Organizations such as the Translational Genomics Research Institute (TGen), a leading biomedical research institute, are on the forefront of enabling a new generation of life-saving treatments. To help achieve its goal to successfully use genomics to prevent, diagnose and treat disease, the Phoenix-based non-profit research institute selected a Dell EMC Ready Solution that helped reduce the data analysis time from 7 days to 4 hours!

We are truly at the intersection of technology and human progress! And the Dell EMC Ready Solutions team is dedicated to working with our customers to make a measurable business impact.

High-performance computing (HPC), data analytics, software-defined infrastructure, business applications and hybrid cloud platforms– these are the technologies that are shaping the digital economy. Many organizations are actively looking to transform IT to gain a greater ability to capitalize on these trends and accelerate business outcomes.

At Dell EMC, we understand that some of our customers may prefer converged or hyper-converged systems, while others may prefer to build infrastructure that meets their specific needs. This is why we are ready with a portfolio of solutions across Ready Nodes, Ready Bundles, Ready Systems and Hybrid Cloud Platforms.

Turn-key Hybrid Cloud Platforms

Some of our largest customers have shown they want turn-key comprehensive hybrid cloud platforms with one-contact support, full life-cycle management to reduce customers’ operational risk and a roadmap of features that extend the value of the platform. These customers choose Enterprise Hybrid Cloud (EHC) and Native Hybrid Cloud (NHC).

EHC will be available globally on Dell EMC VxRack SDDC VMware Cloud Foundation, giving customers a turn-key hybrid cloud experience on proven HCI with VMware’s software-defined data center stack. With functionalities such as more public cloud options by adding Microsoft Azure as an end-point, offers our customers greater flexibility to choose among public clouds.

NHC built on VxRack SDDC is available today via an early access program. Dell EMC Native Hybrid Cloud offers developer-ready infrastructure for Pivotal Cloud Foundry, the world’s most powerful application developer platform for legacy and cloud-native apps. New NHC capabilities include new developer tools and highly available deployments on VxRail, delivering multi-site, multi-foundation and multi-availability zone configurations to support global-scale deployments.

New Cloud Ready Systems

For those looking to take more ownership of customizations and lifecycle management to meet their unique business requirements, we announced  new VMware Ready Systems. These new Ready Systems will be based on hyper-converged infrastructure (HCI) in configurations tested and validated for specific Cloud use cases or workloads.

VMware Ready System from Dell EMC combines VMware Cloud Foundation and vRealize Suite with pre-configured and tested configurations of VxRack SDDC and VxRail. Optional fixed price services will be offered for those customers who prefer to have Dell EMC handle the initial deployment.  Designed for customers and deployments of any size, they will enable IT to optimize the cloud platform to meet unique business requirements while starting with a proven foundation of hyper-converged infrastructure and the latest VMware technology.

Extending this further, we also plan to bring to market Ready Systems on VxRack SDDC to support the new Pivotal Container Service™ when they’re available. This will enable enterprises and service providers to deliver production-ready Kubernetes and will be integrated with Pivotal Cloud Foundry^® (PCF) and VMware’s software-defined data center (SDDC) infrastructure.

Likewise, for customers who want to build and manage the lifecycle of their own HCI stacks, Dell EMC vSAN Ready Nodes are now available with the latest award-winning Dell EMC 14^th Generation PowerEdge servers and VMware vSAN 6.6. Dell EMC vSAN Ready Nodes deliver the capital economic benefits of HCI for organizations that prefer to take on more operational aspects.

We’re excited to extend our Hybrid Cloud & Ready Solutions portfolio with an eye towards accelerating our customers’ business results – aimed at helping them win. At the races, drivers come in to the pit for tire-changes, fuel, and adjusting the mirrors. And a really good team can accomplish all that in a matter of seconds. We are looking forward to accelerating the adoption of Ready Solutions and delighting our customers as ONE efficient F1 like team! Let all get Ready together to accelerate digital transformation!

Ransomware can be a nightmare, but it doesn’t have to be.

Last May, some 200,000 PC owners worldwide suffered a costly wake-up call from the aptly named WannaCry cryptoworm that encrypted their data. The attackers demanded $300 in bitcoin payments to unlock the data. Hospitals, universities, automakers and logistics firms were among those reported hit, but the worst affected were small and medium-size businesses.

Why those businesses? Because their data wasn’t sufficiently protected with complete backups like larger enterprises. And that’s the whole reason ransomware works: Victims can’t afford to lose their data, so they pay up, even if payment is no guarantee they’ll get their data back.

With WannaCry, hundreds paid the ransom but got nothing in return. And if Dell EMC’s 2016 Global Data Protection Index is any indication, ransomware can still find lots of targets: 90 percent of the survey’s respondents are behind the curve in the maturity of their data protection strategies.

Dell EMC aims to help them change that with practical, cost-effective and greatly simplified data protection (DP) that works 24×7 across all kinds of data workloads, no matter where they reside — on-premise, in the cloud or some hybrid of the two.

Growing Needs for Comprehensive Data Protection

Organizations of all sizes need DP. While malware and anti-virus safeguards are necessary to safeguard data from threat actors, they are not sufficient to guard against phishing attacks, which are how ransomware and advanced persistent threats can circumvent defense-in-depth strategies. Also, organizations need DP’s backup and recovery capabilities to provide business continuity in the case of system failures or disasters.

So why do the DP strategies and practices of so many organizations fall short? Here are some important reasons:

• Data growth: Keeping up with the growth of both structured and unstructured data from various sources is one of IT’s biggest challenges affecting DP practices.
• Complexity: Managing DP for complex IT environments — especially diverse platforms and applications — can be complicated, often requiring time-consuming management of many legacy point solutions already in place.
• Inconsistency: Inconsistent backup processes can arise from trying to protect applications and data in varied places — from on-premises infrastructures to virtualized environments to private, public and hybrid clouds.
• Cloud migrations: More and more enterprises are migrating workloads to the cloud, but they lack the tools to protect their data residing there, or they mistakenly believe their cloud provider will provide that protection.
• Copy data sprawl: By some estimates, 60 percent of all data storage is a copy of some kind, whether for disaster recovery, development and testing, or application maintenance — just to name a few. And a typical database environment can have 5–12 copies for each production instance.

As a result, IT groups, especially their DP specialists, can have trouble meeting backup windows and SLAs governing goals for recovery point objective (RPO) and recovery time objective (RTO). Regulatory compliance and audits can be issues, too.

Dell EMC Streamlines the Data Protection Process

To simplify and streamline the DP process, Dell EMC has introduced its updated Data Protection Software Enterprise Edition. This set of 11 powerful DP tools covers the entire DP continuum of availability, replication, snapshots, backup and archiving.

For more specific use cases — such as heavily virtualized environments, mission-critical apps and archive-only solutions — specific tool sets are available in four packages: Data Protection Software for Backup; Data Protection Software for VMware; Data Protection Software for Applications; and Data Protection Software for Archive.

Data Protection Software Enterprise Edition can protect everything from user laptops to the largest data centers. It enables long-term retention of data to private, public or hybrid clouds, too. With deduplication rates of up to 99 percent plus a tight integration with Dell EMC Data Domain infrastructure, the Dell EMC Data Protection software can help lower DP’s overall TCO dramatically by reducing:

• Storage capacity requirements for backups by up to 97 percent
• Network traffic by up to 99 percent
• Backup times by 50 percent

What’s more, the Dell EMC Data Protection Software Enterprise Edition delivers a consistent user experience for DP administrators across all its different tools to minimize learning and maximize productivity. At the same time, organizations can gain global data protection and copy oversight without compromising self-service workflows of their lines of business.

Dell EMC Data Domain Solutions Enhance the DP Benefits

Dell EMC also offers a broad portfolio of Data Domain storage infrastructure solutions for enterprises of all sizes. This includes the recently introduced all-in-one Integrated Data Protection Appliance and the software-defined Data Domain Virtual Edition.

The different Data Domain solutions can scale up to 150 PB of logical capacity managed by a single system. They can also achieve backup speeds of up to 68 TB/hour, making it possible to complete more backups in less time and provide faster, more reliable restores.

Check out Gartner’s 2017 Magic Quadrant for Data Center Backup and Recovery Solutions and see Dell EMC’s leading position among all DP offerings. Then get more information on the full line of Dell EMC Data Protection software and Data Domain options, to discover which DP solution can meet your organization’s requirements.

With the recent launch of our new generation of PowerEdge servers, we’ve provided customers with a bedrock on which to build their modern data center. These are also the first generation of servers created in the merger or Dell, EMC, and VMware, realizing the true potential of customer-focused design.

One of the biggest customer challenges is the need to adapt and grow their infrastructure as their workloads change. They also need smarter management and automation tools to help keep the process simple as their data center gets more complex.

OpenManage Integration for VMware vCenter (OMIVV) addresses this need by bringing simplified management of the entire server infrastructure — physical and virtual — into the vCenter console.

By providing unique cluster-level hardware views directly within vCenter, the OMIVV plug-in simplifies the process for scaling and applying updates to multiple Dell EMC hosts in a single workflow.

OMIVV includes these essential capabilities:

• Monitoring and alerting: Get extensive details for inventory, monitoring and alerting, and recommended vCenter actions based on Dell EMC hardware alerts
• Deployment and provisioning: Perform “Zero-Touch” bare-metal hypervisor deployment without PXE — leveraging iDRAC with Lifecycle Controller
• Firmware updates: Deploy server BIOS and firmware updates from vCenter
• Hardware management: Access and renew all hardware warranties online via the OMIVV console

An optional OpenManage vROps Management Pack is included with the licensing of OpenManage Integration for VMware vCenter. This management pack brings hardware objects, health and alerts into vRealize as objects and dashboards. It includes these great features:

• Monitoring and alerting: Adds hardware health metrics, performance data, and events from managed PowerEdge servers / chassis into vROps
• High-level reporting: Provides detailed reports and views of server and chassis information across the OMIVV v4.1 managed environment
• Hardware contextual mapping: Maps physical relationships with vROps objects for simplified troubleshooting

OpenManage Integration for VMware vCenter and PowerEdge servers are essential elements of the modern data center. Plus, our intelligent management tools not only allow your infrastructure to thrive, they keep things simple and secure as you scale.

Dell EMC also delivers OpenManage Power Center – the first server management solution in the industry to provide virtual (VM) specific power mapping. It enables you to determine the best placement of workloads and VMs based on power consumption within the servers and VMs themselves. Also, OMPC 4.0 enables proportional power consumption for chargeback, down to the individual VM. This means owners of applications are only charged for what they are actually using.

Dell EMC’s OpenManage systems management portfolio delivers practical innovation focused on simplifying and automating the entire IT lifecycle. For more information on the full portfolio, visit dell.com/en-us/work/learn/enterprise-systems-management.

Earlier this year, Wikibon proposed a theory that “the optimum hybrid cloud strategy” is based on an integrated hyper-converged infrastructure (HCI) as opposed to the traditional enterprise architecture built on separate servers and separate traditional SAN.

To test and validate their premise, Wikibon experts performed a three year comparison of a traditional white box / storage array vs. a hyper-converged system. The hyper-converged system they selected was Dell EMC’s VxRack FLEX, which is based on ScaleIO software-defined storage. Through their research, they were able to analyze and compare costs across these four main categories: initial investment, time-to-value, cost over time and ease of use.

While you can read all the details on the approach and methodology for comparing these two instances in the full report here, I’d rather jump right into the juicy stuff: the results!

Initial Investment

The initial investment for a traditional SAN solution was $734K versus $405K for a hyper-converged system. To give you the full picture, there are several reasons why HCI solutions are less expensive to purchase up front. Not only are the equipment costs lower (storage arrays are replaced with DAS and specialized Fibre Channel networking and HBAs are no longer required), but most customers only buy what they need for the short term rather than over purchasing infrastructure to support unknown future requirements, which is common when the infrastructure is intended to last for multiple years. That’s the power of HCI – it enables you to start small and grow incrementally as your demand for resources increase. But the savings and cost discrepancies didn’t stop there.

Time-to-Value

Practitioners who took part in deploying the solutions onsite found that it took 33 days to configure, install and test the traditional white box/storage array as opposed to the hyper-converged infrastructure which took a mere 6 days. The time-to-value for hyper-converged was then calculated to be 6x faster. This is one of the key benefits of an engineered system. IT no longer bears the burden of architecting the solution, procuring separate hardware and software from multiple sources, and installing and testing the configuration before migrating workloads to production. Instead, the system is delivered pre-integrated, pre-validated and ready for deployment.

Cost Over Time

In addition to the upfront costs, the three year comparison then showed maintenance and operational expenses increasing the total cost for a traditional storage array to $1.3 million while maintenance and operations costs for hyper-converged came out to a total of $865K over three years. The main driver behind the savings is that HCI solutions greatly simplify IT operations in a number of ways: HCI provides a more efficient environment for those responsible for managing and provisioning storage; the ease of provisioning storage enables application developers to do more; and automation, streamlined provisioning, and higher reliability saves IT staff time on activities such as data migrations and capacity planning. There are also substantial savings from lower operating expenses such as power, cooling, and data center space. Other staggering numbers from the study included the following:

• Traditional solutions are 47% more expensive than a hyper-converged solution
• Storage costs for the traditional approach are 100% higher
• Overall, a hyper-converged solution is $400K less expensive

Ease of Use 

In this last category, all practitioners interviewed, except one, agreed that the hyper-converged solution was easy to upgrade (more so than the traditional architecture), easy to manage and that it performed well. This makes sense given that HCI is typically managed from a central console that controls both compute and storage and automates many traditional manual functions, helping to reduce the number of tools that have to be learned and used. HCI systems also have full lifecycle management – meaning they are fully tested, maintained, and supported as one system over the entire lifespan. As a result of these efficiencies, people costs for HCI are much lower than the traditional approach. In fact, over a three year time span, people costs are 600% higher for traditional SANs.

So, when looking at the TCO breakdown, it looks like hyper-converged is the way to go over a traditional storage approach. HCI offers lower equipment and operational costs, lower latency and faster bandwidth infrastructure, as well as a “single hand to shake and a single throat to choke” for vendor support and service needs.

Dell EMC’s VxRack FLEX is a fully tested, pre-configured, hyper-converged system that meets all of these criteria while offering extreme scalability (start small and grow to 1,000+ nodes). It truly provides a turnkey experience that enables you to deploy faster, improve agility and simplify IT. You can download the report here to read about all the findings from the research or you can skip right on over to the Dell EMC VxRack website to start exploring your options.

What motivates you to get up every day? For me, the answer is pretty simple, I’m inspired by the work of our customers and partners. I’m talking innovative solutions that have the power to radically transform lives and improve business productivity – whether it’s an MRI machine in a hospital, a way for farmers to measure and improve crop growth, a smart building that is responsive to occupant needs or an industrial-strength PC helping to run a factory line more smoothly. At the end of the day, it’s all about technology simplifying things, improving lives and making business more efficient.

In fact, the whole focus of the Dell EMC OEM division is to help our customers and partners bring their innovative solutions to market as quickly as possible. That’s precisely why Dell EMC OEM is the first (and only) tier-one technology vendor to offer VMware Embedded.

VMware Embedded – a Way to Expand Into the Virtual Space

VMware Embedded is a pre-configured, turnkey virtualization solution that offers a new way for OEMs to increase revenue and expand into the virtual space. In a nutshell, this offering, with a resellable licensing model, enables OEMs to sell more products, more efficiently. Additionally, customers have the option to purchase VMware Embedded with Dell EMC hardware, such as PowerEdge servers, or as a standalone product to streamline their supply chain.

Why Virtualization Matters

We have all seen the trend of businesses tapping into virtualization to gain longer solution life cycles, take advantage of cloud agility, reduce downtime and improve security. As a result, virtualization has become a key priority for a majority of enterprise solutions, built by OEMs and ISVs.

Now with VMware Embedded, customers have the option to run it as a virtual appliance, install on a physical appliance or use in Dell EMC OEM’s datacenter as a managed service offering. This maximizes efficiency and lifecycle across the OEM’s solution, ultimately benefiting the end customer.

Why VMware Is Great for OEMs

As an OEM, you can deliver VMware updates as a value-add service – and at a release cadence that matches your timelines – while serving as the single point of contact for support. To help decrease costs of goods sold and speed time-to-revenue, Dell EMC OEM will work with you to validate designs, align go-to-market strategies and create roadmaps. OEMs can also choose from a wide range of licensing and pricing models, including OEM sublicensing and global distribution rights, without multiple contracts.

For me, this is the main benefit of VMware Embedded – it enables our OEMs to provide quality support of VMware across all deployment models, offering advantages to customers in multiple markets, including manufacturing, video surveillance, communications, gaming, financial services, energy, healthcare, storage and networking.

But don’t take my word for it – this is what Darren Waldrep, vice president of strategic alliances at Datatrend, a Dell EMC OEM Preferred Partner, had to say. “Dell EMC and VMware’s embedded offering is a competitively priced solution that we are excited to offer our customers. VMware Embedded creates a much easier route to market for Dell EMC OEM partners and integrators, like ourselves.” Waldrep specifically highlighted Dell EMC’s and VMware’s “best of breed technologies” and our commitment to truly enabling the channel to deliver best pricing and experience for the end customer.

As we move deeper into the era of digital transformation, the need for speed will be imperative – no matter the industry. Understanding the unique needs of our customers and helping them to adapt to the constantly changing market is what will allow you as an OEM to thrive.

Check out the datasheet or visit Dell EMC OEM in the Dell EMC booth #400 at VMworld, Aug. 27-31 in Las Vegas. We hope to see you there!

It’s almost time for VMworld 2017. Less than a year ago Dell, EMC and VMware all combined to form the largest privately held technology company in the world. Recently, Dell EMC launched the 14^th generation of PowerEdge servers, or the FIRST generation of Dell EMC PowerEdge servers.

The shared vision of Dell EMC and VMware is realized in PowerEdge servers; what we call the bedrock of the modern data center. Whether it’s traditional applications and architectures, Hyper-Converged or Cloud, PowerEdge is the singular platform that forms your entire data center foundation.

At VMworld 2017 we’ll be showcasing our full PowerEdge portfolio and you’ll see how PowerEdge is at the heart of data center infrastructure.

There are a number of exciting sessions highlighting the integration of Dell EMC and VMware.

State of the Union: Everything Multi-Cloud, Converged, Hyper-Converged and More!

You have questions? Chad Sakac has answers! The technology landscape is continuously evolving, making it a challenge for IT leaders to keep up. Chad will relate Dell Technologies’ perspective on multi-cloud, converged and hyper-converged, data analytics, and more. (Session: UEM3332PUS)

Deliver Real Business Results through IT Modernization

As businesses embark on new digital transformation initiatives, we’re seeing them simultaneously transform their core IT infrastructure. You will learn how Dell EMC and VMware together are driving advancements in converged systems, servers, storage, networking and data protection to help you realize greater operational efficiencies, accelerate innovation and deliver better business results. (Session: STO3333BUS)

Modern Data Center Transformation: Dell EMC IT Case Study

In this session, learn how Dell EMC IT is leveraging VxRail/Rack, ScaleIO and more to modernize its infrastructure with flash storage, converged and hyper-converged systems and software defined infrastructure, where all components are delivered through software. (Session: PBO1964BU)

Workforce Transformation: Balancing tomorrow’s Trends with Today’s Needs

The way we work today is changing dramatically, and organizations that empower their employees with the latest technologies gain a strategic advantage. In this session, you will learn how to modernize your workforce with innovative new devices and disruptive technologies designed to align with the new ways that people want to work and be productive. (Session: UEM3332PUS)

Modernizing IT with Server-Centric Architecture Powered by VMware vSAN and VxRail Hyper-Converged Infrastructure Appliance

With server-centric IT, data centers can offer consumable services that match the public cloud yet offer better security, cost efficiency, and performance. This session will discuss the benefits of x86-based server-centric IT and the convergence of technologies and industry trends that now enable it. The session will also explain how customers can realize server-centric IT with VMware vSAN and the Dell EMC VxRail appliance family, along with detailed analysis demonstrating these claims. (Session: STO1742BU)

The Software-Defined Storage Revolution Is Here: Discover Your Options

During the past decade, web-scale companies have shown how to operate data centers with ruthless efficiency by utilizing software-defined storage (SDS). Now, enterprises and service providers are joining the SDS revolution to achieve radical reductions in storage lifecycle costs (TCO). Learn how Dell Technologies’ SDS portfolio is revolutionizing the data center as we highlight customer success stories of VMware vSAN and Dell EMC ScaleIO. (Session: STO1216BU)

Come spend some time with Dell EMC experts to see how we can work together to help you achieve your business and IT initiatives. And be sure to follow us at @DellEMCServers for daily updates, on-site videos, and more.

I’m on the road quite a bit and get the opportunity to engage many customers on a range of topics and problems.  These discussions provide direct feedback that helps the Server team focus on customer- oriented problems and potential challenges vs. creating technology looking for a home. In earlier blogs, I mentioned how the performance CAGR was not keeping up at the same time we had new emerging problems.

Previously, we believed the impact of Moore’s Law on FPGA’s (Field Programmable Gate Arrays) would be more profound than ever – prior it seemed FPGAs were never quite big enough, couldn’t run fast enough and were difficult to program.  Technology moves quickly and those attributes of FPGAs have changed lot – they are certainly big enough now, clock rates are up, you can even get an embedded ARM core, and lastly the programming has improved a lot.  OpenCL has made it easier and more portable – NOTE: I said easier NOT easy – but the results for the right problem makes it worthwhile.

Let me do some context setting on where FPGAs work best – this is not an absolute but rather some high-level guidance.  If we take a step back, it’s clear that we’ve been operating in a world of Compute Intensive problems – meaning, problems and data that you can move to the compute because you are going to crunch on it for a result.  Generally, this has been a lot of structured data, convergence algorithms and complex math, and general purpose x86 has been awesome at these problems. Also, sometimes we throw GPUs at the problem – especially in life science problems.

But, there is a law of opposites. The opposite of Compute Intensive is Data Intensive.  Data Intensive is simple data that is unstructured and only used for simple operations.  In this case, we want the compute and simple operators to move as close to the data as possible.  For example, if you’re trying to count the number of blue balls in a bucket that’s a pretty simple operation that’s data intensive – you’re not trying to compute the next digit of π.  Computing the average size of each ball in the bucket would be more compute intensive.

The law of opposites for general purpose compute is optimized compute…that one is easy.  So, the X-Y coordinate 4 world approximately looks like below showing where various technologies best fit.

But why are CPUs not great for everything, and why are we talking about FPGAs today?  Well, CPUs are very memory-cache hierarchical centric to get data in and out from DRAM to Cache to registers for the CPU to do an operation – as it takes just as much data movement to do complex math as simple math with a general purpose CPU.  In this new world of big unstructured data that memory-cache hierarchy can get in the way.

If you think about the link list pointer chasing problem shown to the left here– in a general purpose CPU when you need to traverse the link list every time you do a head/tail pointer fetch due to the data’s unstructured nature you get a cache miss, and thus, the CPU does a cache line fill –  generally 8 datum’s.  But only the head/tail pointer was needed, which means 7/8^th’s of the memory bus bandwidth was wasted on unnecessary accesses – potentially blocking another CPU core from getting datum it needed. Therein lies a big problem for general purpose CPUs in some of these new problems face today.

Now, let’s focus on some real world examples:

As mentioned earlier, programming is now simpler (simpler – NOT easy).  Open Computing Language (OpenCL) is a framework in C++ for writing programs that execute across heterogeneous platforms consisting of CPUs, GPUs, DSPs, and FPGAs.   OpenCL provides a standard interface for parallel computing using task- and data-based parallelism.  A quick example and flow is shown below.

Now, I’ll walk you thru two examples that we’ve worked on in the Server Solutions Group to prove out FPGA technology and make sure our server platforms intercept the technology when it’s ready.

Problem #1:  “Drowning in pictures, save me…..”

Say you’re a picture gallery site, social media, etc… who want end users to upload full size images from their mega pixel smart phones, so that they can enjoy them on a wide range of devices/screen sizes – how do you solve this problem?  The typical approach is using scale out compute and resize as needed for the end device. However, as shown above, it’s not a great fit for general purpose compute, as it scales at a higher cost and you must manage scale out.  Other options are batching processes and saving static images of all the sizes you needed – so it becomes a blowout storage problem.  Or, force the end user device to resize, but you must send down the entire image – blowing out your network and delivering a poor customer experience.

To avoid any of the above options, we decided to do a real time offload resizing on the FPGA.  For large images, we saw around a 70x speedup and about 20x speedup on small images.  We replaced 20-70 servers into 1 and saved power, cost, and increased performance – easy TCO. So, now the CPU is handling the request for resized images and delivery but using an FPGA to process the images.  Below is high level pictorial.

Problem #2: “I have all these images, and I’d like to sort them by feature”

Digital content is everywhere, and we’re moving from text search to image search. Edge detection is an image processing technique for finding the boundaries of objects within images. It works by detecting discontinuities in brightness. Edge detection is also used for image segmentation and data extraction in areas such as image processing, computer vision, and machine vision.  In this example, we simply wanted to see what we could accomplish on a CPU and FPGA.  We started on the CPU with OpenCL and quickly discovered that the performance was not up to par…. less than 1FPS (frames per second).  The compiler was struggling so we manually unrolled the code to swamp every core (all 32 of them) and got up to 110FPS.  But at 85% CPU load across 32 cores you could barely move the mouse.

The next step was the same OpenCL code (different #defines) and targeted an FPGA.  With the FPGA and parallel nature of the problem we could hit 108FPS. In the FPGA offload case the CPU was ONLY 1% loaded, so we had a server with compute cycles left to do something useful.  To experiment, we went back to the CPU and forced a 1% CPU load limit and found we could not even get 1FPS.   Point being that in this new world of different compute architectures and emerging problems “it depends” will come up a lot.  Below is the data showing the various results I described.

Future Problems

In the future, emerging workloads and use cases (below) will continue to drive the need for new and different compute.  Every company will become a data compute company and must optimize for these new uses. If not, they are open to disruption by those who embrace change more aggressively.  FPGAs can be a part of this journey when applied to the right problem. Machine learning inference is a great example, along with network protocol acceleration/inspection, image processing as shown, and others can benefit from the reprogrammable nature of FPGAs.

Summary

So, FPGAs can be really useful and can help solve real-world problems.  Ultimately, we are heading down a path of more heterogeneous computing where you will hear “it depends” more than you’ll might like.  But, as my Dad says, “use the right tool for the right job.”  If you have questions about how to use FPGAs in your solutions contact your Dell EMC account rep.  Maybe we can help you to.

(The data in this BLOG was made possible by the awesome FPGA team in the Server Solutions Group CTO Office – Duk Kim, Nelson, Mak, Krishna Ramaswamy)

The data center is evolving at a rapid pace. As architectures adapt and grow in complexity to take advantage of new applications and technologies, new challenges always creep in.

“How do I adapt to unknown demands?”

“How do I manage all of this complexity?”

“Will my storage performance keep up?”

A natural progression towards a more server-centric architecture, along with the increasing adoption of Hyper-Converged Infrastructure (HCI) is addressing these core challenges. To further drive this adoption, Dell EMC has designed HCI-focused tools that integrate into your existing data center and keep it moving forward.

Our HCI architectures easily scale with the addition of nodes, while compute and storage virtualization offers more resiliency in case of a failure. For management simplicity, the OpenManage vCenter plug-in integrates server management into your vCenter console.

The rise of flash significantly changes storage performance. I/O challenges are no longer solved with an increase in the number of spindles. Now you solve it with flash. For example, a traditional HDD provides 400 4K IOPS, a PCIe NVMe SSD provides 750,000 4K IOPS.

With the launch of the new generation of PowerEdge servers and vSAN Ready Nodes, Dell EMC and VMware combine to create a scalable infrastructure that delivers intelligent automation and a secure foundation with no compromises.

With VMware vSAN you get the industry-leading software powering HCI solutions and with Dell EMC PowerEdge you get the world’s best-selling server. This combination of VMware vSAN with PowerEdge, provides up to 12X more IOPS in a vSAN cluster and 98% less latency, as well as a fully integrated management solution with vSAN Ready Nodes.

vSAN Ready Nodes from Dell EMC are pre-configured and easily orderable through templates optimized by profiles and use cases. A new factory installation process utilizes the Boot Optimized Storage System (BOSS) cards, installing the hypervisor on a robust bootable device without having to sacrifice drives from your vSAN storage capacity.

The Dell EMC vSAN Ready Nodes are pre-configured and validated building blocks that offer the most flexibility while reducing deployment risks, improving storage efficiency, and allowing you to scale at the speed your business desires.

By choosing a Dell EMC PowerEdge vSAN Ready Node with OEM licensing, and our latest vSAN Pro Deployment services, you get a single point of contact for sales and support for the entire solution.

For more information on Dell EMC vSAN Ready Nodes, visit: dell.com/en-us/work/shop/povw/virtual-san-ready-nodes

There is a wave of change sweeping across IT infrastructure. With the shift to cloud and SDDC, data protection must transform.

The journey to transformation begins with modernizing the current environment, which focuses on delivering IT with fewer people, less time, and less money.  The key is simplification.

Things really begin to change when backup stops being a separate product, managed by a separate team, run in its own silo. Instead, data protection becomes a feature- an integrated part of the environment. In this new world, applications are deployed already protected. Backups and recoveries should be faster, streamlined, with minimal hardware footprint and a lower impact on the production environment.

What does a transformed environment look like?  Data Protection becomes automatic.

The goal here is to speed up backups and recoveries, reduce duplication of costly backup tasks and empower application and database owners who are directly responsible for the data with self-service for data protection with guardrails. And, accomplish this within IT control with central visibility and oversight of backups by IT Administrators, while also solving the difficult data protection problem of large, virtualized, high-rate change mission critical apps.

Express Data Path to Protect Virtualized Mission-Critical Applications

With the increasing prevalence of very large (15 TB+) fast-changing, virtualized mission-critical databases, traditional data protection approaches struggle to keep up.  Application and data owners require speed and control to meet stringent Service Level Objectives (SLOs) for mission critical applications. By decoupling backup software from the data path, administrators can backup directly to protection storage, gaining up to 5x faster backup compared to traditional backup solutions.

With the updated Dell EMC Data Protection Suite for Applications, application owners are empowered to use native application interfaces to perform backups from the VMware hypervisor directly to Dell EMC Data Domain.  Additionally, admins gain discovery, automation and provisioning for the entire data center from storage, applications and VMs.  Impact on application servers during backup windows is significantly reduced, as little or no data flows through the application server.

Empower Administrators With Self-Service and Automation With IT Governance and Control

Modern data protection designed for self-service requires intelligent, consolidated oversight of data and service levels across the business to ensure protection SLO compliance is met.  Data Protection Suite for Applications provides self-service data protection capabilities with global oversight to maximize efficiency, streamline operations and ensure consistent service level compliance.  With the ability to discover physical and virtual SQL and Oracle databases, as well as VMware copies, administrators receive faster time to value via automated VM discovery and provisioning, as well as the elimination of duplicate work streams and the creation of unnecessary silos of storage by sending data directly to Data Domain.

Data Protection Suite for Applications non-disruptively discovers copies across the enterprise and automates protection SLO compliance.  Existing data copies are non-disruptively discovered to gain consolidated oversight of what already exists in the environment.  This also allows admins to maintain self-service by enabling storage administrators and DBAs to continue creating copies from their native interfaces instead of inserting a solution into the data path, and fully within the governance, SLOs and oversight of their IT data protection regime.

Empowering application owners with the ability use native tools within their applications provides the control they desire, including the ability to set, monitor and enforce SLOs.  And, by enabling cooperation and coordination between protection administrators and data owners, administrative overhead is reduced.

Summary

Architected for the modern and software driven data center, Dell EMC data protection provides automation across the entire data protection stack, delivers simpler scalability and faster performance, and protection for a broader scope of VMware workloads, including workloads in the cloud and mission-critical I/O intensive applications.

It’s Day One of VMworld and Dell EMC is excited to discuss our powerful data protection solutions for VMware environments.  VMware has been a driving force behind the transition to the modern, increasingly software-defined data center (SDDC) and the movement to the cloud. Dell EMC ensures businesses are able to protect their data throughout this transition by enabling simplified management, easier scalability, multi-faceted support for the cloud, and comprehensive protection for a wide gamut of virtualized workloads, including mission-critical, IO intensive applications and databases. This is accomplished through our native vSphere integration and software defined architecture, which enables extensive automation and high performance.

Protecting VM workloads is complex and presents challenges that are not easily met by data protection solutions built for legacy SAN based architectures. These challenges include: VM sprawl as a result of the growth of virtualization and the ease of spinning up new VMs, increasingly stringent protection requirements due to government regulations and more critical applications moving to VMware, and shrinking backup windows.

Other data protection solutions are not architected for the SDDC and cannot adequately deal with these challenges. They cannot scale efficiently as the number of VMs goes ups, can only protect a subset of applications, have inflexible networking requirements leading to complex and costly architectures, and offer limited automation resulting in increased operational costs.

Dell EMC Data Protection simplifies the difficult process of protecting data in fast growing VMware environments. Our solutions provide a more modern and simpler to manage and scale software defined architecture for VMware protection with:

• Automation across the entire VMware protection stack (VM backup policy, data movers/proxies and backup storage) with simpler scaling to more VMs without media server sprawl – Less than 5 minutes to deploy and configure a virtual proxy
• Best in class performance and data efficiency with less capacity and bandwidth required – 72x deduplication rate and 98% reduction in network usage
• Transformational management functionality that is designed to enable self-service to vAdmins, including native integration with vSphere UI and vRA, with oversight by backup/infrastructure admins.

Dell EMC Data Protection also provides comprehensive protection for your VMware environment today and tomorrow. Our solutions provide protection for virtualized mission critical IO intensive applications, support for all phases of your journey to the cloud, and are optimized for converged infrastructures:

• Hypervisor direct backup and restore for IO intensive applications and databases for superior performance – 5x faster backups (New)
  • SLO driven protection built to enable self-service with consolidated oversight and automation
• Support for all phases of cloud:
  • Long term retention to the cloud
  • Disaster recovery in the cloud (AWS)
  • Protect workloads in the cloud, including VMware Cloud workloads on AWS (New)
• Optimized data protection for Dell EMC VxRail Appliance (hyper converged architecture) and pre-configured, easy to deploy, comprehensive data protection with the Integrated Data Protection Appliance

Combine all this with our flexible consumption model that lets business pay for their data protection in a way that makes the most financial sense and our customers can rest assured that their VMware environment is protected with a low TCO solution (Protection Storage, Protection Software, as well as an Integrated Appliance) that is ideal for today and designed to help them modernize and transform to a software defined data center.

Ransomware can be a nightmare, but it doesn’t have to be.

Last May, some 200,000 PC owners worldwide suffered a costly wake-up call from the aptly named WannaCry cryptoworm that encrypted their data. The attackers demanded $300 in bitcoin payments to unlock the data. Hospitals, universities, automakers and logistics firms were among those reported hit, but the worst affected were small and medium-size businesses.

Why those businesses? Because their data wasn’t sufficiently protected with complete backups like larger enterprises. And that’s the whole reason ransomware works: Victims can’t afford to lose their data, so they pay up, even if payment is no guarantee they’ll get their data back.

With WannaCry, hundreds paid the ransom but got nothing in return. And if Dell EMC’s 2016 Global Data Protection Index is any indication, ransomware can still find lots of targets: 90 percent of the survey’s respondents are behind the curve in the maturity of their data protection strategies.

Dell EMC aims to help them change that with practical, cost-effective and greatly simplified data protection (DP) that works 24×7 across all kinds of data workloads, no matter where they reside — on-premise, in the cloud or some hybrid of the two.

Growing Needs for Comprehensive Data Protection

Organizations of all sizes need DP. While malware and anti-virus safeguards are necessary to safeguard data from threat actors, they are not sufficient to guard against phishing attacks, which are how ransomware and advanced persistent threats can circumvent defense-in-depth strategies. Also, organizations need DP’s backup and recovery capabilities to provide business continuity in the case of system failures or disasters.

So why do the DP strategies and practices of so many organizations fall short? Here are some important reasons:

• Data growth: Keeping up with the growth of both structured and unstructured data from various sources is one of IT’s biggest challenges affecting DP practices.
• Complexity: Managing DP for complex IT environments — especially diverse platforms and applications — can be complicated, often requiring time-consuming management of many legacy point solutions already in place.
• Inconsistency: Inconsistent backup processes can arise from trying to protect applications and data in varied places — from on-premises infrastructures to virtualized environments to private, public and hybrid clouds.
• Cloud migrations: More and more enterprises are migrating workloads to the cloud, but they lack the tools to protect their data residing there, or they mistakenly believe their cloud provider will provide that protection.
• Copy data sprawl: By some estimates, 60 percent of all data storage is a copy of some kind, whether for disaster recovery, development and testing, or application maintenance — just to name a few. And a typical database environment can have 5–12 copies for each production instance.

As a result, IT groups, especially their DP specialists, can have trouble meeting backup windows and SLAs governing goals for recovery point objective (RPO) and recovery time objective (RTO). Regulatory compliance and audits can be issues, too.

Dell EMC Streamlines the Data Protection Process

To simplify and streamline the DP process, Dell EMC has introduced its updated Data Protection Software Enterprise Edition. This set of 11 powerful DP tools covers the entire DP continuum of availability, replication, snapshots, backup and archiving.

For more specific use cases — such as heavily virtualized environments, mission-critical apps and archive-only solutions — specific tool sets are available in four packages: Data Protection Software for Backup; Data Protection Software for VMware; Data Protection Software for Applications; and Data Protection Software for Archive.

Data Protection Software Enterprise Edition can protect everything from user laptops to the largest data centers. It enables long-term retention of data to private, public or hybrid clouds, too. With deduplication rates of up to 99 percent plus a tight integration with Dell EMC Data Domain infrastructure, the Dell EMC Data Protection software can help lower DP’s overall TCO dramatically by reducing:

• Storage capacity requirements for backups by up to 97 percent
• Network traffic by up to 99 percent
• Backup times by 50 percent

What’s more, the Dell EMC Data Protection Software Enterprise Edition delivers a consistent user experience for DP administrators across all its different tools to minimize learning and maximize productivity. At the same time, organizations can gain global data protection and copy oversight without compromising self-service workflows of their lines of business.

Dell EMC Data Domain Solutions Enhance the DP Benefits

Dell EMC also offers a broad portfolio of Data Domain storage infrastructure solutions for enterprises of all sizes. This includes the recently introduced all-in-one Integrated Data Protection Appliance and the software-defined Data Domain Virtual Edition.

The different Data Domain solutions can scale up to 150 PB of logical capacity managed by a single system. They can also achieve backup speeds of up to 68 TB/hour, making it possible to complete more backups in less time and provide faster, more reliable restores.

Check out Gartner’s 2017 Magic Quadrant for Data Center Backup and Recovery Solutions and see Dell EMC’s leading position among all DP offerings. Then get more information on the full line of Dell EMC Data Protection software and Data Domain options, to discover which DP solution can meet your organization’s requirements.