an attach, Whitten said it provides flexible recovery options, either to a traditional data center or a new Azure private network or to a clean environment within Azure. Whitten also announced CyberSense for AWS, which he said, “provides adaptive analytics, machine learning and forensic tools to detect, diagnose and accelerate data recovery.” But unlike pure metadata solutions, CyberSense will offer full content analytics to enable rapid recovery.
Dell showcased the 25th anniversary of its Precision workstation family. Marking this milestone, Dell has promised to “push the boundaries” of the workstation this year.
In March, Dell launched its smallest form factor 14-inch mobile Precision workstation to date. The Precision 5470 is powered by Intel’s Evo-based 12th Gen Core H-series processor. It has 64GB of DDR5 memory, up to 4TB of storage and up to NVIDIA RTX A1000 graphics. It’s engineered with a new thermal management system and Dell’s new Dual Opposite Outlet fan, designed to let the system run at high speeds.
Dell showcased its commitment to using more environmentally friendly components and packaging with its commercial PCs and workstations. The new Latitude 5000 is built with ocean bound plastics in the laptop’s fan housing. Dell also said its new Latitude and Precision lines will for the first time have packaging made with 100% recycled or renewable materials on the company’s Latitude 3000, 5000 and 7000 series, and the Precision 5000 series. Dell plans to offer it to additional commercial and consumer lines later this year.
Dell said it is all-in when it comes to virtual reality, notably from an infrastructure standpoint. Company officials said many customers are already deploying solutions that enable digital twins. Among many of its customers, TopGolf is among the earliest to adopt Dell’s VR and edge computing capabilities, which the company showcased in its VR Studio.
Kyndryl last month said it became one of the few Dell Technologies Titanium Black partners. According to the announcement by Kris Lovejoy, Kyndryl’s global security and resiliency practice leader, the two are working closely to provide “an unparalleled set of services in and around the orchestration of business continuity, delivered through the Dell unified and scalable platform.” Lovejoy in a video noted that clients who fall victim to ransomware assume that the organization responsible for managing availability will bring them back up.
“That’s not the case,” she said.
Dell and Kyndryl are working to fix that by creating a link between security and availability, she noted. As a result, when struck by ransomware and data is encrypted, it can be quickly unlocked.
Netscout had an outsized presence in the exhibit hall showcasing its nGenius Packet Flow Operating System (PFOS) packet switching software and InfiniStreamNG (ISNG) network and application security software. Netscout and Dell Technologies OEM Solutions announced a partnership a year ago to ensure Dell PowerEdge servers and PowerEdge switches work together.
Vertiv, which provides modular power and cooling systems for large data centers, showcased its new Vertiv Liebert PSI5 Lithium-Ion 3kVA Short Depth UPS, designed to protect critical infrastructure at the edge or for distributed applications. Vertiv also emphasized its Micro 415, a customizable and scalable modular data center offering designed to protect critical edge IT nodes.
Wipro and Dell have been partners for two decades, with a key focus on Cyber Recovery Vault services. Like Netscout, Wipro had a prominent presence in the expo hall. Wipro is coming off a banner fiscal year 2022. The large services provider last week reported that revenues for the year of $10.4 billion grew 27% year-over-year.
The fact that the Red Hat Summit will return this week as a live event in Boston didn’t keep the company from showcasing its OpenShift cloud platform. IBM’s Red Hat will surely launch its own new wares next week, but the company has already launched Red Hat Application Foundations. Introduced last week, the company described Red Hat Application Foundations as a collection of connected application services for Red Hat OpenShift, designed to simplify development of containerized applications that are portable across hybrid and multicloud environments.
PowerStore has quickly become Dell’s fastest growing storage offering since the company launched it two years ago. Now Dell is planning its third major software release for PowerStore.
Dell claims the latest version of its PowerStore software will boost performance by 50% and support up to 66% more capacity. The software is also easier to deploy, and offer improved security with file-level retention, native file replication and support for third-party file monitoring and ransomware protection tools. Dell also said the PowerStore software update will offer expanded VMware integration including improved vSphere Virtual Volumes (vVols) latency and performance, according to Dell. The company also said it has simplified plus simplified disaster recovery with vVols replication, VM-level snapshots and fast clones. Complete support for NVMe will enable faster network speed, which will be most evident with new hardware, the company said.
Dell is adding improved cybersecurity protection to PowerMax, which provides business-critical primary storage for server and mainframe environments. Delivered via Dell’s Cloud IQ ransomware protection software, PowerMax will provide up to 65 million secure snapshots.
Upgrades to Dell’s PowerFlex software-defined infrastructure offering aim to ease consolidation of traditional and cloud-native workloads. The software will provide new file services designed to provide unified block and file features. Dell officials said the PowerFlex enhancements aim to simplify storage management in multicloud and DevOps environments. The company is emphasizing broad file and block support from all major Kubernetes and container orchestration platforms including AWS, Microsoft, Google Cloud Red Hat, VMware and SUSE.
Upgrades to Dell’s PowerFlex software-defined infrastructure offering aim to ease consolidation of traditional and cloud-native workloads. The software will provide new file services designed to provide unified block and file features. Dell officials said the PowerFlex enhancements aim to simplify storage management in multicloud and DevOps environments. The company is emphasizing broad file and block support from all major Kubernetes and container orchestration platforms including AWS, Microsoft, Google Cloud Red Hat, VMware and SUSE.
Last week’s Dell Technologies World gave partners and customers a broad view of Dell’s cloud storage and infrastructure road map. The Las Vegas event set the stage for how the company will bring consistency to its on-premises infrastructure and the major public clouds.
The Dell Technologies ecosystem gathered for the first time in three years to learn the company’s ambitious agenda. At the forefront were Dell’s new Apex Cyber Recovery Services and Project Alpine storage architecture. The operative direction articulated by Dell co-COO Chuck Whitten was multicloud.
Dell’s Chuck Whitten
“The world needs multicloud by design, not by default,” Whitten said during the opening keynote. “And that is the great unsolved infrastructure challenge that we are working on at Dell Technologies.”
While there is little dispute about multicloud, Whitten said it doesn’t work well in its current form.
“Data is siloed; each cloud operates as almost an island,” Whitten said during a follow-up media and analyst briefing. “Someone has to be the orchestrator of bringing all that together and start to simplify what is a very complex multicloud world. And that’s where we come in. We have positioned the company to sit in that ecosystem, of the end user and edge clouds and telecom clouds and private clouds and public clouds and will give customers choice about where they store data and how they consume the services across that ecosystem.”
First Look at Project Alpine
The most significant demonstration of how Dell intends to accomplish that is with Project Alpine. Revealed in January, Project Alpine will bring all of Dell’s block, file and object storage to the three major clouds.
Dell VP of marketing Caitlin Gordon gave the first preview of Project Alpine during the second day keynote session.
Dell’s Caitlin Gordon on stage at Dell Technologies World 2022.
“Our goal with Project Alpine is really to enable operational consistency, drive greater efficiency and simplify data mobility. I am really excited to share our progress in this space,” Gordon told attendees and those viewing online.
Gordon first showcased a development team seeking to modernize an existing app, by moving Dell’s block storage software in AWS. Within the SaaS portal, she deployed the block storage in AWS.
“All of the deployment and the configuration is fully automated, takes just a few minutes to deploy. Once that’s done, you got a quick overview of the deployment,” Gordon said.
Then, to replicate the database from Dell’s on-premises PowerStore storage into AWS, Gordon made a few source and target configuration selections.
“And then once that copy operation is complete, the development team can get back to work,” she said.
Because it uses the same UI and APIs in AWS as on-premises, it doesn’t require any new skills, Gordon emphasized.
Gordon also demonstrated the process of moving cloud-native data on-premises using a new app described as container-mobility software.
“With just a single command, you can securely and seamlessly migrate that application from the cloud to on prem and back,” she said. “This enables you to truly develop once and run anywhere. It is a real game changer.”
Next, Gordon provided a demo of a similar scenario with file services with Microsoft Azure. In this example, Gordon started with video data stored on a makeshift manufacturing floor on a local Dell PowerScale NAS appliance. In this scenario, Gordon showed how to tap into the Microsoft Azure Computer Vision Service to analyze the data to detect anomalies. By copying the data from the PowerScale appliance into the Microsoft Azure cloud, “you can use it to train a computer vision model to automatically detect defects using Azure Cognitive Services,” Gordon explained. “Once that training job is complete, you can apply the new AI model into production to drive greater efficiency and quality in your manufacturing process.”
Dell isn’t the first to provide this capability, Moor Insights and Strategy analyst Steve McDowell wrote in a Forbes post. NetApp Cloud ONTAP and Pure Storage’s Pure Cloud Block Store are among offerings that customers have embraced. McDowell noted that NetApp Cloud ONTAP on AWS and Microsoft Azure delivered roughly 7% of NetApp’s top-line revenue during its most recently reported quarter.
“Beyond the feature set of whatever Project Alpine ultimately delivers, it will enable an experience for Dell customers that is consistent from edge offerings, to on-prem storage, to consumption-based Apex storage, to the public cloud,” McDowell added. “No longer will storage administrators need multiple toolboxes to solve their problems. Instead, they can just buy into the Dell ecosystem.
John Lochausen, primary storage presales engineer at Dell Titanium partner World Wide Technology, anticipates customers will welcome Project Alpine.
WWT’s Gordon Lochausen
“It is a step in the right direction,” Lochausen told Channel Futures. “We, and obviously Dell knows, that that’s been a gap and their product strategy. It’s not like they don’t have smart people working on these things. I don’t want to sound like they missed the boat. But, you know, sometimes turning the Titanic takes a while.”
Dell showcased Project Alpine, Apex and various other segments of its portfolio, in sessions and in the event’s exhibit hall. Likewise, Dell’s key alliance partners had a strong presence. Among them: Netscout, Wipro, Kyndryl and Red Hat. Check out our slideshow above of what we captured in the exhibit hall.
Christine Horton contributed to this report.
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