Dell delivers on multicloud and edge

“Customers tell us they want help simplifying their multicloud and edge strategies as they look to drive more efficiency and performance from their IT,” said Jeff Boudreau, president, Dell Technologies Infrastructure Solutions Group.  “Dell Technologies and VMware have numerous joint engineering initiatives spanning core IT areas such as multicloud, edge and security to help our customers more easily manage and gain value from their data.”

Business data and applications continue to grow in multicloud environments comprised of edge locations, public clouds and on-premises IT. Many organisations have already adopted a multicloud approach, and the number of applications running at the edge will grow 800% by 2024.1  

“IDC’s global research shows many organisations are struggling to balance the rapidly rising complexity and cost of data centre, edge and cloud operations with relentless business demand for better data integration, security and application performance,” notes Mary Johnston Turner, IDC research vice president, future of digital infrastructure agenda. “These organisations recognize the need for a consistent operating model tightly integrated with infrastructure platforms that support sophisticated, large scale data-driven workloads.”

Dell VxRail delivers greater performance and smallest-ever systems at the edge

Dell is introducing several new VxRail systems and software advancements that improve performance on-premises and at the edge including the industry’s only jointly engineered HCI-based DPU solution with VMware.2

• Improved system performance: A result of co-engineering with VMware and its Project Monterey initiative, VxRail systems support new VMware vSphere 8 software that has been rearchitected to run on DPUs. Customers can improve application and networking infrastructure performance and improve TCO by moving these services from a system’s CPU to its new on-board DPU.

•       Support demanding workloads: Select VxRail systems now support VMware’s new vSAN Enterprise Storage Architecture (ESA). With up to 4x vSAN performance improvement3, customers can better support demanding mission-critical applications.

• Smallest edge systems: VxRail rugged modular nodes deliver high performance and scalability in the system’s smallest form factor to date. Modular nodes are ideal for edge use cases including healthcare, energy and utilities and digital cities because of VxRail’s industry-first, on-board hardware witness4, which allows for deployment in high latency, low bandwidth locations.

“The increasing demand for software defined infrastructure services for networking, storage and security places more demands on already-strained CPUs. As more distributed, resource intensive applications are onboarded, there is a need to reimagine the datacentre architecture to fully support the requirements of these applications,” said Krish Prasad, senior vice president & general manager, Cloud Infrastructure Business Group, VMware. “Dell VxRail with VMware vSphere 8 will deliver the foundation of the next generation datacentre architecture by running infrastructure services on the DPU. This will enable greater network and application performance and a new level of sophistication in adopting Zero Trust security strategies to protect the modern enterprise workloads.”

Dell APEX expands multicloud and edge support for VMware environments

Dell is adding several offers to its APEX portfolio for VMware workloads that speed development of cloud-native apps and better allocate compute and storage resources for applications at the edge.

APEX Cloud Services with VMware Cloud adds managed VMware Tanzu Kubernetes Grid services, which allows IT teams to help developers move faster by using a container-based approach to application development. With Dell-managed Tanzu services, customers can provision Kubernetes clusters through the vSphere user interface. Organisations also will be able to speed development efforts by building, testing and running cloud-native applications alongside traditional applications on the same platform. 

APEX Private Cloud and APEX Hybrid Cloud offer new compute-only options that allow customers to support more workloads and increase IT infrastructure efficiency by independently scaling compute and storage resources. Organisations can start small and scale their infrastructure as their IT needs change. Customers can use Dell’s industry-leading enterprise storage data services by connecting compute-only instances to Dell storage such as APEX Data Storage Services.

“APEX Hybrid Cloud lets us manage our multicloud environment seamlessly and gain better insights into our VMware workloads. It’s allowed us to reduce the cost of supporting applications and workloads by 20%,” said Ben Doyle, chief information officer, ATN International. “We stood up the Dell APEX solution quickly, and we easily moved 70% of our infrastructure to it in under three months. We look forward to working with Dell Technologies to expand our cloud footprint moving forward.”

Dell Validated Designs for AI – AutoML uses AI to democratize data science

Dell Validated Designs for AI – Automatic Machine Learning (AutoML) uses automated machine learning models to help data scientists of all skill levels develop AI-powered applications.

The solution includes tested and proven configurations of Dell VxRail hyperconverged infrastructure with H2O.ai, NVIDIA and VMware software to help customers speed time to insight from data with automation that delivers up to 18x faster AI models.5

Organisations report 20%5 faster time to value with Dell Validated Designs for AI, helping data scientists of all skill levels develop AI-powered applications faster. VMware Tanzu in Dell Validated Designs for AI provides greater container security and allows customers to run AI at the edge using VMware Tanzu services.