It all starts with data analytics.  The practice of applying modern analytics software tools across data of all types, including unstructured, semi-structured, and structured data; as well as real-time/streaming and batch.  Discovering insights to enhance the understanding of business and customer behavior is the primary goal.  These analytics-driven insights can be used to shape business outcomes, improve competitive advantage, enhance financial decisions and develop more concise projections.

I sat down with Erin Banks (@BanksEK) aka #BigDataBanks at the Dell EMC Forum Montreal to get the latest.  From pizza to elevators to Mexican food and grocery stores, Big Data is nothing without Big Data Analytics.  We have the details this week.   For more information visit: dellemc.com/bigdata or Email: data_analytics@dell.com.

Get The Source app in the Apple App Store or Google Play, and Subscribe to the podcast: iTunes, Stitcher Radio or Google Play.

Dell EMC The Source Podcast is hosted by Sam Marraccini (@SamMarraccini)

Many Dell EMC partners are winning big with the combination of the Dell Technologies portfolio of products and solutions and the local market expertise they bring. A great example of this is Megaplus.

In Megaplus’ home market of Pakistan, they have worked closely with the Punjab Higher Education Department (HED) to enable the next generation to compete globally—with the help of Dell Vostro, supported by Dell EMC PowerEdge servers.

In a deal worth $70m, the Punjab HED sought to reduce the digital divide for their students and enable them to compete on a global scale. They created an innovative program to provide 115,000 laptops to merit students. As a direct result of this program, the Punjab HED has seen a growing number of entrepreneurs who in turn generate a higher income.

Syed Raza Ali Gilliani, Minister at the Punjab HED, shared:

We wanted to partner with global technology vendors who share the same vision as us, that’s why we work with Megaplus and Dell. We’re partnering with the best of the best.

Partner with Dell EMC to win big with digital transformation.

Learn more about Dell Client Solutions and watch the Megaplus case study below.

Technology is advancing at an exponential rate, changing how we live and work. We’re seeing customers, in every industry, fundamentally rethink their business models. IT is at the heart of this transformation and key to competitive advantage.

Start having these conversations today. Join us at a Dell EMC Forum near you to discover new ways to use technology to better serve your customers. We’ve had over 30,000 attendees in over 60 cities around the world. The good news is that there are still a dozen events happening worldwide through 2017.

In New York, Michael Dell talked about the approach Dell Technologies is taking to deliver a unified IoT strategy to customers. We also heard from AeroFarms, who is redefining agriculture by setting new standards for product quality and production.

In Milan, I heard inspiring stories from customers who increased company efficiency and productivity by modernizing their IT infrastructure and workforce tools. There were also stories of companies putting data to work providing new and valuable business sights.

There has never been a more important time to rethink what’s possible and accelerate your transformational journey. So, join us and let’s make your digital future a reality.

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.

This blog is the third in a three-part series written for National Cybersecurity Awareness Month. [previous post]

People were surprised a few months ago when we announced we were introducing an air gap version of the Dell Endpoint Security Suite Enterprise solution. Aren’t air-gapped devices secure in and of themselves? And do organizations even need air gapped systems with the wide range of security solutions available today?

Organizations related to critical infrastructure frequently rely on air-gapped devices to reduce the points of exposure for their most sensitive departments. In fact, in the worlds of manufacturing, energy and exploration, transportation and finance, organizations often rely on air gap devices to perform critical functions securely.

For these companies, it’s never been more important to employ the most rigorous security precautions available. On October 20, the United States Computer Emergency Readiness Team (US-CERT) released a joint technical alert revealing the Department of Homeland Security and the Federal Bureau of Investigation have discovered a “multi-stage intrusion campaign by threat actors targeting low security and small networks to gain access and move laterally to networks of major, high value asset owners within the energy sector.” The alert called out the energy, nuclear, water, aviation, and critical manufacturing industries as targets of interest for these advanced persistent threats.

The fact is, these industries have been under threat for a while. Last year, 68 percent of oil and gas companies suffered security compromises. And as we move into the era of smart grids and IoT connectivity, 88 percent of American utility executives say cybersecurity is a major concern in smart grid deployment, and 77 percent also feel IoT will be a potential threat.

Employing an air gap model can be one of the most effective ways to ensure cyber attackers don’t succeed in creating a ladder of compromise that disrupts our country’s critical infrastructure. But while air gap is highly secure, it isn’t flawless. Air-gapped devices are still vulnerable to physical attacks that leverage compromised USBs, Firewire connections and other external storage devices.

For this reason, many companies that use air-gapped devices deploy anti-virus solutions for additional protection. Ironically, these solutions can actually become a threat vector, as they typically require organizations to connect to the cloud frequently – often on a daily basis – to download updates. This neutralizes the effectiveness of an air gap system and exposes organizations to the risk of downloading zero-day viruses, which often aren’t recognized by signature-based anti-virus solutions. In other words, most air gap solutions won’t stop the advanced persistent threats the U.S. government is issuing warnings about.

Dell’s Approach to Air Gap

The reason we introduced an air gap endpoint security solution is because we came up with a better way to do it. The Dell solution offers advanced threat protection (read: it stops zero-day threats) by detecting anomalies using Cylance’s artificial-intelligence-based mathematical models. Rather than relying on signatures that need to be updated daily, our models only need to be updated a few times a year, greatly limiting the need to take devices out of air-gap mode. And even when a device is connected for updates, it’s safer because our solution leverages file-based encryption to make sure the company’s data is safe whether it’s being used, shared or stored.

Think about what this means for companies whose projects are located in an area with limited Internet access. Where they would previously have to go without anti-virus protection, cross their fingers and hope they didn’t become the victim of a physical attack, they can now deploy an on-premise security solution that doesn’t require connectivity to operate or manage.

In the end, the goal behind our new air gap endpoint security solution is simple: We want to ensure companies who want to use air-gapped devices are able to do so effectively, consistently and without interruption to their workers’ productivity. There’s nothing more disheartening than employing a security strategy only to have it backfire through the introduction of either new threat vectors or inefficiencies in workflow.

If there’s an overarching mission for the Dell, it’s enabling companies to achieve the perfect balance between productivity and security. With the right technology, you don’t have to sacrifice one for the other.

If you’re interested in learning more about our air gap solution, we invite you to read on and get in touch with us. With the “gaps” in the air gap model finally closed, you just might find it’s the endpoint approach that’s been missing from your larger cybersecurity program.

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!

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

There’s no denying that the workplace IT environment is more complex than ever before. To make the lives of you and your customers a whole lot easier, Dell offers a full range of devices that are easy to deploy, manage and maintain throughout their entire lifecycle. The lifecycle of these devices provides you with a number of opportunities to improve and secure your customers’ end-user experiences while consolidating their bottom line … and increasing yours.

The newest generation of tech-savvy workers have well and truly arrived, with each worker now using an average of 3.5 devices to get their work done. So how do you help your customers keep up – especially when their IT budgets aren’t necessarily rising with the tide?

Dependability That Keeps up With Demand

We understand that your biggest priority is maintaining a positive and effective relationship with your customers: encouraging their growth by helping them create and cultivate their personal Digital Transformation.

That’s why at Dell, our focus is on handling the detailed enquiries your customers might have via our industry-leading, co-deployable co-delivery service. Not only will you get devices that can come from the factory pre-imaged, with free tools from Dell that make management of devices so much easier, but you’ll experience peace of mind knowing that we have the answers to any and all of your customers’ requirements – no matter what stage of the lifecycle they’re in.

Redefining the PC Lifecycle

Ultimately, your customers need a fresh approach: cost-effective solutions that keep pace with user demand while freeing up time, money and resources to reinvest in future innovation. That’s why we’re redefining the concept of PC lifecycle management. By moving from separated linear solutions to a fully integrated 4-phase cyclical process, we can help optimize your customers’ PC performance at every level. By eliminating redundancies, significantly improving security and streamlining the entire process end-to-end, your customers can save up to 25 percent on PC management as a whole.

The cycle is simple and consists of four ongoing phases that span from planning to refresh and back again:

• Plan & Design
• Deploy & Integrate
• Manage & Support
• Optimize or Retire

Plan & Design

Dell provides you with experienced specialists to help you get everything right from the very start. Starting with a thorough assessment of your customer’s specific needs, a well-defined plan is created to optimize the existing IT environment, while managing complex transformations to newer technologies. Through this approach, Dell can help you migrate applications, optimize data and operating systems, implement cloud solutions and roll out critical infrastructure.

Deploy & Integrate

We’ll give you a clear focus on driving efficient modifications implemented as a frictionless user experience. Dell offers a deployment model that can scale to the needs of your customers, regardless of size:

• Dell ProDeploy Client Suite: a fixed price, off-the-shelf solution that delivers systems pre-imaged and configured.

To ensure that your customers’ end users can exploit all the benefits of this deployment, you can also offer them Dell Education Services, which provides full-service training for both regular users and IT professionals.

Manage & Support

Once deployment and implementation have been established, you’ll want to maximize efficiency while minimizing downtime.  Dell ProSupport provides fast proactive IT support for businesses of all sizes. Your customers get a team of in-region engineers who are available 24×7 and respond proactively to provide them with a single source for hardware and software issues, maximizing their user uptime. In addition to the right support, keeping devices secure is critical for everyone, and services like Dell Endpoint Security Suite Enterprise are specially designed to protect your customer’s most vulnerable processes.

Optimize or Retire

The final phase of the lifecycle is where you can help your customers make informed decisions on which devices should be retired and which should be re-purposed or refreshed. Dell has the experience to help you calculate the optimum time to implement new equipment before it becomes a dangerous hindrance on both productivity and security. When devices need to be disposed of, worry-free services are available that include analysis of resell opportunities and secure data wipes – all compliant with the latest protocols and regulations.

We want to help you make the most of your customers’ PC lifespan. We’ll work behind the scenes with you to ensure you deliver flawless planning right through to re-purposing of assets.

Use the co-brandable PC Lifecycle content to take the message to your customers by downloading it on Campaign Builder here.

If you don’t have access to Campaign Builder, please email the following regional teams:

• EMEA.DellEMC.PartnerOnboarding@Dell.com
• NA.DellEMC.PartnerOnboarding@Dell.com
• APJ.DellEMC.PartnerOnboarding@Dell.com

We also have these assets available on the Digital Marketing Platform, so that you can deploy the email and social content directly to your customers from the tool.

If you don’t have access to the Digital Marketing Platform, please register here.

After investing in health information technology for several years, the healthcare industry has found itself mired in digital data today, and in the years to come.

Indeed, in 2016, IDC, in collaboration with Dell EMC, projected that healthcare stakeholders will produce 2,314 exabytes of data by 2020, a significant increase over the 153 exabytes generated in 2013.

This data growth comes during a time of major transformation around both the delivery of healthcare services, and the way that providers are reimbursed. In the value-based care environment, where payment is tied to clinical efficiency and patient outcomes, healthcare data fragmentation is problematic. Clinicians need access to more data sources and analytics to generate insights and determine the most efficacious treatment for their patients.

The challenge of this evolving industry is that today’s health IT infrastructures were not architected and deployed in a way that streamlines data sharing even within a single institution.

Until recently, healthcare organizations deployed diagnostics tools to meet the needs of individual departments. These isolated projects included localized storage infrastructure, leading to the creation of a new data silo with each additional deployment.  This approach subsequently complicated the task of compiling a complete digital picture of a patient’s health from disparate information sources.

The continued rise in hospital mergers and acquisitions adds further complexity, as healthcare IT systems undergo consolidation. Pressure to better manage costs and significantly improve the patient experience has led providers towards consolidation, but it has not always been easy for merging organizations to synthesize their data along with their administrative operations.

Siloed Infrastructure Unable to Provide a 360-Degree Patient View to Clinicians

Traditional IT infrastructure – and in particular, storage architectures supporting existing and new modalities – represent a significant roadblock for providers seeking an integrated workflow across departments.

Legacy workflows, infrastructures, and storage architectures are not designed to support a 360-degree view of the patient, nor can they handle the accelerated growth of medical imaging data that will eventually feed machine learning and artificial intelligence models geared towards providing clinical decision support.

Historically, if you had three PACS, a physician wanting to look at a patient’s images across all systems would technically have to open three different viewers, log in three different times and search for the patient three different ways. Then the physician would need to manually look at and process the images, and assemble them in their head.

VNA’s Ensure Reliable Access to the Right Data at the Right Time

Fortunately, a solution to healthcare workflow integration for medical imaging does exist in the form of the vendor-neutral archive (VNA). A storage infrastructure that does not require a redesign every time an organization adds new data sources or makes workflow adjustments can significantly improve efficiency and IT agility, offering enhanced insights and more reliable access to the right data at the right time.

Migrating these files to new storage systems during an architecture upgrade, for example, can be a complicated project. Most organizations undertake this type of periodic refresh process every three to five years to prevent hardware failures and upgrade infrastructure capabilities. As organizations generate and store more medical imaging data, the project can get more complex and costly each time.

A VNA can prevent data gaps by managing all updates to DICOM files and pointers, drastically reducing the burdens and costs of this critical process.

A VNA also allows a healthcare organization to integrate viewing capabilities and storage with other health IT solutions regardless of its specific PACS application vendor, and its automated data reconciliation capabilities will result in less time spent on ensuring that healthcare providers are able to retrieve the data they need to make informed decisions.

Ultimately, provider organizations should seek to create future-proof infrastructure that is flexible enough to support a broad range of anticipated performance demands, including advanced data analytics, expansion into private, hybrid, or public clouds, and constantly changing clinical workflows.

The VNA is a foundational component of a healthcare ecosystem predicated on efficiency and quality. The challenge remains making preparations for a VNA deployment and choosing the right strategy for the successful launch of a new system.

To achieve these goals, organizations may wish to partner with infrastructure development vendors who can help them to scale their architecture without downtime and consolidate without detracting from day-to-day performance while reducing or eliminating the burdens of future migrations.

Value-based care and provider consolidation are driving healthcare organizations to reevaluate the status of their current resources, especially health information. While some health systems and hospitals have the financial capital for a VNA deployment, others may have to consider a phased approach. In either case, a business imperative is driving medical imaging integration with other health IT systems to ensure that physicians are making care decisions based on the most pertinent, complete, and timely patient data.

For more information on Dell EMC’s Vendor Neutral Archiving solution, download our white paper here.

Ever heard of Storage Field Day? It’s one of several Tech Field Days where multiple IT vendors unveil their latest technology to a dozen independent, influential tech experts from around the globe.

The format is an interactive, highly technical presentation where questions are welcomed and everyone steers clear of “sales pitch” talk. It’s all livestreamed so the rest of us can learn from these always-insightful conversations. On Twitter, use #SFD14 during the livestream to ask questions and chime in with your comments.

Storage Field Day 14 is November 8-10, 2017 in the Silicon Valley. Topics and demos include:

Wednesday, Nov. 8

10:00 am – 12:00 pm PST High-End Storage

VMAX All Flash: Mission-Critical Storage for the Enterprise

The Next Generation: XtremIO X2

Thursday, Nov. 9

8:00 am – 12:30 PST Data Protection

1:00 pm – 3:00 pm PST Midrange Storage

Dell EMC Unity and SC Series Updates

Start your deep dive by tuning into the livestream at 10am PT on November 8 to catch the full presentations. Then check back next week to see the coverage on our dedicated Field Day pages for high-end storage, data protection and midrange storage.

New to Storage Field Day? 

Get a feel for how interactive and informative these Field Days can be. Here’s one of our presentations with Pierluca Chiodella and Kaushik Ghosh at a Storage Field Day this summer.

Join us and get your tech on! For more recorded sessions, check out Tech Field Day’s YouTube channel and playlists.

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

It’s great to be a midrange storage customer. It’s a buyer’s market and there are literally dozens of vendors offering myriad data storage array choices to meet all kinds of workload needs. And if the wide variety of products wasn’t enough, vendors are also throwing in all kinds of extras to help lure customers to go with their product.

It’s not enough to have the best product or even the lowest prices. Midrange storage buyers want assurances they’ll be getting the best customer experience and performance guarantees that will give them confidence they made the right purchase decision for their organization.

Rather than play along with what other vendors offer, Dell EMC decided to go big with our new Future-Proof Storage Loyalty Program, offering stronger and longer guarantees, and unique benefits such as a free cloud-based solution to store snapshots forever; a great new way to protect your business.

The Future-Proof Storage Loyalty Program gives customers a simple, cost-effective path to adopt new technologies and helps lower concerns about technology obsolescence.

Looking for satisfaction and efficiency guarantees? Check. Those are in the program. Need worry-free migrations to new technology, coupled with hardware investment protection? Check. That too is in the program. Looking to try cloud storage in your midrange project? That’s free and you guessed it – in the program. And all of this is offered through our regular support agreements – no extra cost maintenance tiers or forced long-term support agreements.

Let’s take a deeper look into these programs that our customers and partners can benefit from.

Three-Year Satisfaction Guarantee*

We’re so confident that our products will deliver on what we say they’ll provide, we’ll back this up with a long-term satisfaction guarantee. While some vendors may appear to have a similar program, ask them about the actual duration of their guarantee. Dell EMC is providing a three-year satisfaction guarantee, the longest in the industry. Our products will do what we say they will, or we’ll take it back.

4:1 Storage Efficiency Guarantee*

When moving to All-Flash storage, overall data efficiency is very important. You want maximum performance at minimal cost. Simply follow the best practices we recommend and we’ll back that up with a guarantee that we’ll reduce your storage capacity needs by 75%. We’ll make this offer without complex pre-assessments and restrictions as other vendors often do.

Never-Worry Data Migrations

Technology obsolescence is the top concern for some customers. With the rapid pace of technology innovations, getting stuck with old IT products is a potential liability. To dramatically change the game, we’re offering a simple plan to move to next generation Dell EMC technology, with seamless upgrades and built-in on-line data migration technology. For other vendors, this path often requires downtime or third-party products to facilitate data movement. With Dell EMC, we actually help remove the risk and worry.

Hardware Investment Protection*

We’ve talked about the rapid pace of IT infrastructure innovation. For many CTOs, technology obsolescence is a large liability. We understand that concern, and we’re announcing a solution to help our customers. With the hardware investment protection guarantee, we’re providing flexible credit that can be used towards newer technologies. This can used by our customers to continue with our midrange storage products, or they have the flexibility to use this credit for hyper-converged Infrastructure systems or almost anything else in the Dell EMC portfolio. This offers even greater choice, something that CTOs may not receive from other suppliers.

All-Inclusive Software Applications*

Business growth and IT needs are hard to determine at the onset of a storage project. Yet storage companies have traditionally required customers to either buy their storage software system up front, or offer complex line-item pricing. Customers want simplicity and everything they need over time to be included with the initial storage purchase. Everything you need to store, manage and protect data is included with your Dell EMC Unity or SC All-Flash purchase.

Built-in Virtustream Storage Cloud* (for Dell EMC Unity at This Time)

Snapshots provide fast, granular recovery intervals. As an alternative to tape or other data backup methods, customers are looking for the lowest possible cost to store their long-term snapshots and often the lowest cost option is the cloud. Now with the Built-in Cloud Storage Guarantee, Dell EMC Unity customers get “cloud in a box”.  What could be easier – just automatically tier snapshots to their built-in Virtustream Storage Cloud for long-term snapshot retention. This is the most cost-effective way to create long-term system recovery points, and it’s all part of the Future-Proof program. Snapshots can live forever in the cloud.

Today’s midrange storage customers require more than simply “good” products. They require full-featured, efficient products that are easy to purchase and configure, and provide key functionality to protect their data. To address the rapid pace of technology, which can render products obsolete, they also require innovative programs to ensure lasting value. We believe our new midrange storage products and programs will give our customers and partners added confidence to continue their IT Transformation efforts with Dell EMC as their most trusted supplier.

Find out More: DellEMC.com/Future-Proof

Read today’s companion blog: “New Products and Programs Will “Future-Proof” Your Dell EMC Midrange Storage Investments”

[i] Customer must purchase a three year ProSupport agreement. Any refund would be prorated. Satisfaction is based on product compliance with product specifications.

[ii] System must be setup according to best practices; 4:1 All Flash Storage Efficiency Agreement must be signed before purchase.

[iii] Subject to terms and conditions of Dell EMC trade-in program.

[iv] Includes all on-array and select off-array software needed to store, move, and manage data.

[v] Free storage cloud capacity is limited to 20% of purchased storage capacity.

It’s been a busy time for us in midrange storage. We’ve enhanced the product portfolio, we’ve introduced an outstanding loyalty program featuring customer guarantees unique to the industry, and we’ll soon be launching a terrific new Partner campaign.

It’s all very exciting—and for me, what’s best about it is the range of great business opportunities it creates for you, our Partners.

Here. I’ll break it down a little:

Product enhancements

New SC Series All-Flash arrays

These new and intelligent storage systems feature: self-optimizing performance, including best-in-class data reduction; federated data mobility is also automatic; and all-inclusive software value means every SC feature is included, which makes purchasing and maintaining even easier. These arrays represent a premium performance offering, with enhanced pricing, program and software licensing advantages. Customers get huge performance, up to 399,000 IOPS per array, and 3.9 million aggregate IOPS per multi-array federated cluster, all in an easy-to-use package.

All of which is great news for Partners, because you’ll be providing a solution that delivers on performance and reduces hassle at the same time.

Dell EMC Unity Gets More Efficient

The $1 billion market-leading Dell EMC Unity All-Flash is further extending both its performance and its efficiency. The latest Dell EMC Unity 4.3 software upgrade provides existing customers with more All-Flash storage capability, seamless controller scalability, and enhanced NAS availability.

Building on top of this, deduplication and synchronous file replication are new included features, giving your customers business continuity and zero data loss remote protection for their users’ critical file-based data. Customers can combine file replication with block level cloud tiering and swap in new more powerful controllers while data and operations remain in place – helping to eliminate downtime.

Loyalty Program

We’ve also just announced an outstanding Storage Loyalty Program. It comprises six industry-leading offers. Your customers are looking for reassurance on performance, on scalability, on future-proof innovation, on the comprehensiveness of their midrange storage solutions and on the protection of their investment—and they’ll find it here:

• Three-Year Satisfaction Guarantee – unmatched in the industry. This is a great sales argument. Can your customers find anyone offering anything remotely similar? No, they can’t.
• 4:1 Storage Efficiency Guarantee – if your customers follow our recommended best practices, they’ll reduce their capacity needs by 75% – and save on cost. We’ll make this offer without complex pre-assessments and restrictions as other vendors often do.
• Never-Worry Data Migrations – we’re offering seamless upgrades and built-in on-line data migration technology. For other vendors, this path often requires downtime or third party products to facilitate data movement. Not with us: we help remove some of the risks and worry, so it’s always easy for your customers to move up.
• Hardware Investment Protection – we’re providing flexible credits that can be used by your customers to trade in or trade up – for instance, by continuing with midrange storage products, or by using their credits for Hyperconverged Infrastructure products. This choice is something that CTOs won’t receive from other suppliers.
• All-Inclusive Software – storage companies have traditionally required customers either to buy their storage software system up front, or to follow complex line item pricing. But your customers want simplicity. They want everything to be included with the initial storage purchase. With Dell EMC, (Unity today, SC All Flash in December) most of what they need to store, manage and protect data is included with their purchase.
• Built-in Virtustream Storage Cloud – the most cost-effective option for fast, granular recovery intervals is the cloud, and now with the Built-in Cloud Storage Guarantee, your customers can benefit from free Virtustream storage with their purchases of Dell EMC Unity that can automatically tier files and snapshots to the cloud. Storing more snapshots to the cloud gives more recovery points, and free cloud storage makes this happen.

Going BIG

I’m pumped to announce we are going above and beyond in Q4!

The #GetModern Acceleration and Simple is Smart incentives have merged into one profitable promotion, called #GetModern with All Flash or Hyperconverged. In this new exciting incentive, your Sales Reps and SEs each have the potential to earn:

• 1.5% of the deal size (HW + SW + Support) up to $15K for a Modernize IT (MIT) Proposal PLUS a closed All Flash or Hyper Converged sale resulting in a competitive swap … A total potential sales team pay-out of $30K per deal!
• 1% of the deal size (HW + SW + Support) up to $10K for a MIT Proposal PLUS a closed All Flash or Hyper Converged sale … A total potential sales team pay-out of $20K per deal!

Additionally, your Sales Reps and SEs can earn an incremental $500 for just completing a MIT Proposal with a valid Deal Registration, even if the deal doesn’t close. This offer is not stackable. There is no cap on these incentives, as the offer is valid through Q4 or until funds expire, whichever comes first.

Partner Campaign

Some big campaign news will be coming your way on November 20th. That’s when we’ll be increasing the momentum in midrange storage for you, our Partners, with a wealth of support, services, training, rewards and incentives. We want to help you succeed – and to help you deepen your relationships with your customers, by offering them the best possible solutions portfolio at competitive prices, with guarantees no other provider can match, and with services that will help you grow in profitability.

So—in the short term, watch out for our future communications on the campaign, and going forward, on midrange storage in general. We’re committed to this market and to the customers who buy and use our solutions—and we’re committed to you, our Partners.

For more information, visit the Dell EMC Midrange Storage Launch Page.

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.

A few weeks ago, I had the opportunity to attend an event in New York to hear Michael Dell share the Dell Technologies vision and strategy for the Internet of Things (IoT). The number of connected devices and sensors is growing exponentially every day, with analyst firm Gartner predicting the number of IoT devices will hit 20.8 billion by 2020, all of which will generate incredible amounts of data. But the big question is – how can businesses analyze that data and turn it into innovation and progress to transform their business, deliver more for their customers and ultimately drive increased revenue?

Data is the next big challenge for every CIO, and their role is to help direct the CEO towards innovation to help turn data into insights, understanding not only the technological aspects, but the broader business implications for IT investments. As Dell EMC EMEA CIO Chris Murphy states in our Connected CIO publication, the CIO is no longer playing a back-office support role. It is this combination of business acumen and technology expertise that define a new breed of CIO – the Hybrid CIO.

Hybrid CIOs are exactly what organizations need to embrace digital and leverage it to transform their business and emerge as a winner. Travelling around the region, I’ve had an opportunity to see this transformative Hybrid CIO in action, and would call out seven characteristics that they seem to demonstrate:

1. A DNA for Business Acumen

The Hybrid CIO may still be a technician, yet they couple that technical insight with market knowledge. They have the power to focus on those digital trends and technological evolutions that bring added value to the company’s business strategy. Business acumen is also the mindset that the Hybrid CIO instills in the IT Management Team, and the entire IT department. “What value does this project bring to our company”, is the first question that anyone in IT must ask themselves when embarking on a project. It is also a question the CIO will challenge his or her business colleagues with.

2. A Driving Force Behind Innovation

This is the part of the job the Hybrid CIO may still be most excited by – with keeping up to speed on all the latest developments in technology being the reason they pursued this vocation. Technology IS important so it is imperative to recognize which innovations make the business stand out. This means the CIO doesn’t only look at large established vendors, but also those with a startup mentality who may have the type of view on the world your business needs. The Hybrid CIO allows the team to experiment and encourages them to learn from their failures.

3. Courage to Keep Their Eye on the Ball

The most important trait of the Hybrid CIO is courage. At times, they may feel like Columbus, steering a ship to uncharted territories. In charge of the digital agenda, the CIO is the explorer, and not everyone will necessarily agree with the course being mapped out. It is all too easy to give in to demands where other executives have set their own agenda, but this is a temptation that must be resisted. As a Hybrid CIO, they have to stick to their guns, while always keeping an eye on the ultimate goal.

4. Diplomatic Skills to Keep Everyone on Board

Technology has become so pervasive that every line of business has become tech-savvy while feeling entitled to their own IT budget and decision-making power. In many cases, this has led to a situation in which Shadow IT blossomed while the IT department lost control over digital projects, often to the detriment of information security. The Hybrid CIO is able to convince C-level colleagues to involve IT in digital budget decisions and minimally stick to a number of standards that the company has defined. Moments like these are excellent to test the strong communication skills of the CIO, and their ability to motivate and influence others.

5. Integrator – Tying Everything Together

IT is at the heart of any organization’s digital transformation, and the CIO’s office is where it all comes together. Whether projects emanate from IT itself, from the CEO or any other business executive, the Hybrid CIO ties it all together. They set the pace for the innovation, balancing what investments are made to simply keep the engines running, and what buckets are set aside for innovation. The Hybrid CIO has two feet on the accelerator as they are now leading a dual-speed business. As Gartner puts it, they manages two separate, coherent modes of IT delivery, one focused on predictability and the other on exploration. Constantly revving up the innovative projects, but keeping the infrastructure backbone that supports the business, strong.

6. A Strong Partner and Bridge-Builder

The Hybrid CIO is smart and humble enough to realize that they do not know everything, and that the IT department cannot specialize in every technological domain. That’s why it’s important to forge alliances while drawing in resources from service providers, vendors and consultants, while actively engaging in digital ecosystems. After all, everything is connected and companies that are part of a digital ecosystem outpace growth in their market.

7. A Mentor – Keeping Everyone Motivated

It is often said that people are the single biggest asset in a company. This needs to be recognized more than ever in the Fourth Industrial Revolution, where knowledge is the critical ingredient in times of change. Technology changes in seconds and so must the skills of the people working in – and with technology. The Hybrid CIO handpicks the right team members, motivates them and gives them room to develop their own talents in order to achieve the goals of the organization. Hybrid CIOs lead by example, transferring their own leadership and communications skills to their teams.

Now, after reading this, you may be thinking that this is just too much for one person to take into consideration and excel in every area. From my personal perspective, I see the above traits as a continuum or journey that the CIO is currently on towards becoming a more ‘hybrid’ leader. It’s not ‘all or none’ – it’s some and some!

And I look forward to seeing how this challenging role will keep on evolving in the years to come.

In today’s fast-moving business world, new digital workloads and platform business models are the way forward. But how many of your customers’ IT environments are optimized to support the required IT transformation?

Designing and implementing an Enterprise Digital Platform takes time and effort—and customers need expert support. It’s a great business opportunity for you. But are you clear about how best to position your offer?

Exclusive Dell EMC Partner Webcasts to Explore IDC Insights

To help you better understand the problems your customers are facing—and how you can help your customers transform their IT infrastructure—join us as Dell EMC hosts IDC to bring you invaluable research and insight. These webcasts will enable you to help your customers transform their IT infrastructure without disrupting existing provisions.

Chris Blaik, Vice President of Integrated Global Marketing Campaigns at Dell EMC will talk with Margaret Adam, IDC’s Director of European Channels & Alliances, along with leading IDC infrastructure analysts: Giorgio Nebuloni and Carla Arend. Together, they’ll discuss the ever-increasing demands placed on servers, storage and customers’ wider infrastructures, and will explore why many existing enterprise IT environments are struggling to keep up.

Register today to discover:

• IDC’s insights into customer challenges
• What organizations look for from their trusted IT solutions partners
• How to help customers implement an optimized server and storage infrastructure that’s designed to deliver business success in the digital economy

Server Webcast – Composing Digital-Ready Infrastructure

December 14, 2017

We’ll kick off this exclusive Dell EMC and IDC joint initiative with an insightful discussion of what it takes to build digital-ready infrastructure—and how you can best support your customers to deliver the required server IT.

You’ll gain all the understanding you need to be able to have these conversations with your customers, acting as their expert advisor and trusted IT solution partner at all times.

We’ll discuss the impact of digital workloads on enterprise IT environments, the need for customers to refresh their server infrastructure to build an Enterprise Digital Platform—and how you’re ideally placed to help them implement a digitally optimized scalable architecture to support all of their workload requirements.

Learn more about and register for our Server Webcast

Storage Webcast – Optimizing Data Storage for the Digital Economy

January 8, 2018

During our second webcast, to be held in early January, we’ll speak with IDC about the essential role of optimized storage in any modern IT infrastructure and the benefits you can bring to your customers in the way of expert advice and support.

IDC research shows that improving data security, protection and compliance, and driving successful technology refreshes are key issues for many companies.

We’ll discuss how you can help customers to implement a state-of-the-art storage architecture that gets to grips with today’s pressing data challenges—everything from the data explosion caused by digital workloads and the desire to simplify and unify storage, to the ever more urgent need for privacy and security plus optimized backup, recovery and storage integration.

Learn more about and register for our Storage Webcast

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.