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.

“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.
• Comprehensive Primary Health: We partnered with Karuna Trust, a prominent non-profit organization, to digitize the health records of an individual earlier maintained by health workers in physical registers. The care areas include reproductive and child health, maternal health, school health, communicable and non-communicable diseases. We started with a pilot in 2014 covering 23,800 individuals in 1 health center. Today, this partnership covers 25 health centers and impacts 315,000 individuals across 3 states.

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

Technology is no longer just a business tool – it is also helping to solve social issues. Take the question of personal and public security, which is a growing concern in today’s world.

 For example, as a parent, have you ever had the awful experience of your two-year old, wandering off in a busy shopping mall? One minute, they are beside you. You turn your head for literally a moment and when you look back, your son or daughter seems to have vanished into thin air. The chances are that the child has just wandered off innocently and there is no abduction involved but the panic of that moment stops you straight in your tracks and you are sick with worry until your child is safely located.

At the Airport

Picture a busy airport, milling with people.  A bag – abandoned in the check-in area – has been designated as a potential security threat. It may be an innocent mistake on the part of a distracted passenger or it could represent a terrorist attack and present a risk to everyone at the airport? What does security do? How do they quickly identify the owner?

Of course, nothing can ever replace the importance of traditional policing, smart intelligence, surveillance and the presence of police on the ground but the Internet of Things, coupled with secure CCTV technology, is certainly putting real-time data at the finger-tips of both police and security personnel.

In the Shopping Mall

Take for example, the case of the missing toddler. Imagine the security guard, using his/her smartphone – loaded with special software – to photograph the parent for immediate upload into the shopping centre’s facial recognition system. Armed with this image, the system instantly searches the footage from that day and identifies when the parent first arrived at the shopping centre with the child.

Having extracted this footage, Security can then enroll the child’s face into the online facial recognition system. This automatically searches for the missing child across all the CCTV cameras in the network, tracking the movement of the child in real time – where they have been and where they are right now. Based on the GPS coordinates, the guard closest to the child is automatically alerted and the family is quickly reunited. This whole process – from start to finish – takes minutes, helping to quickly resolve a very traumatic experience for both parent and child.

 Real-Time Tracking

Let’s switch to the scenario in the airport. The IoT-based CCTV system quickly locates the abandoned bag– even if partially obscured. It then jumps back to the relevant footage and enrols the face of the person who has left the bag there. This image is transmitted to all cameras in the network and the person’s location is automatically tracked in real-time. An urgent alert – complete with a photograph of the person and details of the incident – is automatically sent to the nearest Security guard for action.  The likelihood is that the episode was simply an innocent mistake but IoT-enabled personal devices with face recognition technologies, connected to a database of criminals, can proactively warn Police when convicted offenders are in the vicinity.

Other Developments

In other security developments, the New York City Police Department has tested acoustic sensors, which can detect illegal gunshots to provide real-time alerts to police in busy precincts. Many police officers now wear body cams on the beat with studies indicating that they improve self-awareness and help promote the right behaviour from both the police and those they interact with.

The bottom line is that police agencies across the world are moving toward more data-driven approaches to solving crimes. Machine learning is particularly good at identifying patterns and can be useful when trying to discern a modus operandi of an offender, particularly in the case of serial crime.

Supporting Urban Planning

Let’s switch to a more benign setting. Maybe you work in the local planning authority. How do you make public spaces in the city work better for citizens? What is the air pollution level like at any given moment in time? What streets in the city centre attract the most foot fall?  What is the percentage of car users versus pedestrians and cyclists?

Data Is the Answer

Thanks to the use of sensors, IoT CCTV and analytics, planners can now better understand foot fall patterns – how many people are going where, how and when. It’s important to say that in this instance, people are not individually identified – rather, the planners are looking at aggregated data to help determine infrastructural requirements, like the number of required cycle ways, car lanes, footpaths, parks and bins.

There are other potential benefits. For example, business-people looking to open a new shop could potentially be given accurate figures for foot fall near their proposed location to help them assess the potential for their new venture.

Smart parking can also use sensors and devices to help drivers quickly locate parking spaces and reduce congestion and fuel emissions. There are also obvious public security benefits. Apart from detecting and preventing vandalism and crime in real-time, in the event of an accident or say an elderly person falling, the emergency services can be automatically summonsed to the scene.

Smart Partnerships

So, what role does Dell EMC OEM play in all of this? The answer is simple. We collaborate with specialist video surveillance and security partners, like iOmniscinet, Milestone, V-5 Systems and Pelco to power their solutions. Our partners provide the IP while we provide the customised hardware platform, and support services.

Of course, it goes without saying that criminals and hackers will try to exploit any vulnerability they can find in new security systems.  All these interconnected networks and devices need the right levels of security, built in from the start to protect both the cities and their citizens. That is where we can also add value. We have a dedicated focus on surveillance with experts available in our IoT lab to collaborate with specialist video surveillance and security partners.

As a society, I believe that we need to continue to respect the importance of individual privacy while carefully balancing this against the need to protect the common good.

What are your views on technology being used to improve security and urban planning? I would love to hear your comments and questions.

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.

The notion of “the whole being greater than the sum of its parts” is true for many implementations of technology. Take, for example, hyper-converged infrastructure (HCI) solutions like the Dell EMC VxRail. HCI combines virtualization software and software defined storage with industry standard servers. It ties these components together with orchestration and infrastructure management software to deliver a combined solution that provides operational and deployment efficiencies that, for many classes of users, would not be possible if the components were delivered separately.

However, certain challenges require separating out the parts – that’s where the solution is found. And, that is true in the case of Server Disaggregation and the potential benefits such an architecture can provide.

So, what is Server Disaggregation? It’s the idea that for data centers of a certain size, efficiencies of servers can be improved by dissecting the traditional servers’ components and grouping like components into resource pools. Once pooled, a physical server can be aggregated (i.e., built) by drawing resources on the fly, optimally sized for the application it will run. The benefits of this model are best described by examining a little history.

B.V.E. (Before the Virtualization Era)

Before virtualization became prevalent, enterprise applications were typically assigned to physical servers in a one-to-one mapping. To prevent unexpected interactions between the programs, such as one misbehaving program consuming all the bandwidth of a server component and starving the other programs, it was common to give critical enterprise applications their own dedicated server hardware.

Figure 1 describes this model. Figure 1 (a) illustrates a concept physical server with its resources separated by class type: CPU, SCM[1], GPU and FPGA, Network, Storage. Figure 1 (b) shows a hypothetical application deployed on the server and shows the portion of the resources the application consumed. Figure 1 (c) calls out the portion of the server’s resources that were underutilized by the application.

Figure 1 (c) highlights the problem with this model, overprovisioning.  The underutilized resources were the result of overprovisioning of the server hardware for the application to be run. Servers were overprovisioned for a variety of reasons including lack of knowledge of the application’s resource needs, fear of possible dynamic changes in workload, and to account for anticipated application or dataset growth overtime. Overprovisioning was the result of a “better safe than sorry” mindset, which was not necessarily bad philosophy when dealing with mission critical enterprise applications. However, this model had its costs (e.g., higher acquisition costs, greater power consumption, etc.). Also, because the sizing of multiple servers for applications was done when the servers were acquired, a certain amount of configuration agility was removed as more knowledge about the true resource needs of the applications was learned. Before virtualization, data center server utilizations could be as low as 15% or less.

Figure 1: Enterprise Application Deployment before Virtualization

The Virtualization Age

When virtualization first started to appear in data centers, one of its biggest value propositions was to increase server utilizations. (Although, many people would say, and I would agree, that equally important are the operational features that virtualization environments like VMware vSphere provide. Features like live-migration, snapshots and rapid deployment of applications, to name a few.) Figure 2 shows how hypervisors increased server utilizations by allowing multiple enterprise applications to share the same physical server hardware. After virtualization was introduced to the data center server utilizations could climb to 50% to 70%.

Figure 2: Enterprise Application Deployment after Virtualization

Disaggregation: A Server Evolution under Development

While the improvement of utilization brought by virtualization is impressive, the amount of unutilized or underutilized resources trapped on each server starts to add up quickly. In a virtual server farm, the data center could have the equivalent of one idle server for every one to three servers deployed.

The goals of Server Disaggregation are to further improve the utilization of data center server resources and to add to operational efficiency and agility. Figure 3 illustrates the Server Disaggregation concept. In the fully disaggregated server model, resources typically found in servers are grouped together into common resource pools. The pools are connected by one or more high-speed, high-bandwidth, low latency fabrics. A software entity, called the Server Builder in this example, is responsible for managing the pooled resources and rack scale fabric.

When an administrator or a higher-level orchestration engine needs a server for a specific application, it sends a request to the Server Builder with the characteristics of the needed server (e.g., CPU, DRAM, persistent memory (SCM), network, and storage requirements). The Server Builder draws the necessary resources from the resource pools and configures the rack scale fabric to connect the resources together. The result is a disaggregated server as shown in Figure 3 (a), a full bare-metal, bootable server ready for the installation of an operating system, hypervisor and/or application.

The process can be repeated if the required unassigned resources remain in the pools, allowing new servers to be created and customized to the application to be installed. From the OS, hypervisor or application point of view, the disaggregated server is undistinguishable from a traditional server, although with several added benefits that will be described in the next section. In this sense, disaggregation is an evolution of server architecture, not a revolution as it does not require a refactoring of the existing software ecosystem.

Figure 3: Disaggregated Servers

The Benefits of Being Apart

While having all the capabilities of a traditional server, the disaggregated server has many benefits:

• Configuration Optimization: The Server Builder can deliver a disaggregated server specifically composed of the resources a given application requires.
• Liberation of Unused Resources: Unused resources are no longer trapped within the traditional server chassis. These resources are now available to all disaggregated servers for capability expansion or to be used for the creation of additional servers (see Figure 3 (b)).
• Less Need to Overprovision: Because resources can be dynamically and independently added to a disaggregated server, there will be less temptation to use a larger than needed server during initial deployment. Also, since unused resources are available to all existing and future configurations, spare capacity can be managed from a data center level instead of a per server level, enabling a smaller amount of reserved resources to provide the overflow capacity to more servers.
• Independent Acquisition of Resources: Resources can be purchased independently and added separately to their respective pools.
• Increased RAS (Reliability, Availability and Serviceability): High-availability can be added to server resources where it was not possible or economical to do so before. For example, the rack scale fabric can be designed to add redundant paths to resources. Also, when a CPU resource fails, the other resources can be remapped to a new CPU resource and the disaggregated server rebooted.
• Increased Agility through Repurposing: When a disaggregated server is retired, its resources return to the pool which in turn can be reused in new disaggregated servers. Also, as application loads change, disaggregated servers devoted to one application cluster can be reformed and dedicated to another application cluster with different resource requirements

The above list is not exhaustive and many other benefits of this architecture exist.

The Challenges (and Opportunities) of a Long(ish)-Distant Relationship

Full server disaggregation is not here yet and the concept is under development. For it to be possible, an extremely low-latency fabric is required to allow the components to be separated at the rack level. The fabric also needs to support memory semantics to be able to disaggregate SCM (Storage Class Memory). It remains to be seen if all DRAM can be disaggregated from the CPU, but I believe that large portions can depending on the requirements of the different classes of data used by an application. Fortunately, the industry is already developing an open standard for a fabric which is perfect for full disaggregation, Gen-Z. Information about the Gen-Z effort can be found at www.genzconsortium.org.

The software that controls resources and configures disaggregated servers, the Server Builder, needs to be developed. It also provides opportunities for the addition of monitoring and metric collection that can be used to dynamically manage resources in ways that were not possible with the traditional server model.

Another opportunity is the tying together of the disaggregated server infrastructure with the existing orchestration ecosystems. Server Disaggregation is in no way a competitor to existing orchestration architectures like virtualization. On the contrary, Server Disaggregation is enhancing the traditional server architecture that these orchestration environments already use.

One can imagine that the management utilities administrators use to control their orchestration environments could be augmented to communicate directly to the Server Builder to create the servers they need.  The administrator may not ever need to interface directly to the Server Builder. The benefits of disaggregation should be additive to the benefits of the orchestration environments.

Conclusion: An Exciting Time in Server Architecture

It is an exciting time to be involved in server architecture. New technologies like SCM and rack scale, low-latency fabrics are opening new doors for server innovation. Server Disaggregation has the potential to be one of these important innovations. Indeed, we have already seen some of the benefits of the disaggregation of some of the server components in systems like the Dell EMC PowerEdge FX2 and Dell EMC PowerEdge VRTX. Server Disaggregation can build on the benefits these examples provide and lead to a more efficient and more dynamic server infrastructure environment.

[1] SCM – Storage Class Memory. A class of emerging persistent memory technologies with latencies lower than NAND flash.

The IT industry is one of constant change, perhaps never greater than right now – from sweeping consolidation, to revolutionizing IT infrastructure. Transformation is happening all around us – at Dell EMC, we talk about the four critical transformations we believe every organization must embrace to remain competitive.

Being a viable business today means having a strong point-of-view of where the world is going tomorrow. Earlier this month, during our Titanium Black “Access to the Future” experience, we shared with these select, elite Partners Dell EMC’s vision for the future, how we’re thinking about 2030 – from our technology roadmap, to our go-to-market plans. Titanium Black Partners are innovating in incredible ways, going big and winning big with Dell EMC’s best-in-class portfolio, and architecting real and meaningful change for our end users. They understand the four transformations as essential, and are helping their customers prepare for tomorrow… today.

Hearing and engaging with Dell leadership, including Michael Dell, Jeff Clarke, Tom Sweet, Howard Elias, Rory Read, Jeremy Burton, Marius Haas, Bill Scannell and John Roese, we discussed the decisions and influences shaping how Dell EMC will remain competitive and win, and how our Partners can align and embed with us.

As we stand shoulder-to-shoulder with our Partners, we face an exciting future. One that promises continued evolution and even revolution. One that holds tremendous opportunities. Titanium Black Partners told me throughout “Access to the Future” that they are on board with us 100%. They told me they are excited about and confident in our vision and strategy. Most importantly, they told me they can see and feel how Dell EMC and our Partners will lead and continue to grow… together.

Global Channels is a powerful force in Dell EMC’s success, with our incredible Titanium Black Partners leading the way. No one at “Access to the Future” is settling for ordinary. We are charging full force towards Extraordinary.