There’s never been a better time to adopt 25GbE, both from a technology and an economic perspective.

It’s no secret that broader technology shifts require substantially more network bandwidth. Just to name a few, these include:

• Virtualization in all its forms – server, storage, network, desktop
• Increasing use of and demand for video/streaming
• IoT requiring near real-time response rates across the network
• Numerous and varied cloud architectures
• New infrastructure options such as multi-core processing, NVMe, PCIe 3.0 and high speed flash storage need increased throughput

As organizations push more traffic into their enterprise and private data centers, and with bigger “pipes” coming into the enterprise, more bandwidth is also required as data moves down across the fabric or top-of-rack switches (ToR). The bulk of today’s data center top-of-rack (ToR) switches support 10GbE connections in the rack and connect to higher speed 40/100GbE fabrics. The next step in the evolution is for in-rack connectivity to move from 10GbE to 25GbE and for fabric uplinks to move from 40GbE to 100GbE.

The Economic Advantages of 25GbE at the Top-Of-Rack

The availability of 25GbE switches and adapters has changed the economics of upgrading server-to-switch connectivity. New 25GbE chips use the same class of cables as 10GbE but deliver 2.5 times the performance, while using the same number of lanes as 10GbE on the ASIC chip. That means 25GbE switches can be produced very cost-effectively.

Using a single lane on a switch or adapter, 25GbE ports also compare favorably to 40GbE technology that requires four lanes. Deploying 25GbE networks also enables organizations to significantly reduce the required number of switches and cables — along with space, power and cooling — compared to similar bandwidth solutions using 10GbE and 40GbE technology. Fewer network components reduce ongoing management and maintenance costs while more efficiently utilizing servers already in place.

Most important, with 25/50/100GbE multi-rate connectivity, enterprises now have a path to 100GbE that is non-disruptive, can be implemented today and provides economical steps along the way. Considering the economics, it is no surprise that the move to 25GbE (and 50GbE) is accelerating — a recent five-year forecast by industry analyst Dell’Oro Group predicts 25GbE will deliver a significant amount of Ethernet bandwidth by 2018.

Key customer benefits of 25GbE with Dell EMC Networking:

• Run your business applications and services faster with 5X the throughput with similar economics to 10GbE
• Future-proof your infrastructure with backwards compatibility to 10GbE and easier migration to 100GbE
• Realize economic advantages on both cost and revenue generation using an open networking architecture

• It runs on a pair of cables just like 10GbE, so moving to 25GbE does not require any cabling infrastructure upgrades—it is fully compatible with the existing 10GbE infrastructure.

In addition to implementing new technologies, many IT organizations are tasked with decreasing their CAPEX and OPEX expenditures and resources. IT departments are taking a hard look at making their data centers more efficient and simplifying operational and maintenance activities across the board. The push behind these mandated reductions vary from changing economic conditions to government requirements for green initiatives.

With the recent introduction of the Dell EMC Networking S5048F-ON, we are committed to making 25GbE networking widely accessible. So much so that for a limited time, we’re introducing 25GbE for the price of 10GbE. Now that’s networking math that anyone can understand.

“Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic” — Arthur C. Clarke

At this moment in history, we can watch movies on our phones and use our televisions to call our loved ones. Advanced computing is leading to more accurate medical diagnoses, breakthrough medical treatments and a better shopping experience. Businesses, through artificial intelligence, can recognize who their customers are, accurately predict what they are most likely to buy and when they are going to buy it.

Computing acceleration primarily comes from the advances in silicon processing per Moore’s law: the number of transistors incorporated in a chip will approximately double every 24 months, and roughly translates to doubling of the chip’s performance. This has unleashed a level of technology proliferation unprecedented in human history. Digitization has also resulted in the proliferation of data of all kinds — personal, professional and machine data. However, these performance gains from Moore’s law are beginning to plateau. Engineers and scientists are finding that the slow performances offered by contemporary CPUs are either quickly becoming un-economical or insufficient.

Enter the accelerators.

The most common accelerator is the high-speed NVIDIA graphical processing unit (GPU). This specialized hardware is designed to perform one particular task more efficiently than a general-purpose CPU. GPUs have been supporting video games and image rendering for years. The primary computational requirement for video applications is matrix multiplication or, technically speaking, vector processing. The need for a fast rendering of high-resolution images quickly overwhelms a general-purpose CPU. Video game hardware engineers solved this problem with GPUs. They’re so good that the leading-edge GPU from NVIDIA can easily crank out 125 TFLOPS.

Image Source: Nvidia.com

Before long, there was a dramatic acceleration of the performance of critical applications in diverse verticals with similar computational requirements. Verticals from financial services to manufacturing logistics to retail to scientific research to oil and gas exploration now use accelerators to help solve computational problems that they could not before.

Artificial intelligence including machine learning and deep learning has become more mainstream. Accelerated computing is becoming essential to provide the necessary performance to support these business-critical applications. In fact, Google recently stated that it could not run its various services without accelerated computing.

There are many reasons for an enterprise to use accelerated computing but here are the top three:

• It is BETTER: Enables enterprises to cover workloads more comprehensively by leveraging machine learning / deep learning applications to analyze vast, unstructured data workloads
• It is FASTER: Get to critical business insights faster. Depending on the application and supporting hardware, accelerated computing can boost performance from 10x to 100x
• It is COST-EFFECTIVE: A denser but simpler infrastructure for better overall computational performance. It helps lower CapEx and OpEx and helps maintain reliable services. Leverage off-the-shelf accelerators and libraries to effectively support increasingly complex cognitive workloads

Adopting accelerated computing is an easy win for enterprises striving for competitive advantage. Dell EMC has expanded its leadership from HPC into AI. We offer a portfolio of accelerated computing platforms to support our customers’ diverse AI computational needs. Our customers are at various stages in the AI adoption journey and we realize that not all applications need the same category of performance.

Businesses having heterogeneous HPC workloads tend to use our PowerEdge R740XD, our three accelerator-based workhorse platform designed to be more fault tolerant for critical servers in HPC environments. Moving along the increasing computational complexity line, we have the PowerEdge C6420, a server platform with innovative cooling options to provide the maximum performance density for applications such as high frequency trading. Our other platforms include the C6320p, T640 and a few other platforms under investigation.

As machine learning and deep learning applications gain greater adoption, we are very excited to announce the PowerEdge C4140, an ultra-dense, accelerator optimized server platform designed to handle these intensive AI workloads. With its innovative interleaved GPU design, the C4140 can support four GPUs and provide the kind of unthrottled, no-compromise performance that customers have come to expect from Dell EMC PowerEdge servers. The C4140 can now deliver up to 500 TFLOPS for deep learning applications and on a lifesciences application; it is 19x faster than an equivalent CPU-only system. One can also view this superlative performance as needing 19 CPU-only servers to accomplish the same task as one (1) C4140. With NVIDIA’s state-of-the-art GPUs and PowerEdge servers, Dell EMC is helping businesses adopt machine learning and deep learning applications through our various HPC Ready Bundles.

Come and see us at SC 17 (Nov 13 –16) to learn more about the Dell EMC PowerEdge portfolio and some of the hush-hush products we are showcasing in our Whisper Suites. If you cannot make it, be sure to follow us on Twitter and check out Direct2DellEMC for the latest news and updates.

It is also worthwhile to consider that a high-speed interconnect is just as important as the high-speed computations. The next big thing on the scene is Gen-Z, a new data access technology developed by a broad-based industry consortium including Dell EMC. This technology provides the high-speed interconnect needed to allow system disaggregation and the ability to scale acceleration, compute, and memory independently.

The myriad ways that enterprises are taking advantage of this superior performance afforded by accelerated computing and driving new, wondrous applications is nothing short of magic.

Digital transformation is on every CEO’s priority list.  But can emerging digital technologies benefit more than just businesses, to transform nations and drive real socio-economic change?

The answer is YES…and it’s already happening.

Many countries are increasingly using technology to tackle key developmental challenges—from education to healthcare—and human rights issues like human trafficking. It’s no longer just developed, Western nations, who are leading this innovation – a recent study by The Economist shows that emerging markets offer countless examples of technology driving societal change. Examples include: Kiron, an online university designed for global refugees; China’s Baby Come Home app to help parents find their missing children; and BIM, a mobile payment system to empower Peru’s rural populations[i].

The impact of technology on communities is extremely personal for me—the Dell EMC India Center of Excellence (COE) sponsors programs in partnership with government partners to transform rural healthcare across the country. Our foundation is a mobile, cloud and analytics solution which provides a unique, health record for every citizen and connects health workers, doctors and decision-makers in a single, integrated platform.

 We have made a significant impact by leveraging Dell EMC technology and expertise to serve India’s rural healthcare industry (and this is just the beginning…):

• Women’s Health: The Mahila Master Health Checkup program provides screening for non-communicable diseases in the state of Andhra Pradesh. Launched in Sept 2016, it aims to screen 7 million women by 12,000 health workers and 100+ doctors.
• Primary Care: The Mee Arogyam program covers basic care for 2.25 million people. It covers non-communicable and communicable diseases along with outpatient department care and provides doctors help in digitizing health records.

The success in India’s rural communities would not be possible without government-driven programs like Digital India and Smart Cities, which formalize and prioritize digitization for the country. Across the world, governments play a critical role in driving scalable technological advancement and transformation. Government policies and frameworks need enthusiastic adoption by the private sector as well. As IDC states, “governments that plan to launch new digital transformation strategies for their countries should align strategic vision, people, process, technology and data elements of their digital agendas”. This is where companies can add tremendous value to ensure strategies are comprehensive and encompass the basics, such as connectivity, internet infrastructure and data and analytics.

As technology advances, governments and the private sector must work together to build the right ecosystem for it to operate within. From broadband highways to affordable smartphones, electricity infrastructure to legal frameworks and implementation strategies, we definitely have our work cut out for us. Exciting times lie ahead for companies, nations and all of humankind.

Do you want to know the secret of a successful business relationship? In my book, it’s trust, complementary skills and mutual need/benefit. Both parties need to have skin in the game, play to their strengths and be aware of each other’s expectations.

The Marketplace Is Challenging

Lofty words but how does this translate to the IT business? As technology is becoming more commoditized, companies are increasingly looking at different ways to do business, provide a better user experience, more responsive services and remain relevant.

No big surprises as to why. It’s challenging out there. Companies have a shorter window to get product to market and gain competitive advantage. Did you know that about half of the companies listed on the Fortune 500 in the year 2000 have subsequently fallen off the list and many of these no longer exist in today’s world? In my view, today’s winners are companies with a long-term view of the market while the losers are companies that stand still and fail to innovate.

Together Is Better

As a result of this market dynamic, I’m seeing customers collaborate with the team at Dell EMC OEM to migrate from a hardware- or software-only model to a broad solutions approach. However, and this point is important to emphasize, it’s not about dabbling in what you don’t know. It’s about continuing to focus on your core strengths but developing the right alliances to add new expertise. As the saying goes, two heads are better than one.

Pelco and Dell EMC OEM Partnership

Take the video surveillance business as a case in point. According to market reports, it’s a thriving business, enjoying annual compound growth of around eight to 10%. While it’s a fragmented market, it’s also a highly specialist niche area with about 10 significant players driving trends. Recognizing that video management and video surveillance systems are complex by nature, Pelco by Schneider Electric, a global leader in video surveillance and security products and technologies, recently launched its VideoXpert Professional VMS, powered by Dell EMC technology.

End-Customer Benefits

From an end-customer viewpoint, the benefits of such a relationship are pretty obvious. Customers tell us that they want easy-to-deploy video surveillance solutions that are smart, scalable and flexible. With the Pelco and Dell EMC OEM collaboration, they get an integrated, tested, validated solution from two best-in-class providers in the industry, backed up by award-winning global support. What’s not to like? Win-win!

Business Benefits for Pelco

However what about Pelco? Apart from customer benefits, are there other pluses? Are we helping Pelco navigate through the market and adapt its business model? If so, how? We talk all the time to our customers, and Pelco recently shared some great insights.

According to Pelco CEO, Jean-Marc Theolier, the collaboration is already delivering real benefits on the ground. “We now have a new, broad channel to market plus the credibility of co-branding with a global leader.”

However, innovation has been the biggest delivery. “Most importantly, the relationship has definitely strengthened our ability to deliver innovation to customers. For example, thanks to Dell EMC’s supply chain expertise, we’ve been able to significantly reduce customer lead-times and introduce our products to market faster, gaining significant advantage over the competition.”

Dell EMC’s global support footprint also gets the thumbs-up. According to Theolier, “We’ve found the whole process of gaining country regulatory certification much faster and easier. The quality of post-sales support is yet another unique selling point, which the competition simply cannot match.”

 Meanwhile, John Roman, global VP of Strategic Accounts at Pelco, admits that he was unaware that Dell EMC had so much existing expertise in video surveillance technology. ”I’ve been pleasantly surprised and impressed by the depth of knowledge, the way the team has collaborated with our subject matter experts plus the great resources available at the Dell EMC OEM video labs. It’s been a real meeting of minds.”

What about the future? As Pelco is already active in adjacent non-surveillance areas like access control and POS, Theolier feels that there is good opportunity to expand market space by harnessing the Internet of Things. “Understandably, there are concerns about uptime, cybersecurity and liability. While we need to adopt a cautious, balanced approach about deploying new technologies, I am excited about the potential of IoT and believe that the benefits far outweigh the risks.”

Business Benefits for Dell EMC OEM

On our side, Pelco has brought huge video security expertise to the table while we are both gaining from best practice sharing in production, procurement and business processes.

From a sales perspective, this relationship is also proving to be a clear winner. Let’s not forget that in today’s world, video surveillance is relevant to so many vertical industries, everyone from retail and manufacturing to airports, healthcare, finance, education, highway monitoring – you name it, they’re on the list.

As IP cameras capture more resolution, there is increasing demand for additional bandwidth, compression, intelligence, a long-term central repository to store the data for the ever-increasing retention time required, monitors to display 4K surveillance cameras in HD resolution, high-powered workstations to show video streams, virtualization to run the applications, high-end compute to run all the video streams, software to analyze the information plus the ability to take that information and derive insights from it. All this plays to our core strengths and capabilities.

For me, Pelco and Dell EMC OEM are bringing it all together in a full stack, soup-to-nuts solution, from camera to recording systems, from client to the network through to compute, storage and into the cloud. It’s this type of collaboration that truly brings added value to both companies and to our joint customers.

Last Words

But, let’s leave the last word to Pelco. Theolier says he is optimistic and excited about the future, “I think the Dell EMC merger is great not only for our partnership but for the broader industry. In our experience, the transition has gone incredibly smoothly with no disruption to customers. I am excited about the capacity of the combined company, the breadth of the product portfolio and the positive impact of this alliance.”

Great to hear as we celebrate our first anniversary as a combined company! I’d love to hear how you are adapting your business model to remain competitive and what we can do to help.

Watch a video about the Dell EMC and Pelco partnership here.

 Learn more about Dell EMC OEM

Follow @DellOEM on Twitter, and join our LinkedIn OEM Showcase page.

I consistently hear from customers that one of their biggest challenges is how to best manage and learn from the ever-increasing amount of data they collect daily. It’s a significant contributor to why the artificial intelligence (AI) market is forecasted to increase from more than $640 million in 2016 to nearly $37 billion in 2025, with AI workloads growing at an estimated annual rate of 52%¹. The rapid growth of data and new technology advancements has made it economically viable to adopt machine learning to disrupt new markets, improve operations, and pave a competitive advantage. Working with our strategic technology partners, we’re able to bring these powerful capabilities to organizations of all sizes and industries in more ways than ever before.

At this week’s Supercomputing 2017 conference, we unveiled THREE new solutions that converge our HPC and data analytics expertise along with next generation strategic partner technology and equip organizations to unlock faster, better and deeper data insights. First, what we coin as the ‘bedrock’ of any modern data center, the PowerEdge C4140, an ultra-dense, accelerator optimized server platform designed to handle intensive AI workloads. Coupling the C4140 with our HPC knowhow, we’ve built a new family of Ready Solutions; the Dell EMC Ready Bundles for Machine Learning and Deep Learning enable organizations to realize advancements across a wide array of use cases.

When you consider the applications of machine and deep learning in areas like strengthening security with facial recognition, improving health care, and understanding human behavior in retail, the possibilities are endless and exciting!

Take, for example, these customer stories:

MasterCard leverages artificial intelligence to help protect consumers against credit card fraud. With approximately two million applied rules to automate spend tracking; they handle 160 million transactions per hour and 52 billion per year. Utilizing Dell EMC machine learning technologies, they’ve accelerated the speed with which they can retrieve and validate transaction data, as well as apply new rules to prevent authorized card usage. Of equal importance to stopping unauthorized charges is ensuring that genuine charges are not falsely flagged as fraudulent and prohibited. As their machines become more intelligent, MasterCard is moving closer to a model of complete and proactive oversight, where inaccuracies are prevented before they occur, and customer disruption is minimized.

The Texas Advanced Computing Center (TACC) at The University of Texas at Austin is a leading academic center that uses machine learning for critical scientific discoveries, such as identifying brain tumors, developing cures for cancer, and forecasting severe weather conditions, like tornados. In partnership with Dell EMC, Intel, and Seagate, their “Stampede 2” supercomputer is ranked No. 12 on the latest TOP500 list as one of the most powerful computer systems in the world with its more than 18 petaflop performance. These technologies empower them to support thousands of researchers running simulations too complex for their normal desktop environments.

As another example, Simon Fraser University’s “Cedar” supercomputer is helping researches in Canada to study DNA bacteria patterns for collaborations with worldwide public health agencies.  Unlike the many HPC systems built for narrowly targeted applications, Cedar is designed to run a wide variety of scientific workloads, including those related to personalized medicine, green energy technology, AI and the AI sub-fields of machine learning and deep learning. Simon Fraser’s research findings are leading to better and faster infectious disease control measures, like new vaccination programs, to help keep humankind safe.

We’re at the forefront of many incredible breakthroughs in artificial intelligence, stemming from the mastery of machine and deep learning, and only scratching the surface of what’s possible.  We told you in October that we’re committed to investments in this space and making AI a reality for all customers. We’re making excellent headway as a company and have already made several exciting announcements, including accelerated computing platforms to support our customers’ unique AI performance needs.

Working with the best and brightest minds to better the world is what energizes me and our Dell EMC teams every day to propel our HPC mission towards artificial intelligence-based customer and industry outcomes. Stay tuned for even more announcements and customer successes in this space, as together we advance technology to drive human progress.

¹ Tractica, Artificial Intelligence Revenue to Reach $36.8 Billion Worldwide by 2025, Aug 2016

What used to take a month, now takes hours. Delivering anywhere in the country is becoming faster and cheaper than ever. In this episode, we’ll take a look at the steps we took to get closer and closer to instant gratification.

For more on these stories go to delltechnologies.com/trailblazers. Please let us know what you think of the show by leaving us a rating or review in Apple Podcasts.

Innovation is a word I hear all the time – I even use it myself often. It seems as though every major organization, technology-related or otherwise, has branded itself an innovator that offers something unique and new. That’s particularly true when you think about companies offering artificial intelligence solutions. But here’s the thing – while these companies talk about what’s unique and ‘cutting-edge,’ many times they ignore a critical piece of the puzzle – the customer. I’ve challenged myself when using the term – am I truly innovating?

As I travel and talk to customers & partners worldwide, it’s clear to me that although there are benefits to new, unique technology, what customers want more than anything is simplicity. They want simple ways to address their day-to-day pain points, as well as simple paths to adopt new technology so they can remain competitive and focus on driving revenue for their business. Partners are looking for a reliable ecosystem to simplify their go to market.

Artificial intelligence and, more specifically, machine learning are aimed at empowering organizations to automate and simplify a great number of tasks. That said, adopting these transformative abilities often present more challenges than they solve. Steep learning curves, difficult adoption paths, and the inability to scale are some of the frustrations our customers deal with as they try to deploy AI solutions, resulting in more time and money spent than they were prepared for.

Simplicity is a core value for Dell EMC and nowhere is this truer than in our work around artificial intelligence and machine learning. As we discussed during at our IQT Day event in New York earlier this month, we are committed to working with a strong ecosystem of technology partners to enable customers to leverage the power of artificial intelligence and machine learning solutions – simply. Working with our partners, we offer real solutions that deliver results right now and drive long-term continuous improvement in business performance.

Our efforts in this area were on display this week at the Intel SHIFT Event in New York. Dell EMC has a longstanding relationship with Intel which has resulted in a vast number of achievements. This year alone, we’ve worked with Intel (and SAP) to power better patient outcomes, continued to leverage Intel technologies in our Dell EMC HPC Innovation Lab, now recognized as one of the Top 500 supercomputers in the world, and continue to identify opportunities to do more for our customers in the areas of machine learning and deep learning. If you weren’t able to attend the event and speak with our team, I was fortunate enough to sit down with Daniel Newman for his S.M.A.C. Talk live blog and talk how Dell EMC and Intel are working together to help our customers achieve simplicity in adopting and deploying artificial intelligence and machine learning solutions. You can access that podcast by clicking here.

Artificial intelligence and machine learning continue to be top-of-mind for me as I visit with both customers and partners. Keep your eye on this page for exciting news to come as we help customers navigate this brave, new world.

Container technology and Docker, in particular, enables application development agility through their developer-centric tooling. As I discussed in my previous blog, the fundamental problem containers set out to address is to enable seamless portability of applications across machines.

The layered copy-on-write implementation of Container images enables faster application builds, efficient storage of images in repository and faster boot-up times for containers. However, the top-most writeable layer is a non-starter for data persistence. Due to the ephemeral nature of the containers, cloud native remained exclusive to stateless applications during their initial years. But, not anymore!

What was missing?

The local data volumes helped developers get past the data persistence problem but, when containers are deployed in large scale or in production, the local data volumes posed several challenges to the applications and operations teams:

• Data inaccessibility: Container orchestrator (CO) platforms like Kubernetes schedule application services based upon the resources available within a cluster. However, by placing the application data on the storage devices available within the local server, container schedulers cannot flexibly schedule or reschedule services, as pointed out in the figure below.
• Limited scalability: The local data volume can scale in terms of both performance and capacity only to what is available in the local node.
• High availability for enterprise applications: Enterprise application require 6-9’s of data availability. However, local data volumes are prone to data loss should either the direct attached storage (DAS) devices or the entire server fail abruptly.
• Infrastructure inefficiency and management complexity: Keeping silos of data spread across random servers in the cluster lead to inefficient utilization of storage and complex enterprise data life cycle management.

Storage strategy for stateful containers:

A better deployment pattern for persistent layer would be to abstract storage devices available across multiple server nodes and create a virtual pool of storage, from which container schedulers can draw storage, as shown below.

Dell EMC ScaleIO software defined storage helps you just achieve that while delivering very high performance, enterprise-class features and the ability to run infrastructure as a code.

• ScaleIO is hardware-agnostic and can take advantage of any type of media available in the industry-standard x86 hardware.
• The enterprise features such as data services, multi-tenancy, high resiliency and security enable deploying enterprise applications in cloud native architecture.
• As a software-based storage that can be deployed and operated through its API, ScaleIO integrates seamlessly into the cloud native ecosystem.

Got questions? Leave a comment or join our upcoming webcast on 11/09 at 9 AM Pacific to discuss. To try ScaleIO yourself, visit www.dellemc.com/getscaleio to start your evaluation today!

Dell EMC is excited about OpenStack Summit happening in Sydney. As Australia is known as the “Land Down Under”, I’d like to provide a peek under the covers of our OpenStack strategy.

Since our last release and announcement of the Dell EMC Ready Bundle for Red Hat OpenStack Platform, Dell EMC has strengthened our OpenStack team to build scaled and hardened solutions for communications and cloud service providers. SP use-cases provide the right foundation to enable robust feature sets for large enterprise, higher education, and government workloads.

Our OpenStack strategy is built around integrating physical and virtual infrastructure into platforms best able to address the complex technical and operational challenges facing the SP industry. These include IaaS, CaaS, SaaS, NFV and the increasing role that containers, bare metal and cloud native technologies play. Today, there are four areas I would like to provide updates on:

1. Dell EMC NFV Ready Bundle for VMware with Integrated OpenStack
2. Dell EMC Ready Bundle for Red Hat OpenStack Platform
3. Dell EMC NFV Ready Bundle for Red Hat
4. Update and Priorities for Dell EMC OpenStack Solutions

Dell EMC NFV Ready Bundle for VMware with Integrated OpenStack

In September, at MWC Americas, Dell EMC announced the Dell EMC NFV Ready Bundle for VMware. This solution extended Dell EMC’s thought leadership and commitment to the Communications Service Provider (CSP) industry by enabling a fully-integrated platform of Dell EMC infrastructure with VMware vCloud NFV.

Today, we have extended that platform to support VMware Integrated OpenStack (VIO) providing an option for SPs to capitalize on the accessibility of OpenStack by using the open APIs to integrate with VMware infrastructure. This carrier grade Ready Bundle provides a strong foundation for SPs to reduce time to service while offering multi-tenancy, dynamic scalability, high-availability, integrated containers support and In-Service-Software-Upgrade.

Dell EMC Ready Bundle for Red Hat OpenStack Platform

At the same time, we’re announcing an update to the Dell EMC Ready Bundle for Red Hat OpenStack Platform to enable support for the Dell PowerEdge 14th generation server family.

Release 10.1 of the Ready Bundle supports the PowerEdge R640 and R740xd rack servers and runs Red Hat OpenStack Platform 10 and Red Hat Ceph Storage 2 software.  The PowerEdge 14th generation servers bring a scalable architecture, intelligent automation, and deeply integrated security, as well as increased performance and density for this Ready Bundle.

This release includes the Dell EMC JetPack Automation Toolkit, which delivers rapid and reliable automated deployment and life-cycle management capabilities for OpenStack in less than half the time of current methods.

More information can be found at dell.com/openstack and all technical documentation, including the Architecture Guides, can be found in the Dell EMC Tech Center community.

Dell EMC NFV Ready Bundle for Red Hat

In addition to the standard platform, Dell EMC introduces availability of our next Dell EMC NFV Ready Bundle for Red Hat which is a pre-integrated and pre-validated joint Dell EMC + Red Hat solution optimized to simplify and help CSPs accelerate production deployments of business critical virtualized network functions (VNF) and operationalization of NFV.

This NFV Ready Bundle provides enhancements on the core platform to include deployment of NFV-specific enhancements in an automated fashion with JetPack. Such enhancements include NUMA pinning, SR-IOV, DPDK support, and Huge Pages – all capabilities that Virtual Network Function (VNF) providers rely on for delivery of their network workloads.

Update and Priorities for Dell EMC OpenStack Solutions

Going forward, Dell EMC has created a single organization to develop both the strategy and the solutions for OpenStack across our partners. As a result, we are better able to serve our customers and our partners (VMware, Red Hat, Canonical, SuSE and Mirantis) and markets. As an example, this team just delivered the Dell EMC Canonical Mitaka OpenStack Reference Architectures for PowerEdge and DSS 9000 rack scale infrastructure. Our core objective is to deliver a simplified and converged platform, continue investment in JetPack as a common automation layer, expanding the networking options available to include SDN, 25 Gigabit networking integrated with Dell EMC Open Networking, and create a comprehensive infrastructure assurance suite across the entire stack.

Dell EMC is committed to OpenStack as a platform for multiple workloads, and will continue to invest to bring industry-leading OpenStack solutions that address our customers’ challenges to market. Be sure to visit Dell EMC at OpenStack Summit (Dev & Ops Lounge sponsored by Dell EMC on Level 4) and join many of the speaking engagements in which Dell EMC is participating:

• Mon 6, 2:00pm-2:10pm Sydney Convention and Exhibition Centre – Level 2 – Parkside 2 Foyer 

Baremetal Server Management – Like Shooting Redfish in a Barrel 

Automated NFV Deployment and Management with TripleO

• Tue 7, 5:50pm-6:30pm Sydney Convention and Exhibition Centre – Level 3 Convention Center – Cockle Bay Room 1

Fast and secure Clear Containers on OpenStack. A winner! 

• Wed 8, 3:30pm-4:10pm Sydney Convention and Exhibition Centre – Level 3 Convention Center – C3.6

What’s Your Workflow?

Earlier this year, Dell EMC hosted a webinar with Carahsoft Technology to provide an overview of our technology solutions for North American Tribes and casinos.

Al Ford, a technical sales rep here at Dell EMC, hosted the event and discussed how integrated storage solutions and infrastructure can help Tribes and casinos to evolve their data centers.

For example, Pechanga Resort & Casino worked with us to ensure it was making the best possible use of data and analytics to gain greater insight into its customers, inform its investments, and optimize day-to-day operations.

With data sources including loyalty cards, slot machines, and online and point-of sale transactions, the potential for Pechanga is huge.

“We’re already a data-driven business,” says John Kenefick, VP of IT & CIO for Pechanga. “We knew that the next step was to take advantage of the latest advances in big data. We wanted to eliminate silos and aggregate data from all sources in one place where marketing, financial, and other analysts could use it easily to gain insight and make business decisions.”

The objective, says Lee Torres, Pechanga’s VP of Marketing & CMO, is to be able to apply information in a timely and cost effective way to optimize each guest’s experience in two ways. “One is guest-facing. How, based on the data, should we invest in a customer, to offer an experience that gives them more of what they want? The other is internal. How can we streamline procedures and processes and provide our team members with information to deliver a better guest experience during the visit?”

A common concern for Dell EMC Tribal and casino customers and prospects is around the entry point and cost associated with deploying or updating storage and data center infrastructure. To that end, we’ve focused our range of customized, affordable and effective solutions with the following in mind:

• Ease of management – management is built throughout all solutions and products
• Improved effectiveness and responsiveness of existing infrastructure
• Improved responsiveness for remote offices
• High scalability and low-cost entry points
• Flexibility to adopt new technologies and avoid vendor lock-in

While the Pechanga team clearly recognized the potential pay-off and urgency of putting big data to work, they were unsure of where or how to start. After meeting with Dell EMC big data analytics consultants and data scientists, Kenefick decided to move forward with Dell EMC’s recommended first step: Develop a company-wide vision.

Dell EMC’s Big Data Vision Workshop service provided Pechanga a quick, low-risk way to explore what’s possible with big data and analytics in its business—and align stakeholders on the best way to move forward.

“It was a cool process because a lot of people from different functional areas of the company were all together in one room with the Dell EMC team and it was amazing how the ideas started to flow,” says Torres. “It wasn’t just ‘What can I do in marketing?’ and ‘What can I do in IT?’, it was ‘What can we do together as a company?’ and that really set the stage for where we are today.”

 A quality infrastructure provider should any provide flexibility to accommodate any workload, environment and experience. For our Tribal and casino customers we aim to provide solutions that are:

• Tailored to your workloads and paired to match architectural strengths
• Aligned to your IT environment, leveraging existing standards and technology, staffing and expertise, processes and operations
• Delivered for your consumption model – driven by your organization’s specific requirements and desired experience. Whether your casino is looking to build or buy, Dell EMC can help fill in the blanks, provide technical maps or provide the entire blue print with validated solutions, engineering systems and hybrid cloud platforms.

“The primary advice I would give to others is: find the right partner,” says Tjeerd Brink, VP of Finance & CFO. “Dell EMC helped us think outside of our box and identify areas where we can really use big data to help us grow our business.”

Torres agrees. “Dell EMC brought big data expertise—and not just about data, but about the structure and the processes we needed to develop. We were able combine their expertise with what we do really well, which is run a casino. It’s been a great partnership.”

If you’re interested in learning more about our work with Pechanga Resort & Casino, check out the customer profile here or watch a video about their deployment here.

We’ve had a busy summer releasing new midrange storage products including the SC 5020, SCv3000 and new Dell EMC Unity All-Flash data storage arrays. Today, we’re announcing the All-Flash version of SC Series, which makes deploying All-Flash even easier; one SKU and all-inclusive licensing. For Dell EMC Unity, deduplication is available, along with other features to simplify data-in-place migrations without any downtime.

As the storage market evolves, customers are looking beyond just product innovations. While product enhancements remain extremely important, customers are looking for more. They want products and programs to ensure their technology investments solve business problems today and into the future given the rapid advancement of technology. They need a future-proof investment. We’re excited to share our innovations in both products and the best storage loyalty program in the industry. Together these can help lower the risk and cost for customers to modernize their data centers.

Dell EMC SC All-Flash

Storage customers now get the best of both worlds in the SC Series, with both speed and intelligence. With the SC Series All-Flash, they get huge performance, up to 399,000 IOPS per array, and 3.9 million aggregate IOPS per multi-array federated cluster[i], all in an easy-to-use package. Ideal for storage generalists, because the SC Series has all the intelligence to do the work automatically, all behind the scenes, with little to no storage administrator intervention. Best-in-class data reduction is also built-in, so no special operator skills are needed. Federated data mobility, to move active or “live volumes” between systems for easy, non-disruptive workload migration is done automatically too. Just a few check boxes – that’s all it takes.

With the addition of all-inclusive software[ii], every SC feature is included that makes purchasing and maintaining even easier, and keeps the cost low over time. Our customers agree. According to Steve Athanas, Director of Platforms & Systems Engineering at UMASS Lowell: “We chose SC Series storage because dollar-for-dollar, Dell EMC arrays were the most cost-effective and they provide a great roadmap for longevity.”

Dell EMC Unity

Our midrange momentum continues with Dell EMC Unity, already designed for simplicity and unified customer environments. In our previous blogs, we announced deduplication was coming soon and as promised to our customers, it’s now part of this new v4.3 software release. We’re building on Dell EMC Unity’s strong efficiency and performance, where it leads the market in shipments[i]. We also put the product to the test against another strong midrange player – HPE 3PAR.  Research firm Principled Technologies confirmed that Dell EMC Unity loads data up to 22% faster, handles up to 29% more orders per minute, and requires up to 2.5X less storage than HPE; impressive results!

Building on top of deduplication, new synchronous file replication is included too, giving our customers business continuity and zero data loss remote protection for users’ critical file-based data. Customers can combine file replication with block-level cloud tiering for greater data protection.

Snapshots are a lower cost option than full volume copies, since they require far less space. For the ultimate in data protection, customers can leverage cloud tiering with our new Future-Proof Storage Loyalty Program. This program provides free cloud storage for Dell EMC Unity customers (SC in the future), ideal for long-term snapshot retention. Storing snapshots in the cloud is the lowest cost option. If you haven’t heard of the program, more details are available here.

Rounding out the Unity OS release, new functionality now enables customers to swap in new and more powerful storage controllers while data and operations remain online and in place.  This eliminates downtime and protects existing investments.  Upgrades can take place from hybrid to All-Flash and operations can continue during a hardware upgrade with no downtime.

• Read more about SC All-Flash
• Read more about Dell EMC Unity
• Read the blog about Future-Proof Storage Loyalty Program

[i] Source: IDC Enterprise Storage Systems Quarterly Tracker, Sept 2017. Midrange is defined as external storage systems priced $25k < $250k

What happens at the intersection of machine learning, deep learning and high performance computing (HPC)?  Human progress, driven by an intelligent ecosystem of predictable analytics and devices!  The era is upon us, and now we can train machines to use data to sense, learn, reason, make predictions and evolve.

We are at the forefront of this revolution with the Dell EMC HPC Innovation Lab, recognized as one of the TOP 500 supercomputers in the world. Co-architected with our partners, this 13,000-foot data center enables customers to fine-tune their HPC solutions with leading-edge technologies and benchmarks. For example, we’ve been working with customers to customize real-time object depiction functionality, which enables computers to correctly identify items from visual representations. As our deep learning capabilities continue to progress, there are infinite applications for customers!

Imagine if next week’s SuperComputing2017 (SC17) conference—arguably the most significant HPC event of the year—was using data analytics and machine learning algorithms to predict where we would find you within the Colorado Convention Center? Here’s a snapshot of where you would be:

#1 – In the Dell EMC Booth #913

Surveillance cameras spot you attending our in-booth theater presentations, not just once but each day of the show! You are amazed and inspired by how Dell EMC is working with customers and partners to deliver better healthcare systems, stronger security solutions and a more intelligent future. Strange sparkles of light appear around you. Upon zooming in, it’s revealed to be your Dell EMC free giveaway shining in the fluorescent lighting.

#2 – Walking the show floor

Outside of the booth, our presence spans many areas of the exposition center as we’re proud to sponsor many of our exhibiting partners and customers. New this year, we’ve also teamed up with Alienware and NVIDIA to bring an over-the-top alternate reality (AR) and virtual reality (VR) experience. Time series analysis reconstructs your zigzagged path across the show floor, showing spikes in time spent engaging with this immersive exhibit.

 #3 – Reading up on our latest announcements

Your customized alerts know you’re curious to learn more, so you begin receiving live event updates from @DellEMCServers and @DellHPC. The Dell EMC newsroom enables you to remain current on exciting portfolio announcements, which you heard firsthand in our booth on November 13.

#4 – Visiting the Whisper Suite for a sneak peak of our products

You’re found again visiting the Dell EMC Whisper Suite, just a short walk from the show floor. Here, your eyes go wide with excitement as you preview products that won’t become available until later this year. We’ve already predicted your attendance here as you’ve been eager to see our AMD-related offerings since we first announced them at VMworld EMEA. The room is bustling, and you’re glad you coordinated a guaranteed entry time with your Dell EMC sales representative in advance. If you hadn’t, you could have inquired for more information in our booth.

#5 – HPC Community & Innovation Lab

Based on your SC17 interactions, interests and data points, we’ve identified you as an excellent fit for the Dell EMC HPC Community! This worldwide user community fosters the exchange of ideas between our customers, technical staff and partners to promote the advancement of innovative and powerful HPC solutions. We invite you to join and participate in exclusive workshops, as well as valuable technical sessions and discussions. The next community meeting occurs on-site at SC17 on November 13, and you can find more information here.

With the capabilities of our Innovation Lab available to customers free of charge, it’s amazing to think of what’s on the horizon with HPC! As we gear up for an invigorating event, we are excited to share the evolution of our portfolio—and how together we can continue to transform the world.

Well, those were not the predictions based on machine learning algorithms, those were my predictions of where you’d be. But I guess humans can still make better predictions in some cases! Or at least I hope so. Do you agree?

For more information, reference the SC17 tip sheet and follow me on Twitter.

Following a long trip to Australia in which I had the opportunity to visit with Telstra, and be fortunate enough to offer a keynote on Transforming Communications Service Provider Infrastructure at the Telstra Product Engineering Technology Symposium, I am reflecting on the many opportunities to drive innovation, internally to Dell EMC and externally in the telecommunications industry. I’ve given keynotes and expressed my own personal and professional views on how the industry will evolve, the core technologies driving that evolution, and both a look back at how far we’ve come in driving network virtualization and software programmability and lament how far we still have to go to enable operational transformation.

For me, the Telstra Symposium this week was not about reflection or looking at the challenges still facing the telecommunications industry. It was a celebration of innovation – an opportunity to navigate through the tactile Internet and marvel at rows of drones modified to communicate over cellular networks and robots interacting with people in real-time, to watch artificial intelligence put into practice, video evolved, and virtual reality becoming real. What was unique about this experience is that it was not a massive tradeshow, with all of the marketing and polish of live demonstrations, but instead over 40 teams engineering and sharing their creations alongside Dell EMC and 20 other industry partners.

At the center of all of this transformation was perhaps the most inconspicuous enabler of all of these experiences – the network edge demonstrations. We, as an industry, have wrestled with the nomenclature quite a bit – we call it Fog Computing or Central Office Re-Architected as a Datacenter (CORD) or Multi-Access Edge Computing (MEC) – but the objective is the same – to enable the next generation set of services that are real-time, data-intensive, interactive, and video-rich by moving network services and applications closer to the access networks, on a virtualized platform optimized for the network edge.

What Does This Network Edge Platform Look Like?

I hear this question quite a bit – what does the network edge platform look like? More importantly, what does “optimized for the network edge” mean?

At its foundation, the network edge platform is a combination of compute /storage/ networking, cloud technologies and network virtualization technologies, delivered in a way that accounts for the most pertinent characteristics of the edge itself:

• As part of the network, the edge has to take on characteristics similar to other network facilities, from the customer premise and backhaul aggregation facilities to Points of Presence (PoPs) and regional data centers.
• Network workloads, such as Virtual Network Functions (VNFs), will reside on the network edge platform, but not in the same way that we are seeing NFV being instantiated today – we will see both the platform and functions get disaggregated.
• Enabled by a combination of containers and virtual machines, the network edge platform will rely on controllers and schedulers that are no longer geographically co-located with the data processing nodes.
• The functions, as microservices, will split into control planes, user / data planes, and state machines, allowing for independent optimization and scaling techniques to be applied. In short, network functions become two-tiered applications (front-end, back-end).
• The user / data planes will be enabled through increased accelerators, both those residing in server platforms, such as FPGAs and Smart NICs, and through SDN-enabled merchant silicon and programmable ASICs.

Dell EMC Telstra Symposium demonstration – SD-WAN, Lean PoPs and network edge platform

What Does This Mean?

To me, it means that searching to understand whether the network edge lives simultaneously in the network and the cloud. Attempting to operationalize the network edge in only one does a great injustice to the other. The network edge is a domain in and of itself, and should be treated as such.

At the conference, I had the chance to see Dell EMC architects and Telstra engineers both emphasize the innovation happening at the network edge, with technologies such as “Lean PoPs”, mobile CORD (M-CORD), multi-cloud and multi-domain orchestration. These demonstrations weren’t the flashiest and didn’t gather the largest crowds, but in the future, when I am connecting to a 5G network to communicate with things that are communicating with other things autonomously, I am certain that the experience will be enabled by innovations at the network edge.

I recently had another client conversation about optimizing their data warehouse and Business Intelligence (BI) environment. The client had lots of pride in their existing data warehouse and business intelligence accomplishments, and rightfully so. The heart of the conversation was about taking costs out of their reporting environments by consolidating runaway data marts and “spreadmarts[1],” and improving business analyst BI self-sufficiency.

These types of conversations are good – saving money and improving effectiveness is always a good thing – but organizations need to be careful that they are not just “paving the cow path.” That is, are they just optimizing existing (old school) processes when new methodologies exist that can possibly eliminate those processes? Or as I challenged the customer:

“Do you want to report, or do you want to prevent?”

There is a significant number of business and operational use cases where “prevention” is the ideal outcome instead of “optimization” including:

• Instead of reporting on delayed deliveries, how about preventing delayed deliveries?
• Instead of reporting on spoilage, how about preventing spoilage?
• Instead of reporting on the number of students dropping out of your college, how about preventing students from dropping out?
• Instead of reporting on product failures, how about preventing product failures?

In order to prevent, we first need to predict. And if I can predict, then I can prescribe.

Contemplate this “Power of Prevention” thinking. If I can predict (with some level of confidence) each of the situations above, then I can pursue prescriptive analytics in order to try to prevent. For example, what data and analytics might I need in order to:

• Predict which orders are likely to be delayed, so I can prescribe preventative actions (e.g., reprioritize delivery schedule, schedule additional delivery resources, institute delivery logistic tracking)
• Predict which products and produce is likely to spoil so that I can prescribe preventative actions (e.g., aggressively mark down prices, change in-store merchandising, donate before spoilage)
• Predicting which students are likely to drop out so that I can prescribe preventative actions (e.g., tutoring, interventions, curriculum recommendations, study groups, different major)
• Predicting which products are likely to fail so that I can prescribe preventative actions (e.g., early maintenance, scaling back operations and run times, off-loading work load)

Now this is thinking like a data scientist!

Preventative Analytics: Hospital Example

We did a project for a hospital to predict which patients are likely to catch a staph infection (what hospitals call Hospital Acquired Infections or HAI). Staph infections are costly to hospitals due to increased levels of care plus the potential financial and legal liabilities if a patient becomes sick or dies from the staph infection. In order to meet the business use case of “Reducing HAI Infections,” we created a “HAI Score” for every patient (based upon personal data such as their health care history, demographics, current health readings, and family health history; diet, coupled with clustering of “similar” patient situations). Think of it as a FICO score[2] that measures the likelihood of catching a Hospital Acquired Infection while in the hospital.

We used the HAI score to identify patients that we felt had an abnormally high chance of catching a staph infection based upon their current HAI score plus the types of care that they were likely to receive while in the hospital (for example, requiring a catheter was always an area of concern).

If we could predict that a patient had an abnormally high HAI score, then we could prescribe relevant levels of care such as having the patient spend an extra day in the hospital, a regiment of follow up calls to make sure that the patent was taking their medications, and cleaning their wound areas or more frequently doctor check up visit.

The best way to reduce operating and business costs and risks is to prevent them!

And that concept can apply across a multitude of use cases.

Transitioning from Predictive to Preventive

Online returns are a big issue in the rapidly growing world of eCommerce. In 2016, e-retail sales accounted for 8.7 percent of all retail sales worldwide. This figure is expected to reach 15.5 percent in 2021.

Figure 1: E-Commerce Share of Total Global Retail Sales from 2015 to 2021

BusinessWeek highlighted the problem that online retailers are having with returns in their recent article “Online Retailers Are Desperate to Stem a Surging Tide of Returns.”

From the article, some compelling factoids:

• Almost a third of web orders end up being sent back, vs. 9 percent of purchases at physical stores
• The expense of processing and shipping returned items can range from 20 percent to 65 percent of an online retailer’s cost of goods sold
• 75 percent of online shoppers returned merchandise this year by shipping goods back to the merchant

For example, one client with whom I am working is trying to reduce RMA’s or Returned Merchandise Authorizations. The potential cost and risk savings are staggering (note: the details on the business initiative have been scrubbed with the client’s blessing).

One way to address the RMA or returns problem, would be to create “Merchandise Return Likelihood” (MRL) score for each sale – for each individual product for each individual customer – to predict the likelihood of a product or merchandise being returned before it was ever sold.  If a customer had a high predicted MRL score, then we might take preventative actions such as:

• Increasing the amount of professional services attached to the product to ensure proper installation and configuration
• Adding a regiment of remote health checkups where we are monitoring the performance data off of the products to predict any early performance problems
• Adding a formal on-site health checkup service where technicians validate that the product is performing to specifications
• Or maybe not even sell the product to the customer if we think the likelihood of return is too high (such as when a single shopper orders multiple versions of the same core product with the obvious intention of keeping just the one that fits)

I think this approach would allow us to “reduce returns” by taking preventive actions to predict the likelihood of product returns so that we can prescribe preventative actions or decisions.

Summary

“The best way to reduce operating and business costs and risks is to prevent them!”

The opportunities to reduce costs by preventing them require a different frame of thinking – to think like a data scientist. While optimizing business and operational processes is good, one must be careful about “paving the cow path” – of optimizing a business or operational process that is out dated. As I challenged a recent client:

 “Do you want to report, or do you want to prevent?”

Sources:

Figure 1: E-Commerce Share of Total Global Retail Sales from 2015 to 2021

[1] A spreadmart (spreadsheet data mart) is a business data analysis system running on spreadsheets or other desktop databases that is created and maintained by individuals or groups to perform the tasks normally done by a data mart or data warehouse.

[2] FICO score (from Fair Isaac Corporation) measures the likelihood of a borrower to repay their loan or credit; measures a borrower’s ability to repay a loan

The post Why Use Data Analytics to Prevent, Not Just Report appeared first on InFocus Blog | Dell EMC Services.

The motivational saying “Keep Calm and Carry On” does not apply to enterprise IT professionals. Not anymore, unless they have their data protection and data risk management strategies worked out.

Enterprise IT is facing persistent challenges to protect their data and secure their data center against cyberattacks and ransomware. On top of operational challenges to ensure data recoverability and availability, they now need to keep abreast of the shifts in legislative compliance requirements globally and in their territories, as these legislations would impact their businesses. Legislation and compliance requirements are becoming more stringent to ensure businesses handle data responsibly. We have read of many incidents of data theft and ransomware that impeded businesses and brought public services to a halt. Enterprise IT therefore, needs to have a holistic approach to data protection and data risk management.

Dell EMC has commissioned a research project with IDC focusing on data risk management, to provide enterprise IT professionals with the latest regulatory compliance requirements and best practices to help them mitigate these risks. This research took the form of an InfoBrief and the focus is on data privacy and protection, specifically in Asia Pacific markets. It captures the main legislation that comes with punitive damage and provides organizations better understanding of the region’s patchy legislative framework.

The IDC Data Risk Management Barometer shows a ranking of the markets based on the severity of financial penalties for non-compliance.

IDC has also highlighted 6 key actions in limiting data risk exposure:

• Ensure integrity of data and access to data, which are critical components of a robust data management practice
• Put in-place, well-defined responsibilities of both the data owner and data processor
• Ensure data recoverability from backup, which is going to become more critical over time
• Protect your business from cyberattacks or ransomware, leveraging on air-gap solutions with faster restore capabilities for business-critical functions
• Require Recovery Point and Recovery Time Objectives to be as near to zero as possible to keep business running
• Gain visibility into what and where data is located, in order to be secure, compliant and to be able to monetize data more effectively

How is the IDC Data Risk Management Barometer InfoBrief beneficial to enterprise IT?

• Understanding the legislation helps build the IT infrastructure for compliance, thereby helping businesses avoid breach of any legislation, which can result in potential monetary and reputation damages.
• It helps enterprise IT leaders in setting IT priorities and budget for compliant costs more accurately.
• Enterprise IT can be a catalyst in helping business units better manage their data in order to more effectively monetize data.

To download the full InfoBrief and watch the executive video, visit the IDC Data Risk Management Barometer microsite.

Innovation is a word I hear all the time – I even use it myself often. It seems as though every major organization, technology-related or otherwise, has branded itself an innovator that offers something unique and new. That’s particularly true when you think about companies offering artificial intelligence solutions. But here’s the thing – while these companies talk about what’s unique and ‘cutting-edge,’ many times they ignore a critical piece of the puzzle – the customer. I’ve challenged myself when using the term – am I truly innovating?

As I travel and talk to customers & partners worldwide, it’s clear to me that although there are benefits to new, unique technology, what customers want more than anything is simplicity. They want simple ways to address their day-to-day pain points, as well as simple paths to adopt new technology so they can remain competitive and focus on driving revenue for their business. Partners are looking for a reliable ecosystem to simplify their go to market.

Artificial intelligence and, more specifically, machine learning are aimed at empowering organizations to automate and simplify a great number of tasks. That said, adopting these transformative abilities often present more challenges than they solve. Steep learning curves, difficult adoption paths, and the inability to scale are some of the frustrations our customers deal with as they try to deploy AI solutions, resulting in more time and money spent than they were prepared for.

Simplicity is a core value for Dell EMC and nowhere is this truer than in our work around artificial intelligence and machine learning. As we discussed during at our IQT Day event in New York earlier this month, we are committed to working with a strong ecosystem of technology partners to enable customers to leverage the power of artificial intelligence and machine learning solutions – simply. Working with our partners, we offer real solutions that deliver results right now and drive long-term continuous improvement in business performance.

Our efforts in this area were on display this week at the Intel SHIFT Event in New York. Dell EMC has a longstanding relationship with Intel which has resulted in a vast number of achievements. This year alone, we’ve worked with Intel (and SAP) to power better patient outcomes, continued to leverage Intel technologies in our Dell EMC HPC Innovation Lab, now recognized as one of the Top 500 supercomputers in the world, and continue to identify opportunities to do more for our customers in the areas of machine learning and deep learning. If you weren’t able to attend the event and speak with our team, I was fortunate enough to sit down with Daniel Newman for his S.M.A.C. Talk live blog and talk how Dell EMC and Intel are working together to help our customers achieve simplicity in adopting and deploying artificial intelligence and machine learning solutions. You can access that podcast by clicking here.

Artificial intelligence and machine learning continue to be top-of-mind for me as I visit with both customers and partners. Keep your eye on this page for exciting news to come as we help customers navigate this brave, new world.

What truly drives us is learning about the innovative ways that customers use PowerEdge servers to succeed in a continuously evolving digital world. At Dell EMC, we love to learn first-hand how they’re modernizing their infrastructure, rolling out new services and experiencing an IT Transformation across so many different industries.

These are a few of the most innovative PowerEdge customers we’ve visited this year.

Ryanair

Ryanair has experienced unprecedented growth over the past few years to become the largest airline in Europe. Their goal is to become the main destination for end-to-end travel planning, offering flights, hotel rooms or holiday packages for business and pleasure. To build an infrastructure that could keep pace with the convenience of one-stop travel sites, they underwent a multi-year IT transformation impacting all facets of the business.

To capture revenue beyond commoditized ticket sales, the company built an entirely new production website. Using a PowerEdge-based platform, developers are able to quickly build and roll out new applications and services for an entirely new customer experience. The improved Ryanair site now provides rapid response times, 100 percent uptime, and drives 98 percent of annual revenue.

OTTO Motors

OTTO Motors is building autonomous self-driving vehicles to handle some of the world’s deadliest, dirtiest, and dullest jobs.

In their Ontario testing lab, OTTO self-driving vehicles independently move around the floor to generate internal maps — often while carrying and delivering heavy loads throughout the facility. Programmers can change code on the fly to direct OTTO to a new route based on real-time analytics. In the real world, you can find OTTO self-driving vehicles helping repair centers to improve material flow, and keeping workers safer by doing the heavy lifting for them.

OTTO Motors uses Dell EMC PowerEdge servers as the foundation for their design, testing, and production environments, allowing them to keep up with the company’s rapid growth. PowerEdge servers are especially useful for OTTO’s custom-built data analytics platform, which processes and analyzes massive amounts of data. The system can detect a problem, automatically align it with every other known occurrence, and push an automated workflow to a developer’s desktop within seconds.

Hampshire Fire and Rescue

Neil Moore, Head of Digital Technologies, for Hampshire Fire and Rescue sat down with us at VMworld Barcelona to discuss their IT Transformation. As first responders, Hampshire Fire and Rescue needs to connect more people in more places easily and quickly. That’s why they needed a smart, always-on infrastructure that can easily support new services, and respond to multiple calls while pulling detailed location data within seconds. With Dell EMC PowerEdge as the bedrock of their data center, they’ve met all of these challenges and can take on new services with ease. This resilient infrastructure allows Hampshire Fire and Rescue to focus on their main goal: keeping their community safe.

To learn about how PowerEdge can power your IT transformation, visit DellEMC.com/Servers.

For more customer stories, and to share your own, connect with us on Twitter @DellEMCServers.

Business today requires the effective use of technology to create competitive differentiation, drive growth, and optimize profit.   Yet, while business is dependent on technology, increasing IT expenditures can be viewed as a drag on business results. That’s why evaluating technology investments in terms of business outcomes is so important.

We’re familiar with the stories of how technology has changed not only businesses but entire markets.  The first-to-market coffee chain offering free wifi has a competitive advantage. The on-line book seller that leveraged its infrastructure to become an IT service provider realized phenomenal business growth. The brick and mortar retailer that integrated its supply chain and its distribution centers was able to optimize profits.

The organizations behind these success stories evaluated investments not only in terms of cost but also in terms of the value the investment could bring to the business—the business outcome.

In “The Best Path Forward”, an article by Russ Banham about how CFOs make capital budgeting decisions, the author acknowledges how difficult these decisions are, saying “deciding whether an investment is worth funding is not a job for the fainthearted.”  Knowing that CFOs usually are directly involved in most technology decisions or define the criteria by which they’re evaluated, it’s helpful to know how CFOs think about and evaluate investments.  Banham quotes Mark Partin, CFO of the accounting software company BlackLine, as seeing the CFO’s role as “stitching together [the company’s] strategic growth plan and fundamental investment model, year after year.”  Banham goes on to state that David Hensley, CFO at Power Distribution, discovered “the techniques of capital budgeting can be biased toward certain kinds of projects and rarely give CFOs all the answers…it is often the risker, hardest-to-measure investments that can be most transformative for a company.”

As we’ve collaborated with our customers to help them not only to evaluate the potential value of a technology investment decision but to look backward at the total IT, business and financial impact of that decision, we’ve learned that it’s essential to go beyond the “classic” criteria used to evaluate technology decisions, especially those in the data center.

In the classic business model, IT was a cost center and the key criterion when choosing between investment alternatives was to select the option deemed to have the lowest Total Cost of Ownership (TCO).  But TCO allows us to measure only a small portion of the value of any potential investment. TCO not only fails to recognize the transformative opportunities of technology but also keeps IT relegated to a cost-corner rather than positioning IT leadership as equal partners in the business.

At Dell EMC we collaborate with our customers, applying a business value approach that encompasses strategic goals as well as financial and non-financial criteria that go beyond TCO to demonstrate business and IT value, and to position IT as a champion of better business outcomes.

These value principles underpin our unique Customer Value Program enabling us to help customers assess, or forecast, the value of a converged/hyper-converged solution, implement operational and organizational changes to transform and unlock more value from their investment, and use a proactive, continuous-improvement approach to realize, drive and measure the most value from their investment.

The Customer Value Program leverages the successful transformation projects of many customers who have navigated technology, organizational, resource skill, and process changes to enable better planning decisions, mitigate risk and maximize the probability of desired business outcomes. From detailed guidance, assessment tools and expert advice, to educational and certification programs, to quantifying business, IT and financial outcomes, the Customer Value Program provides a comprehensive process to chart a Transformation journey.  Start yours today by going to http://www.dellemc.com/converged-infrastructure/customer-value/index.htm

Dell EMC is excited about OpenStack Summit happening in Sydney. As Australia is known as the “Land Down Under”, I’d like to provide a peek under the covers of our OpenStack strategy.

Since our last release and announcement of the Dell EMC Ready Bundle for Red Hat OpenStack Platform, Dell EMC has strengthened our OpenStack team to build scaled and hardened solutions for communications and cloud service providers. SP use-cases provide the right foundation to enable robust feature sets for large enterprise, higher education, and government workloads.

Our OpenStack strategy is built around integrating physical and virtual infrastructure into platforms best able to address the complex technical and operational challenges facing the SP industry. These include IaaS, CaaS, SaaS, NFV and the increasing role that containers, bare metal and cloud native technologies play. Today, there are four areas I would like to provide updates on:

1. Dell EMC NFV Ready Bundle for VMware with Integrated OpenStack
2. Dell EMC Ready Bundle for Red Hat OpenStack Platform
3. Dell EMC NFV Ready Bundle for Red Hat
4. Update and Priorities for Dell EMC OpenStack Solutions

Dell EMC NFV Ready Bundle for VMware with Integrated OpenStack

In September, at MWC Americas, Dell EMC announced the Dell EMC NFV Ready Bundle for VMware. This solution extended Dell EMC’s thought leadership and commitment to the Communications Service Provider (CSP) industry by enabling a fully-integrated platform of Dell EMC infrastructure with VMware vCloud NFV.

Today, we have extended that platform to support VMware Integrated OpenStack (VIO) providing an option for SPs to capitalize on the accessibility of OpenStack by using the open APIs to integrate with VMware infrastructure. This carrier grade Ready Bundle provides a strong foundation for SPs to reduce time to service while offering multi-tenancy, dynamic scalability, high-availability, integrated containers support and In-Service-Software-Upgrade.

Dell EMC Ready Bundle for Red Hat OpenStack Platform

At the same time, we’re announcing an update to the Dell EMC Ready Bundle for Red Hat OpenStack Platform to enable support for the Dell PowerEdge 14th generation server family.

Release 10.1 of the Ready Bundle supports the PowerEdge R640 and R740xd rack servers and runs Red Hat OpenStack Platform 10 and Red Hat Ceph Storage 2 software.  The PowerEdge 14th generation servers bring a scalable architecture, intelligent automation, and deeply integrated security, as well as increased performance and density for this Ready Bundle.

This release includes the Dell EMC JetPack Automation Toolkit, which delivers rapid and reliable automated deployment and life-cycle management capabilities for OpenStack in less than half the time of current methods.

More information can be found at dell.com/openstack and all technical documentation, including the Architecture Guides, can be found in the Dell EMC Tech Center community.

Dell EMC NFV Ready Bundle for Red Hat

In addition to the standard platform, Dell EMC introduces availability of our next Dell EMC NFV Ready Bundle for Red Hat which is a pre-integrated and pre-validated joint Dell EMC + Red Hat solution optimized to simplify and help CSPs accelerate production deployments of business critical virtualized network functions (VNF) and operationalization of NFV.

This NFV Ready Bundle provides enhancements on the core platform to include deployment of NFV-specific enhancements in an automated fashion with JetPack. Such enhancements include NUMA pinning, SR-IOV, DPDK support, and Huge Pages – all capabilities that Virtual Network Function (VNF) providers rely on for delivery of their network workloads.

Update and Priorities for Dell EMC OpenStack Solutions

Going forward, Dell EMC has created a single organization to develop both the strategy and the solutions for OpenStack across our partners. As a result, we are better able to serve our customers and our partners (VMware, Red Hat, Canonical, SuSE and Mirantis) and markets. As an example, this team just delivered the Dell EMC Canonical Mitaka OpenStack Reference Architectures for PowerEdge and DSS 9000 rack scale infrastructure. Our core objective is to deliver a simplified and converged platform, continue investment in JetPack as a common automation layer, expanding the networking options available to include SDN, 25 Gigabit networking integrated with Dell EMC Open Networking, and create a comprehensive infrastructure assurance suite across the entire stack.

Dell EMC is committed to OpenStack as a platform for multiple workloads, and will continue to invest to bring industry-leading OpenStack solutions that address our customers’ challenges to market. Be sure to visit Dell EMC at OpenStack Summit (Dev & Ops Lounge sponsored by Dell EMC on Level 4) and join many of the speaking engagements in which Dell EMC is participating:

• Mon 6, 2:00pm-2:10pm Sydney Convention and Exhibition Centre – Level 2 – Parkside 2 Foyer 

Baremetal Server Management – Like Shooting Redfish in a Barrel 

Automated NFV Deployment and Management with TripleO

• Tue 7, 5:50pm-6:30pm Sydney Convention and Exhibition Centre – Level 3 Convention Center – Cockle Bay Room 1

Fast and secure Clear Containers on OpenStack. A winner! 

• Wed 8, 3:30pm-4:10pm Sydney Convention and Exhibition Centre – Level 3 Convention Center – C3.6

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