As discussed in part one of this blog series, Bridging the Operational Gap to Accelerate NFV Deployment, and despite considerable investment, Communications Service Providers (CSPs) have been slow to realize the advantages of Network Functions Virtualization (NFV) and Software Defined Networking (SDN). NFV and SDN are critical drivers to remaining competitive—especially with new over-the-top (OTT) players entering the market.

A recently published white paper, Bridging the IT/Network Operations Gap to Accelerate NFV Deployment and Achieve Operational Excellence, identifies cultural and practical differences between IT and network operations as a major stumbling block keeping operators from fully leveraging the agility, dynamic scaling and efficiency advantages of network virtualization.

In this blog, we take a look at one carrier’s experience and how an agile operational approach can serve to bridge the IT/Network Operations gap and accelerate return on NFV/SDN investment.

NFV Deployment Case Study #1: Failure to Migrate

This European-based Tier 1 multinational CSP, with operations in 20+ countries, set out to be an early adopter of NFV.

The CTO began by creating an overlay organization of IT and network experts to develop an enterprise NFV strategy. The integrated team lab-tested NFV and management and network orchestration (MANO) solutions from multiple suppliers and selected a single IT services partner to help them implement a common environment in regional data centers and deploy their selected NFV infrastructure (NFVi) and MANO solutions across all of its operating companies.

Within the regional data centers (where virtualization concepts were understood) the transition to NFVi went smoothly. Network engineers in the operating companies, however, struggled with separating network functions from the underlying physical hardware—as evidenced by questions such as: “If a function experiences a fault, how do we know which server or storage device to check?”

Faced with network engineering mistrust in the virtual ability to automatically shift capacity to whichever functions need it, the CTO permitted each operating company to opt for either the fully virtualized solution or a “hybrid” model, in which the IMS application platform was virtualized, but physical capacity was dedicated to specific functions.

With each operating company essentially dictating the configuration it wanted, including custom software, the CSP was unable to realize the benefits of automation across the enterprise. Not only did the fragmented solution take more than two years to deploy, project costs were much higher, due to both extensive vendor customization services and dedicated hardware capacity.

Today, with resources continuing to focus on non-critical elements rather than close-to-the-customer applications, the CSP is still pursuing full NFV transformation and currently implementing industry standard operating models with sufficient assurance measures to satisfy the network side.

How Might All of This Have Gone Differently?

In our experience, many of the open standards and “service-centric” lessons learned through maturation of IT virtualization and IT-as-a-Service (ITaaS) enablement over the past decade can be leveraged to help CSPs drive the people, process and technology transformation needed to succeed with NFV/SDN.

For example, the CSP could have avoided bifurcation of its NFV deployment by applying the ETSI NFV framework to architecturally separate each network vendor’s “appliance” into:

• Infrastructure (NFVi) – Compute, storage, networking
• Network function (VNF) – Application layer to provide customer configuration and execute the network function
• Management software (MANO) – Allows operation and management of the layers

Another recommendation would have been to build on the CSPs existing IT-side as-a-service capabilities and the consumer-centric organizational structure, processes and closed feedback loops of today’s mature IT Service Centers to create an agile NFV Service Center as illustrated below.

Additionally, this CSP could have looked to build upon a pre-validated NFV infrastructure platform, such as the Dell EMC NFV Ready Bundles for VMware and/or Red Hat. These bundles are designed to simplify deployments by removing the complexities of NFV frameworks. Ultimately, they will reduce the overall cost of production and accelerate time to revenue.

Dell EMC Agile NFV Service Center Organizational Model

By combining the strengths of both its Network and IT organizations in a new service-oriented organization, the CSP could drive people and process changes that shift focus from infrastructure to services and applications, as well as to put a structure in place to manage the ongoing modification/build of services and operations to meet business and consumer needs.

To read more about this and other case studies—as well as about Dell EMC NFV consulting services that can help drive the holistic people, process and technology transformation necessary for NFV/SDN success, read the whitepaper, Bridging the IT/Network Operations Gap to Accelerate NFV Deployment and Achieve Operational Excellence.

Next Time:  Silos Never Die: A Case Study in NFV Deployment

Join Us at Mobile World Congress in Barcelona February 26 – March 1

Visit us at Hall 3, Booth 3K10 for a more in-depth discussion of NFV/SDN and other topics important to you. #MWC18

Today’s Travel Tip

Know how to reach your airline regarding complaints!

With so many travel challenges and service failures these days by travel providers (particularly airlines), I have found it helpful to be quite vocal to their respective customer service organizations via email.  In addition, airlines and other travel providers generally monitor twitter and other social media to respond to customer issues.

Some helpful hints in raising issues:

1. Be specific – list the specific flight number, date and issue.
2. Be insistent – point out your frequent flier number and status.
3. Be rigorous – keep a log of everyone you talked to with names (and their corresponding call center city), dates and what they said.
4. Be flexible yet aggrieved – ask for compensation in the form of either credits, travel vouchers or miles/points.
5. Escalate – if all of the above fails, consider the old standby- a ‘snail mail’ letter to the CEO of the company at their corporate headquarters (all located via searching the internet, not necessarily their website).

Most major airlines have forms on their website you can complete. In addition, many such as United and Lufthansa provide additional direct email addresses (e.g., customer.relations@united.com, customer.relations@lufthansa.com) which can prove fruitful in getting results. Good luck!

The post Failure to Migrate: A Case Study in NFV Deployment appeared first on InFocus Blog | Dell EMC Services.

Cybersecurity can seem overwhelming, as more data moves into the cloud and internet-enabled devices proliferate. Possibly even more daunting than dealing with potential threats is evaluating the hundreds of new vendors offering solutions. Which “next best thing” can truly keep your data protected? Is security a technology problem or a human one? How can outnumbered “good guys” gain a tactical advantage over threat actors? Dr. Zulfikar Ramzan brings his expertise to bear on this tricky topic, sharing the four critical criteria businesses can use to evaluate cybersecurity solutions, how businesses should prioritize security spending, and why he remains optimistic for the future.

Experience your choice of SAP Health – as off-premises managed cloud or on-premises in your data center (described below) LIVE at HIMSS18 in the Dell EMC booth #3613 or SAP booth #4821

Driven by current and future value from business processes and enterprise software, organizations across all industries are realizing the need for flexible IT consumption models. Here cloud computing is becoming more and more important. Cloud computing add higher flexibility and agility and can help to lower cost in terms of hardware, people and maintenance. This gives a wider array of business model options to the customer. At the same time, not all business processes can be transferred into a cloud system at equal speed. Some processes are more complex than others e.g. a full blown SCM vs. a simple leave request, and some customers may have concerns about data security, as is the case with e.g. personal or health data.

At the same time, healthcare is undergoing a great revolution, due to several factors. This includes the emergence of AI/IoT-based analytics platforms, and the growth of data especially in medical imaging and genomics. Evidence resides in areas like whole genome or population DNA sequencing, which used to take months at high costs, and which now can be done in a matter of days, if not hours. Our children will look at us in disbelief when we tell them that genetic screening for major risk factors was not available in our time. So on the one hand there is a great pull for making the most out of health data, yet on the other hand data handling and security constraints must be resolved.

The solutions provided by SAP Health rely on the SAP Cloud Platform to deliver on these promises. In that light, SAP works with the best partners in the cloud area, one of which is Virtustream, a Dell Technologies business. Virtustream and SAP are partners for a long-time, both for cloud services and for technical innovations. The Virtustream Enterprise Cloud is built on a Dell EMC infrastructure foundation. In 2016, Virtustream announced the first S/4HANA customer running in the cloud. SAP and Virtustream work closely on new innovations, and this also encompasses partnering on SAP Health. The Virtustream Enterprise Cloud is purpose-built for mission-critical applications, with managed services that deliver the highest standards in availability, security, and compliance, addressing many of the data concerns that exist especially in the healthcare space. The Virtustream Enterprise Cloud applies to healthcare systems of record, such as SAP S/4HANA and EMRs, and systems of insight, such as SAP Health services, that require application performance and availability service level agreements for running 24×7 operations. This also encompasses compliance with regulatory frameworks such as HIPAA and HiTECH to protect patient data, and strong business continuity design – all with a cost-effective utility-based infrastructure service. Virtustream also meets data residency requirements, by region and even by country. Virtustream has hosting locations in the US, UK, France, Germany, and the Netherlands, all of which are equipped to support such data residency requirements. In addition, Dell EMC, which is also a Dell Technologies business, is one of the leading providers of infrastructure services for healthcare globally. Dell EMC supports both providers and payers, using the same architectures available in the Virtustream cloud. In partnering with SAP Health, Virtustream adds its compliance, scale, and cloud efficiencies to the already existing Health partnership between Dell EMC and SAP. Customers can quickly enhance their on premise infrastructure with pay-for-use as-they-grow environment, and be confident that their patient data is fully protected. Thus, this joint approach can fully support the cloud-based solutions of SAP’s Health offer. These posts from our Direct2DellEMC blog provide some additional context and background on our existing engagement with SAP:

• 21st Century Computing: Dell EMC, Intel and SAP power better patient outcomes
• Partners in Personalized Medicine: Dell, SAP and Intel team up to provide optimized patient results
• Enabling Precision Medicine in the Era of the Genome with SAP Health and Dell EMC Isilon Data Lake in a Hadoop environment

The combination of Virtustream, Dell EMC and SAP Health supports next generation precision medicine to provide personalized, best-in-class patient care. As healthcare customers look to launch new systems of actionable insight, like delivered by the SAP Health solutions, they need a trusted partner that can support on the intersection of data analysis and large-yet-secure data lakes, nourished from disparate data sources. It is crucial to deliver a robust infrastructure solution that addresses any concerns.

Want to learn more? Just visit us LIVE at HIMSS18 in the Dell EMC booth #3613. Dr. Marten Neubauer, our SAP Healthcare & Lifesciences expert with Dell EMC’s Global SAP Center of Excellence, will be there for you.

Six months ago I started working as a trainee at Dell EMC, the World’s Largest Privately-Controlled Technology Company. Even though it is a global and huge corporation I perceive Dell EMC as a genuine and authentic employer, supplier and innovator, and in the following post I will describe why.

Given my interest in technology, my willingness to support customers in a digital world and my passion for innovation, Dell EMC was for me an obvious workplace to apply for. I wanted to work with innovation and at the same time learn more about the tech- industry and market trends. After a couple months of insight in the company it has appeared to me that my idea of Dell EMC being innovative and a developing workplace, is correct. Not only has Dell committed 4.5 billion dollars to research and development of the company itself, but we support customers in innovating as well. We offer our customers the solutions they need in order to build their digital future and to free up time and resources for innovation.

As a trainee at Dell EMC I have the privilege to travel and experience a couple of our sites across Europe. During a stay in Amsterdam I got to meet graduates from 17 nationalities and some of the local staff in the Netherlands. This was when I first was introduced to the initiative Dell for entrepreneurs .

Dell for entrepreneurs (also referred to as DFE) was created 5 years ago in the US as a way for Dell to support entrepreneurs to gain the resources, expertise and solutions they need to succeed. The purpose is to network and get inspired by each other. DFE has, since it was first initiated, grown worldwide. It is now present in the US, Canada, Germany, Singapore, Netherlands, Spain etc. However, at the end of 2017, when I started my trainee position at Dell, DFE had not yet entered the Swedish market. Therefore I was determined to bringing Dell for entrepreneurs to Stockholm, Sweden. Together with a fellow colleague, we did some research on the Swedish market in order to find the best way of adapting DFE locally in Sweden. We attended startup-events in Stockholm and met with people that are engaged in the entrepreneurial ecosystem of our capital. Furthermore we interviewed representatives of DFE from other countries in order to understand their way of approaching the project. Eventually we anchored the project with the Swedish management team and together with an excellent team we are now starting the Dell for entrepreneurs journey in Sweden! This is an awesome opportunity, not only for myself, who gets to work with what I am passionate about; innovation, developing talents and connecting with others, but it is also a great way for the startups in Sweden and Dell EMC to network and get inspired by each other. The Dell environment has truly encouraged me to take own initiatives and to pursue what I am passionate about. At this present stage we are identifying ways to adapt DFE to the Swedish ecosystem in order to best support the local startups.

Finally, some thoughts around innovation and entrepreneurship. I believe diversity is crucial in order to succeed with innovation and entrepreneurship. Bringing people together from different backgrounds, industries and with different experiences is opening up for new learnings and insights. Furthermore, I believe that openness is important to innovation and successful cooperation. If you are open to other people’s thoughts and perspectives, you can connect different parties and understand different ideas. I believe the best innovations are created when we come together to work for a common goal. Winning together is one of the core values of DellEMC, and I see no better way than connecting with the startup world and its ecosystem in order to win together!

Six months ago I started working as a trainee at Dell EMC, the World’s Largest Privately-Controlled Technology Company. Even though it is a global and huge corporation I perceive Dell EMC as a genuine and authentic employer, supplier and innovator, and in the following post I will describe why.

Given my interest in technology, my willingness to support customers in a digital world and my passion for innovation, Dell EMC was for me an obvious workplace to apply for. I wanted to work with innovation and at the same time learn more about the tech- industry and market trends. After a couple months of insight in the company it has appeared to me that my idea of Dell EMC being innovative and a developing workplace, is correct. Not only has Dell committed 4.5 billion dollars to research and development of the company itself, but we support customers in innovating as well. We offer our customers the solutions they need in order to build their digital future and to free up time and resources for innovation.

As a trainee at Dell EMC I have the privilege to travel and experience a couple of our sites across Europe. During a stay in Amsterdam I got to meet graduates from 17 nationalities and some of the local staff in the Netherlands. This was when I first was introduced to the initiative Dell for entrepreneurs .

Dell for entrepreneurs (also referred to as DFE) was created 5 years ago in the US as a way for Dell to support entrepreneurs to gain the resources, expertise and solutions they need to succeed. The purpose is to network and get inspired by each other. DFE has, since it was first initiated, grown worldwide. It is now present in the US, Canada, Germany, Singapore, Netherlands, Spain etc. However, at the end of 2017, when I started my trainee position at Dell, DFE had not yet entered the Swedish market. Therefore I was determined to bringing Dell for entrepreneurs to Stockholm, Sweden. Together with a fellow colleague, we did some research on the Swedish market in order to find the best way of adapting DFE locally in Sweden. We attended startup-events in Stockholm and met with people that are engaged in the entrepreneurial ecosystem of our capital. Furthermore we interviewed representatives of DFE from other countries in order to understand their way of approaching the project. Eventually we anchored the project with the Swedish management team and together with an excellent team we are now starting the Dell for entrepreneurs journey in Sweden! This is an awesome opportunity, not only for myself, who gets to work with what I am passionate about; innovation, developing talents and connecting with others, but it is also a great way for the startups in Sweden and Dell EMC to network and get inspired by each other. The Dell environment has truly encouraged me to take own initiatives and to pursue what I am passionate about. At this present stage we are identifying ways to adapt DFE to the Swedish ecosystem in order to best support the local startups.

Finally, some thoughts around innovation and entrepreneurship. I believe diversity is crucial in order to succeed with innovation and entrepreneurship. Bringing people together from different backgrounds, industries and with different experiences is opening up for new learnings and insights. Furthermore, I believe that openness is important to innovation and successful cooperation. If you are open to other people’s thoughts and perspectives, you can connect different parties and understand different ideas. I believe the best innovations are created when we come together to work for a common goal. Winning together is one of the core values of DellEMC, and I see no better way than connecting with the startup world and its ecosystem in order to win together!

So, I’m at a business and technology conference where I just ate crickets for the first time. It’s not really what I was expecting at this event. But, I do know what to expect at Dell Technologies World, April 30-May 3.

Along with the awesome general session and guru speakers I wrote about yesterday, there will be a great opportunity for technology professionals to hone their skills and gain new certifications.

“You get to meet the people behind the technology we use every day, learn about strategy and products for the future and also be able to meet peers from around the globe. Different horizons with the same passion for greatness,” one of last year’s attendees, Aloys, noted.

Dell EMC Education Services recently launched a set of new certifications that help develop the highly-skilled talent who can help companies make transformation real, achieve business goals and lead the competition.

“These new certifications bridge skills gaps at every stage of transformational maturity. They establish and validate skills required for digital, IT, workforce, and security transformation,” Christine Fraser wrote here on Direct2DellEMC last week.

Education offerings and certification exams for converged systems and hybrid cloud platforms are available now. Multi-Cloud Expert certification will be available in conjunction with Dell Technologies World in Las Vegas.

Starting now, IT professionals interested in earning the Dell EMC Certified Master – Enterprise Architect credential can apply to be considered to appear before the Review Board; the first review session will occur at Dell Technologies World. Visit the Dell EMC Education Services website to learn more.

But don’t wait too long to register for Dell Technologies World, or you might miss out on some great prizes!

Yes, if you register before February 28 (TOMORROW!), you can select one of these great prizes: Ring video doorbell, Bose wireless headphones, Alienware gaming keyboard, YETI cooler or guest pass to the evening event.

Next week, the Dell EMC Healthcare and Life Sciences team will join over 45,000+ health IT professionals, clinicians and executives from around the globe at the HIMSS Annual Conference & Exhibition, the largest health IT event in the industry.

Not only will we gain up to date insight into the accelerated pace of change taking place in healthcare fueled by exponentially growing data and applications, but we will also discuss how the use of information and transformative technologies are helping healthcare organizations further improve the quality, safety, and cost-effectiveness of patient care outcomes.

The world is quickly becoming a place where everything is connected, creating greater disparate sources of data and insight. Making the digital transformation real is the focus across numerous industries – and healthcare is no exception.

We are all living in the digital era where clinicians need faster access to all available patient information, actionable insights to prescribe the best treatment plans to improve patient care outcomes at lower cost and protection of all of this sensitive information against cyber threats. From healthcare integrated delivery networks (IDNs) to rural health centers, Dell EMC provides transformative technology solutions, products, services, and financial offerings that make the future of healthcare real today – from the point of care to the data center to the cloud.

This year at HIMSS, Dell EMC executives will be available to host customer, partner, and analyst discussions, providing perspective on how we provide essential infrastructure solutions aligned with our partner ecosystem that address healthcare’s toughest challenges including clinical application optimization, multi-cloud environments, healthcare cloud, clinical genomics, high performance computing (HPC), IoT, innovative devices, and data protection.

Along with these strategic discussions we are also featuring customer speakers in our Dell EMC booth # 3613 who will highlight how Dell EMC solutions have been deployed as part of their digital transformation journey in our four focus areas of heath IT transformation, precision medicine transformation, connected health transformation, and security transformation.

In addition, there will be experiential demos highlighting our four focus areas of health IT transformation, precision medicine transformation, connected health transformation, and security transformation, focus groups, social media activities and customer events. If you’re in Las Vegas, we hope you will stop by Dell EMC booth #3613. If not, check out our sessions and get social at #Dell EMCHealth #HIMSS18! Making healthcare transformation real!

Wednesday, March 7 | 12:30 pm

What’s Your Cyber-Attack Recovery (CR) Plan?

Cyber-Security is often discussed in terms of prevention and perimeter defenses, but what about Recovery of mission-critical Healthcare Applications when a successful Cyber-Attack Event occurs? In a Healthcare environment resiliency and a layered data protection approach is essential to preserving continuity of critical patient services. In this session, learn how Dell EMC Isolated Recovery Solution and Services can help you perform successful recoveries from a Cyber-Attack event.

Tweet Ups

Tuesday, March 6 | 2:00 pm

Data Hygiene in Healthcare: The First Step to Getting Value Out of Your Data

Digital transformation in healthcare. With digitization, comes automation. With automation comes more applications. With more applications, comes more data. ‘Dirty data’ might cost you more than you realize…especially when it’s stored in legacy applications that are not managed well. Join the discussion taking place in the Dell EMC booth #3613 to share your insights.

Wednesday, March 7 | 11:00 am

Data Innovation: Machine Learning and Artificial Intelligence in Healthcare – it’s happening…

It’s no secret, the healthcare industry has an (over) abundance of data. There are lots of mergers/acquisitions and consolidations taking place in the industry which only complicates matters and intensifies the playing field. There is likely a ton of analysis that’s not currently being done that could potentially provide better insights and results for healthcare organizations—their doctors, researchers and patients. Now that we have the data, how do we make it useful? How can we deploy machine learning and artificial intelligence technologies into driving better results in a healthcare environment? How do you take the data and make it actionable? We invite you to join us in the Dell EMC booth #3613 to discuss this hot topic.

Transformational Change and the Telecom Industry

Here at the annual gathering of telecom leaders at Mobile World Congress in Barcelona, I am struck by how the industry periodically goes through transformational step changes.

These changes usually happen quite abruptly and are typically caused by shifts in usage patterns or the disruptive entry of a new business case when the priorities of yesterday may be rendered irrelevant. You only have to remember WhatsApp, and how almost overnight, it destroyed the SMS text business model. Of course, the industry has been evolving for years. We’ve moved from the remote sending of messages or voice communication by phone to today’s focus on connecting technology to people via devices, or the Cloud.

Network Virtualisation

Let me use an example that may feel more familiar. Telecom infrastructure (in terms of compute, storage and networking) used to be regarded as a purely physical thing. Something to be consumed by different types of applications. The industry traditionally built appliances with infrastructure, middleware and workloads. However, with the advent of NFV, workloads have now become virtualised, delivering greater flexibility, quicker time to market and smarter use of resources.

Workload management with the Cloud and the Edge

While some companies were in a technology race to be first out of the gate with a virtualisation stack and other technologies, I am glad that the focus throughout has remained firmly on resources in the infrastructure, and more importantly, the box. With the introduction of Cloud on one side and Edge on the other, we are now seeing a new transformation. Workload management, in its various guises, is rightly becoming the focus for Telecom and NFV rather than worrying about what the workloads run on, or what stack is being used.

Software-defined infrastructure

As a result, we are seeing the emergence of Software-defined Infrastructure (SDI) –  the concept of allocating bare metal resources in geographically distributed sites and grouping them together to manage in a virtual datacentre. The advantage of SDI is that it can place workloads in either private or public Clouds to maintain data integrity while increasing speed and efficiency.

I think that this transformation is being driven by the fact that NFV is not moving towards the homogenous execution environment that was expected some years ago. Instead, it is moving in the opposite direction with more variants of virtualisation, like containers as well as the need for bare metal execution of workloads.  Added to this, we are also seeing an increased need to place workloads closer the end-user for latency purposes and to deliver a better user experience, as well as the movement of workloads towards the Cloud for scale and economy. This is all without changing the environment or redeploying the products. I think that this development is pretty remarkable.

A software-defined future

In fact, I believe that we might well be seeing the real emergence of a software-defined future, where flexibility is fulfilled by automation, orchestration, policy, analytics and reporting.  After all, a large share of the potential value coming from digitisation across global industries over the next decade is dependent on the telecom industry delivering productivity improvements. According to the 2017 World Economic Forum, the digital transformation of telecommunications represents a $2 trillion opportunity for industry and society.

Interesting times ahead! I’d love to hear your comments, predictions and questions. Click here to read what my colleague, James Hole from Dell EMC OEM has to say on the role of specialist telecom companies.  Click here to read the views of our marketing lead for OEM Telecom solutions. Finally, if you’re at Mobile World Congress, we’d really love to meet you! Do visit our booth in Hall 3, Stand 3K10 where we are showcasing the following solutions:

Edge Solutions

• View the newly designed micro Modular Data Center (MDC) – debuting at Mobile World Congress – and learn how you can embed compute and storage capacity at the edge where data is being generated.
• Re-imagine the customer edge with new universal CPE platforms and SD-WAN Ready Node solutions.
• Core/Cloud Solutions
• See how you can bring the cloud to the network with our NFV solutions and Telco Cloud offerings.
• Experience Dell EMC’s larger MDC capabilities with a virtual and interactive tour. Put on a headset and be transported to one of our latest MDC designs, the Flex Module.
• View our open and flexible rack scale infrastructure, the DSS 9000, and see how Dell EMC is enabling NEBS-compliant rack scale solutions.

 IoT Solutions

• See how Dell EMC Isilon scale-out NAS and Elastic Cloud Storage (ECS) solutions provide highly efficient edge-to-core-to-cloud storage with built-in analytics to unlock the value of your IoT data.
• Discover how Dell IoT Gateways transform Fleet Management by eliminating machine to machine telematics silos, for more cost savings; increased customer satisfaction and safety; and improved employee performance.
• Learn how Dell IoT is revolutionising the building services sector and facilities management by transforming high energy costs into savings with a powerful, integrated intelligent building solution.

Learn more about Dell EMC OEM

Not quite the headline you’d maybe expect to see from a company that is big into promoting open standards but let me explain. It’s true that we continue to see a massive shift in the industry away from proprietary, expensive IT equipment to standardised, cost efficient computing blocks. Within the industry, Dell EMC OEM is now regarded as an essential infrastructure partner, providing the IT foundational platform upon which the telco solution is built. However, that doesn’t mean that specialist companies have gone away and are no longer required. On the contrary, their skills continue to be highly relevant and in demand.

Network virtualisation

For example, take network virtualisation. A hot topic for some time, this has featured prominently in labs work and proof of concept designs, but we are now seeing service providers deploying network virtualisation infrastructure in the field. As you know, deploying a network involves everything from antennae, base stations, edge computing, IoT, core switching, transmission, operations support, business support, analytics, performance management, customer experience and more. While there are lots of component parts, each of these elements needs to work together in tandem plus the network must be always available. Given this complexity, it’s obvious that rolling out a network is a specialist activity.

The important role of specialist companies

And so, while network infrastructure costs are reducing thanks to the use of standardised IT components, I firmly believe that installation, support and SLA will continue to be the domain of specialist companies. After all, it’s not just a question of installing a server and software and off you go – each installation must be supported with an SLA functional guarantee. Specialist companies such as Ericsson and Nokia have huge expertise in installing and supporting networks. These specialist skills will continue to be in demand as virtual networks continue to be built out, using standard compute infrastructure.

Horses for courses

In fact, Dell EMC OEM is already deeply involved in supporting Ericsson and Nokia in the deployment of virtualised networks, based on standard infrastructure components. I see these relationships as key to the successful roll out of modern telecommunications networks. No-one vendor can deliver all – we need horses for courses and each party brings value-add to the table. The important word is partnership.

On that note, I’m looking forward this week to meeting representatives from the entire telecoms ecosystem, including service providers, telecom equipment manufacturers and network equipment providers. I’d love to hear your comments and predictions about the future of the industry. Do visit our booth in Hall 3, Stand 3K10 where we are showcasing the following solutions:

Edge Solutions

• View the newly designed micro Modular Data Center (MDC) – debuting at Mobile World Congress – and learn how you can embed compute and storage capacity at the edge where data is being generated.
• Re-imagine the customer edge with new universal CPE platforms and SD-WAN Ready Node solutions.

Core/Cloud Solutions

• See how you can bring the cloud to the network with our NFV solutions and Telco Cloud offerings.
• Experience Dell EMC’s larger MDC capabilities with a virtual and interactive tour. Put on a headset and be transported to one of our latest MDC designs, the Flex Module.
• View our open and flexible rack scale infrastructure, the DSS 9000, and see how Dell EMC is enabling NEBS-compliant rack scale solutions.

IoT SOLUTIONS

• See how Dell EMC Isilon scale-out NAS and Elastic Cloud Storage (ECS) solutions provide highly efficient edge-to-core-to-cloud storage with built-in analytics to unlock the value of your IoT data.
• Discover how Dell IoT Gateways transform Fleet Management by eliminating machine to machine telematics silos, for more cost savings; increased customer satisfaction and safety; and improved employee performance.
• Learn how Dell IoT is revolutionising the building services sector and facilities management by transforming high energy costs into savings with a powerful, integrated intelligent building solution.

Learn more about Dell EMC OEM at https://www.dellemc.com/en-us/oem/telecom2.htm

So, I’m at a business and technology conference where I just ate crickets for the first time. It’s not really what I was expecting at this event. But, I do know what to expect at Dell Technologies World, April 30-May 3.

Along with the awesome general session and guru speakers I wrote about yesterday, there will be a great opportunity for technology professionals to hone their skills and gain new certifications.

“You get to meet the people behind the technology we use every day, learn about strategy and products for the future and also be able to meet peers from around the globe. Different horizons with the same passion for greatness,” one of last year’s attendees, Aloys, noted.

Dell EMC Education Services recently launched a set of new certifications that help develop the highly-skilled talent who can help companies make transformation real, achieve business goals and lead the competition.

“These new certifications bridge skills gaps at every stage of transformational maturity. They establish and validate skills required for digital, IT, workforce, and security transformation,” Christine Fraser wrote here on Direct2DellEMC last week.

Education offerings and certification exams for converged systems and hybrid cloud platforms are available now. Multi-Cloud Expert certification will be available in conjunction with Dell Technologies World in Las Vegas.

Starting now, IT professionals interested in earning the Dell EMC Certified Master – Enterprise Architect credential can apply to be considered to appear before the Review Board; the first review session will occur at Dell Technologies World. Visit the Dell EMC Education Services website to learn more.

But don’t wait too long to register for Dell Technologies World, or you might miss out on some great prizes!

Yes, if you register before February 28 (TOMORROW!), you can select one of these great prizes: Ring video doorbell, Bose wireless headphones, Alienware gaming keyboard, YETI cooler or guest pass to the evening event.

Next week, the Dell EMC Healthcare and Life Sciences team will join over 45,000+ health IT professionals, clinicians and executives from around the globe at the HIMSS Annual Conference & Exhibition, the largest health IT event in the industry.

Not only will we gain up to date insight into the accelerated pace of change taking place in healthcare fueled by exponentially growing data and applications, but we will also discuss how the use of information and transformative technologies are helping healthcare organizations further improve the quality, safety, and cost-effectiveness of patient care outcomes.

The world is quickly becoming a place where everything is connected, creating greater disparate sources of data and insight. Making the digital transformation real is the focus across numerous industries – and healthcare is no exception.

We are all living in the digital era where clinicians need faster access to all available patient information, actionable insights to prescribe the best treatment plans to improve patient care outcomes at lower cost and protection of all of this sensitive information against cyber threats. From healthcare integrated delivery networks (IDNs) to rural health centers, Dell EMC provides transformative technology solutions, products, services, and financial offerings that make the future of healthcare real today – from the point of care to the data center to the cloud.

This year at HIMSS, Dell EMC executives will be available to host customer, partner, and analyst discussions, providing perspective on how we provide essential infrastructure solutions aligned with our partner ecosystem that address healthcare’s toughest challenges including clinical application optimization, multi-cloud environments, healthcare cloud, clinical genomics, high performance computing (HPC), IoT, innovative devices, and data protection.

Along with these strategic discussions we are also featuring customer speakers in our Dell EMC booth # 3613 who will highlight how Dell EMC solutions have been deployed as part of their digital transformation journey in our four focus areas of heath IT transformation, precision medicine transformation, connected health transformation, and security transformation.

In addition, there will be experiential demos highlighting our four focus areas of health IT transformation, precision medicine transformation, connected health transformation, and security transformation, focus groups, social media activities and customer events. If you’re in Las Vegas, we hope you will stop by Dell EMC booth #3613. If not, check out our sessions and get social at @DellEMCHealth #TransformHIT #HIMSS18! Making healthcare transformation real!

Wednesday, March 7 | 12:30 pm

What’s Your Cyber-Attack Recovery (CR) Plan?

Cyber-Security is often discussed in terms of prevention and perimeter defenses, but what about Recovery of mission-critical Healthcare Applications when a successful Cyber-Attack Event occurs? In a Healthcare environment resiliency and a layered data protection approach is essential to preserving continuity of critical patient services. In this session, learn how Dell EMC Isolated Recovery Solution and Services can help you perform successful recoveries from a Cyber-Attack event.

Tweet Ups

Tuesday, March 6 | 2:00 pm

Data Hygiene in Healthcare: The First Step to Getting Value Out of Your Data

Digital transformation in healthcare. With digitization, comes automation. With automation comes more applications. With more applications, comes more data. ‘Dirty data’ might cost you more than you realize…especially when it’s stored in legacy applications that are not managed well. Join the discussion taking place in the Dell EMC booth #3613 to share your insights.

Wednesday, March 7 | 11:00 am

Data Innovation: Machine Learning and Artificial Intelligence in Healthcare – it’s happening…

It’s no secret, the healthcare industry has an (over) abundance of data. There are lots of mergers/acquisitions and consolidations taking place in the industry which only complicates matters and intensifies the playing field. There is likely a ton of analysis that’s not currently being done that could potentially provide better insights and results for healthcare organizations—their doctors, researchers and patients. Now that we have the data, how do we make it useful? How can we deploy machine learning and artificial intelligence technologies into driving better results in a healthcare environment? How do you take the data and make it actionable? We invite you to join us in the Dell EMC booth #3613 to discuss this hot topic.

The Dell EMC Customer Solution Centers (CSC) are designed to help you, our customers, “Make it Real.”  A place where our world-class IT experts collaborate with you to share best practices across the Dell EMC and Dell Technologies product portfolio.

Supporting technical briefings, architectural design sessions and proof of concepts, the CSC provides the ability for you to see the solutions of the future and test your solution against your business needs – so you can move forward with confidence.

I sat down with KC Choi, Sr Vice President Dell EMC Presales. We talked “Making it Real” and how to engage in the CSC and Executive Briefing process.

With 18 locations globally, most CSCs are located alongside one of our Executive Briefing Centers, providing the ability to test drive how the solutions will work. Locations in North America include:  Chicago, Hopkinton, Nashville, New York, Round Rock, Santa Clara, Washington DC – There is sure to be a CSC near you. If you’re international, centers in Asia Pacific include Beijing, Singapore, Shanghai, Sydney, Tokyo – EMEA: Cork, Dubai, Frankfurt, Luderick, Lodz, Paris and in Latin America, Mexico City and San Paulo.

Get Dell EMC 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)

In 2017, the blockchain concept took center stage. It was suddenly everywhere in the news, and people were talking about it as if it were the Holy Grail. Just consider the constant stream of news on the Bitcoin cryptocurrency and payment system, one of the early blockchain implementations. And now people are thinking more broadly, and talking about all kinds of use cases for blockchain ledgers — from processing land titles and loans to sharing product construction plans.

That’s all exciting stuff. But the story shouldn’t stop there. There’s another side to the blockchain concept that people need to focus on: data privacy — which is currently a missing link in the blockchain.

Let’s take Bitcoin as an example. In order to let the simple smart contract of Bitcoin validate the distributed ledger continuously, all transaction data — including amount, source account and target account — must be available to all network participants in unencrypted form. This means that the much-heralded anonymity on the Bitcoin network is the more the result of massive obscurity than of real security measures like encryption and privacy.

Here’s the unvarnished truth: Massive obscurity does not equate to data privacy — and that’s an issue when it comes to almost any serious business use case for blockchain. Most use cases won’t work if you can’t secure blockchain transactions against read access from everybody out there.

So how do you build data encryption and, by extension, privacy into a blockchain? The answer lies in a new kind of IT stack that enables blockchain-based applications to reliably process private data. This topic is explored in a just-released white paper that looks at the trustworthy processing of private data stored on SAP HANA® databases powered by Dell EMC Ready Solutions for SAP, using SAP Leonardo Blockchain as a Service (BaaS) and trusted computing appliances from Camelot Innovative Technologies Lab – CamelotIT Lab – running Intel-based Dell Enterprise Workstations.

While the full story of how it’s done is beyond the scope of this blog. Here’s the quick version of the story: The paper walks through a blockchain approach that keeps private data completely off-chain. This approach allows all parties to store their private data in their local environments only, while registering the private data on-chain by storing a hash of it for later verification of its integrity.

There’s a lot more to this story, of course. You can read all the details in the new Dell EMC white paper titled “Blockchain for Off-Chain Smart Contracts in a SAP environment” Download the paper

Note: In addition to Dr. Marten Neubauer from the Dell EMC Global SAP Center of Excellence, the linked white paper was authored by our partner Camelot ITLab, a leading SAP consultancy for digital value chain management with a comprehensive portfolio of blockchain products and services leveraging Camelot Hypertrust Network and SAP Leonardo.

As workplaces have evolved, so have the workforces that use them. Several distinct worker personas have emerged, each with its own demands for specific hardware, software and services. We think it’s time your customers knew more about them.

Our goal is to help businesses use the most appropriate technology to suit employees’ needs – whatever their role, wherever they work, and however they work. That way, users get a better experience and organizations get more productive employees. Our guides offer the first step by providing you with the right information to further educate your customers about this critical component of workplace transformation.

This blog explores what offerings from the Dell Technologies portfolio would suit the needs of field workers.

Technology match-up

These workers can be found working in any environment. Their devices need to be robust enough to withstand less than optimal conditions, while maintaining a good mobile connection to data.

The Dell Rugged and Rugged Extreme ranges — including both laptops and tablets with Microsoft Windows 10 Pro — have been subjected to independent MIL-STD-810G testing, and have come out unscathed. The Latitude Rugged can survive drops of up to 36 inches. Dust, shocks, humidity, altitude and even extreme temperatures (between -13°F and 140°F) are powerless against its performance. As the name suggests, the Rugged Extreme range goes even further. Add salt fog, freeze/thaw cycles and explosive atmospheres to that list. These workers can go anywhere.

Increasingly, organizations are equipping their field workers with sensors to manage assets deployed in the field. This is where Dell EMC’s internet of things (IoT) capabilities come in, providing a way to manage and connect field devices back into a central infrastructure. When machine learning algorithms are applied to the incoming data, a predictive model can be developed to ensure field services teams are able to respond to asset failures before they happen, rather than after they do.

Read our field worker guide to discover more about how Talisen obtains meaningful analytics in the aerospace and defence industries by taking advantage of IoT components, maximizing operational efficiencies with Dell EMC technology.

Our approach

Technology has a huge potential to help organizations transform their workplaces, and by extension, transform their people’s working lives. We believe that approaching workers as personas is a critical part of workplace transformation, providing personalized products for how employees work today and in the future.  We’ll take care of the solutions, so you can take care of your customers.

Read the Field Services guides, as well as others, here.

We’ve also created related emails here, on our new Digital Marketing Platform so that your marketing teams can quickly get these guides into the hands of your customers. The guides explain how to maximize the productivity of their employees through the right choices from our end-to-end portfolio.

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

…and lived to talk about it

We make no secret about the customer-focused design behind our PowerEdge servers. It’s a pretty simple approach; tell us what you need, and we’ll build it. Need servers with enough processing prowess to power deep learning? We’ve got you covered. Looking to stock your astrophysics lab with enough compute power to study black holes and unlock the secrets of the universe? Meet the R740.

So when given the opportunity to talk shop and swap ideas with some of the biggest influencers in the industry, we couldn’t pass it up. Last week we had the pleasure to host a group of 12 bloggers, analysts, authors, and IT experts as part of Tech Field Day 16. We got to share our innovations in server automation and absorb some invaluable feedback on where the industry’s headed, how demands are evolving, and where our solutions have room to grow. Here’s where the conversation went, and what we learned along the way.

Our day began with a look at our systems management portfolio from Kevin Noreen, our senior director of product management. He unpacked some of the challenges and frustrations that have crept into today’s IT infrastructure; the sluggishness of rolling out new services; the overwhelming complexity of the data center; and the disruptions and loss of revenue that results from frequent downtime. Kevin then went into how we’re focused on solving these issues by simplifying and automating the entire process with management tools that unite the PowerEdge portfolio.

We then hit the ground running with in-depth demos of iDRAC9 and OpenManage mobile from Doug Iler and Manoj Malhotra. Our TFD guests were quick to live Tweet their thoughts on the updated web-based UI, remarking on its speed and simplicity – even joking that a tool this fast couldn’t possibly be iDRAC. When they got a hands-on look at OpenManage Mobile and its anytime/anywhere capabilities, some pointed out how great power (unfortunately) often comes with great responsibility.

Our product manager for embedded management automation, Paul Rubin, then went deep into RESTful APIs, Redfish, and the unique challenges of customers he calls “the automators” – those migrating from vendor-specific consoles into the world of multi-vendor data centers who would benefit the most from automation. Paul covered how we’re working to pair the right tools with open, industry standards to bring simplicity to the most complex environments.

Brian Doty, our sr. consultant on PowerEdge management was next up with an overview on our next-generation OpenManage Enterprise tool. An update on our popular OM Essentials, released in beta back in 2011, OM Enterprise provides full lifecycle management of Dell EMC servers, as well as monitoring of 3^rd party storage, compute and networking. Like with our web-based iDRAC9, a lot of the social conversation focused on the improved interface and a bit of recognition for the empathy behind everything we do.

Our final presentation from Ray Hebert sparked the day’s most engaging conversation, with our delegates sharing their views on where the industry is headed, and our experts giving their take on how we’re responding to the changing landscape. If you watch one video from Tech Field Day 16, make it this one.

Overall, our influencers were open and honest with their feedback on what we’ve done right, and where we need to course correct. That shared knowledge and the willingness to listen and learn more is what made TFD16 such a monumental success.

Share your questions, feedback, victories, and failures with us at @DellEMCservers and let’s keep this conversation going.

Special thanks to Michael Shepherd, AI Research Strategist, Dell EMC Services, for his co-authorship. Learn more about Michael at the bottom of this post.

Imagine you wanted to determine how much solar energy could be generated from adding solar cells to a particular house. This is what Google’s Project Sunroof does with Deep Learning. Enter an address and Google uses a Deep Learning framework to estimate how much money you could save in energy costs with solar cells over 20 years (see Figure 1).

Figure 1: Google Project Sunroof Project

It’s a very cool application of Deep Learning. But let’s assume there “might” be an even better way to estimate solar energy savings. For example, you want to use Deep Learning to estimate how much solar energy we could generate with solar panels on the Golden Gate Bridge (that probably wouldn’t be a very popular decision in San Francisco). The obvious application would be to analyze several photos of the Golden Gate Bridge and estimate clear skies based upon cloud coverage.

However instead of estimating the potential solar energy generation based upon “cloud coverage,” what if we wanted to use “sunlight reflection” to generate the solar energy estimate (see Figure 2)?

Figure 2: Determining Best Predictive Variables for the Golden Gate Bridge

Or maybe you want to test another metric based upon the “sharpness of the shadows” generated by the bridge? Or another metric based upon how many people in the photo are wearing sunglasses? Or yet another metric based upon…

How do you know which of these variables – clouds or reflection or shadows or sunglasses or anything else – is the better predictor of solar energy generation? You try them all!

This thought process highlights an important behavioral trait of the best data scientists; the best data scientists have strong imaginative skills for not just “thinking outside the box” – but actually redefining the box – in trying to find variables and metrics that might be better predictors of performance.

The word “might” is a powerful enabler. “Might” is used to say or indicate that something is possible. It’s a data scientist’s most important concept, because “might” gives the data scientist the license to explore, be wrong, learn and try again.

“It Can’t Be Done” Is Not a Data Scientist Term

Andrew Ng, artificial intelligence visionary and fearless leader for many of us, wrote a recent article titled, “What Artificial Intelligence Can and Can’t Do Right Now.” In the article, Andrew states the following:

“Surprisingly, despite AI’s breadth of impact, the types of it being deployed are still extremely limited. Almost all of AI’s recent progress is through one type, in which some input data (A) is used to quickly generate some simple response (B). For example:”

Figure 3: What Machine Learning Can Do

While the use cases are limited today, the creativity at which data scientists are leveraging Big Data and existing Machine Learning and Deep Learning technologies is staggering. Let me give you one example of how data scientists from one of our Services teams at Dell EMC are thinking outside the box, to uncover new ways to help our customers avoid issues in their IT environment and create a more effortless support experience.

Predicting Hard Drive Failures

Let’s say that you are capturing over 260+ different pieces of telemetry data several times a minute for the life of a device. Most of these 260+ variables have incomplete or sparse data, the collection timing doesn’t always line up nice and neat, and getting time continuity across the devices is a major challenge.

If you were using a traditional Machine Learning algorithm, the data science team would have to spend an overwhelming amount of time 1) feature engineering new variables based on domain knowledge, and 2) using trial-and-error to determine which combinations of variables should even be included in the Machine Learning model.

Instead, our Dell EMC Services data scientists used a Patent Pending approach to Deep Learning to “pixelate” the data. They turned the over 260+ variables into device performance “images.” Then once they created these “images,” the team leveraged a recurrent neural network to find “shapes” and repeatable patterns out of random pixels (see Figure 3).

Figure 4: Pixelating Telemetry Data

A recurrent neural network (RNN) is a class of artificial neural network where connections between units form a directed cycle. RNNs can use their internal memory to process arbitrary sequences of inputs, which typically makes RNNs ideal for handwriting or speech recognition. Except in this case, instead of trying to decipher handwriting into words, the data science team used the RNN to decipher the seemingly random pixels into a prediction on the state of the device (see Figure 4).

Figure 5: Using RNN’s to Identify Shapes and Patterns Buried in the Telemetry Data

I love this example because the team didn’t feel constrained to try to fit the square peg into the round “Machine Learning” hole. Instead, they used Deep Learning in a different context to decipher seemingly random pixels into a prediction of the health of a device. The data scientists didn’t wait until someone developed a better Machine Learning algorithm. Instead, they looked at the wide variety of Machine Learning and Deep Learning tools and algorithms available to them, and applied them to a different, but related use case. If we can predict the health of a device and the potential problems that could occur with that device, then we can also help customers prevent those problems, significantly enhancing their support experience and positively impacting their environment.

Summary

One of a data scientist’s most important characteristics is that they refuse to take “it can’t be done” as an answer. They are willing to try different variables and metrics, and different type of advanced analytic algorithms, to see if there is another way to predict performance.

By the way, I included this image just because I thought it was cool. This graphic measures the activity between different IT systems. Just like with data science, this image shows there’s no lack of variables to consider when building your Machine Learning and Deep Learning models!

Want more information on how Dell EMC Services uses data science?

Check out the “Decoding Customer DNA with Data Science” blog by Doug Schmitt, President, Dell EMC Global Services, and watch for the upcoming podcasts “A Conversation with Two Data Geeks” to hear directly from the data scientists behind our transformative technologies.

I would like to thank my co-author Michael Shepherd, AI Research Strategist, Dell EMC Services. Michael holds U.S. patents in both hardware and software and is a Technical Evangelist who provides vision through transformational AI data science. With experience in supply chain, manufacturing and services, he enjoys demonstrating real scenarios with the SupportAssist Intelligence Engine showing how predictive and proactive AI platforms running at the “speed of thought” are feasible in every industry.

The post Great Data Scientists Don’t Just Think Outside the Box, They Redefine the Box appeared first on InFocus Blog | Dell EMC Services.

…and lived to talk about it

We make no secret about the customer-focused design behind our PowerEdge servers. It’s a pretty simple approach; tell us what you need, and we’ll build it. Need servers with enough processing prowess to power deep learning? We’ve got you covered. Looking to stock your astrophysics lab with enough compute power to study black holes and unlock the secrets of the universe? Meet the R740.

So when given the opportunity to talk shop and swap ideas with some of the biggest influencers in the industry, we couldn’t pass it up. Last week we had the pleasure to host a group of 12 bloggers, analysts, authors, and IT experts as part of Tech Field Day 16. We got to share our innovations in server automation and absorb some invaluable feedback on where the industry’s headed, how demands are evolving, and where our solutions have room to grow. Here’s where the conversation went, and what we learned along the way.

Our day began with a look at our systems management portfolio from Kevin Noreen, our senior director of product management. He unpacked some of the challenges and frustrations that have crept into today’s IT infrastructure; the sluggishness of rolling out new services; the overwhelming complexity of the data center; and the disruptions and loss of revenue that results from frequent downtime. Kevin then went into how we’re focused on solving these issues by simplifying and automating the entire process with management tools that unite the PowerEdge portfolio.

We then hit the ground running with in-depth demos of iDRAC9 and OpenManage mobile from Doug Iler and Manoj Malhotra. Our TFD guests were quick to live Tweet their thoughts on the updated web-based UI, remarking on its speed and simplicity – even joking that a tool this fast couldn’t possibly be iDRAC. When they got a hands-on look at OpenManage Mobile and its anytime/anywhere capabilities, some pointed out how great power (unfortunately) often comes with great responsibility.

Our product manager for embedded management automation, Paul Rubin, then went deep into RESTful APIs, Redfish, and the unique challenges of customers he calls “the automators” – those migrating from vendor-specific consoles into the world of multi-vendor data centers who would benefit the most from automation. Paul covered how we’re working to pair the right tools with open, industry standards to bring simplicity to the most complex environments.

Brian Doty, our sr. consultant on PowerEdge management was next up with an overview on our next-generation OpenManage Enterprise tool. An update on our popular OM Essentials, released in beta back in 2011, OM Enterprise provides full lifecycle management of Dell EMC servers, as well as monitoring of 3^rd party storage, compute and networking. Like with our web-based iDRAC9, a lot of the social conversation focused on the improved interface and a bit of recognition for the empathy behind everything we do.

Our final presentation from Ray Hebert sparked the day’s most engaging conversation, with our delegates sharing their views on where the industry is headed, and our experts giving their take on how we’re responding to the changing landscape. If you watch one video from Tech Field Day 16, make it this one.

Overall, our influencers were open and honest with their feedback on what we’ve done right, and where we need to course correct. That shared knowledge and the willingness to listen and learn more is what made TFD16 such a monumental success.

Share your questions, feedback, victories, and failures with us at @DellEMCservers and let’s keep this conversation going.

Dell EMC knows that the cloud is a key element of any modern data protection solution. That’s why our best-in-breed protection storage platforms enable users to easily extend to the cloud to benefit from the economics & agility that it can provide.

For modern disaster recovery, Dell EMC offers Data Domain Cloud Disaster Recovery (DD CDR) to copy backed-up VMs to the public cloud. And for long-term retention, Dell EMC offers Data Domain Cloud Tier (DD Cloud Tier) – which now supports additional cloud service providers as well as new support for highly-requested workloads. In this blog, we will focus on DD Cloud Tier.

DD Cloud Tier helps simplify and automate an organization’s path to the cloud with automated and efficient movement of long-term retention data, thanks to its seamless integration and API extensibility. DD Cloud Tier sets Data Domain apart as the only protection storage offering that can natively-tier deduplicated data to the public, private or hybrid cloud for long-term retention.¹ No separate cloud gateway or virtual appliance is required – which means that customers do not have to worry about any additional physical footprint or management overhead, and will see the benefits from Dell EMC’s advanced deduplication in their cloud environment.

DD Cloud Tier helps enterprises ensure that long-term retention data is protected with modern efficiency no matter what happens. For a complete Dell Technologies solution, Virustream Storage Cloud & Dell EMC Elastic Cloud Storage (ECS) are both supported options for your long-term cloud retention needs. A number of third-party cloud service providers are supported as well, including Amazon Web Services (AWS) and Microsoft Azure.

Now with DD OS 6.1.1, Dell EMC is expanding cloud provider support for DD Cloud Tier to include Azure Government Cloud, IBM Cloud Object Storage (Standard), and Ceph Object Storage. With the ability to native-tier deduplicated long-term retention data to these new options, Dell EMC continues to deliver flexible protection with a wide ecosystem of both enterprise & homegrown applications as well as cloud service providers. You can even tier to two separate clouds from the same Data Domain system if you desire, allowing you to create the modern long-term cloud retention solution that is best for your organization’s needs.

Furthermore, DD OS 6.1.1 expands on the existing DD Cloud Tier support for IBM’s TSM Virtual Tape Library (VTL) workloads with support for Dell EMC Networker and IBMi VTL workloads. This means that Data Domain VTL users will now be able to extend their TSM, IBMi and Networker VTL workloads to the cloud for long-term cloud retention along with the rest of their data ready to be held for retention. With minimal changes to workflow, you can quickly & easily replace your Physical Tape Library infrastructure with the Data Domain VTL supported long-term retention to Cloud workflow. This year is the ideal time to finally retire any remaining tape infrastructure with this expanded VTL support via DD Cloud Tier.

To learn more about Dell EMC Data Domain and DD Cloud Tier, please visit the Dell EMC Store to compare products and follow @DellEMCProtect on Twitter for the latest announcements, customer case studies and topical content.

¹ Based on internal analysis, November 2016