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.

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

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.

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

It seems like everyone’s talking about big data these days to achieve competitive advantage through business efficiencies, improved customer service, and industry-disrupting innovation. Gaining access to massive amounts of information is definitely important for the modern enterprise, but what you do with that data is what really matters most.

To start thinking more strategically about your data, imagine you’re on an analytics journey that takes you to three exciting places. Each stop along the way will help you harness greater value from the data generated by your automation systems, including enterprise resource planning, customer relationship management, e-commerce, warranty management, and much more.

Descriptive Analytics

The most basic type of data analytics is descriptive analytics, which involves using data to gain insights into your current business realities. With this type of analytics, you can gain visibility into a whole host of things, such as what it’s costing you to manage a fleet of vehicles or how successfully your marketing automation campaigns are delivering qualified leads.

Being able to generate reports about what’s going on across the enterprise helps business leaders make better decisions. And as more data is collected, you can start noting trends and patterns that can give you further insights into possible future states.

Predictive Analytics

In this way, descriptive analytics becomes the springboard to the second stop on our data journey, the realm of predictive analytics. Predictive analytics requires a more expansive use of data, combining it with sophisticated mathematical models and algorithms to discern why things are happening and to facilitate more accurate forecasting based on different data inputs.

Predictive and descriptive analytics both rely on human beings to interpret data through engaged inquiry. We must look at the data and figure out what it means. But what if machines could do that work for us instead? Machine learning is the next destination you need to explore, because it’s opening huge opportunities for businesses to accelerate innovations.

Machine Learning

Machine learning is the capability of computer systems to adapt and get better at specific tasks without explicit programming. When massive amounts of data are being analyzed far faster than people can do it, businesses can more quickly and accurately do things like anticipate and stop security breaches and fraud, diagnose diseases, personalize customer communications, conduct scientific research, and much more.

A Data Journey, Completed

As an infrastructure company, Dell EMC offers solutions to advance enterprise organizations on their data journey. Hardware is often the key factor in effective data management, and our dedicated engineers are constantly configuring Ready Solutions to help companies achieve optimal performance with critical data storage and management systems, from SAP and ScaleIO to Hadoop and Splunk. These solutions include all the hardware, software, resources, and services you need to extract value from your data faster and with less risk.

A classic example of a company that has advanced its data journey with us is Mastercard. The leading payment solutions company started using our Ready Bundle for Cloudera Hadoop for descriptive analytics. Eventually, the company started using predictive analytics to anticipate customer spending patterns and is now using advanced machine-learning algorithms to automatically shut down credit cards and notify customers when their spending patterns look like fraud.

Contact Us Today—Or Meet with Us at Strata Data

All large organizations capture and store big data, yet many don’t have the systems and processes in place to capitalize on all information they have. At Dell EMC, we know that a successful big data project doesn’t begin with the deployment of a particular technology or solution. It begins with a business use case and a strategic roadmap that will take you from where you are today to where you want to be tomorrow.

To learn more about our Ready Solutions, contact your Dell EMC representative at 1-866-438-3622 or email us at data_analytics@dell.com. You can also stop by and see us at the Intel booth at this year’s Strata Data Conference in San Jose from March 5–8. Thousands of top data scientists, analysts, engineers, and executives will be there to learn how to turn algorithms into greater advantage – you don’t want to miss it.

Part Two – From the Company’s Perspective – Innovation Leads to Optimization

As discussed in Part One, a well-constructed CSR plan has the potential both to benefit global sustainability and enhance customer trust. While amplifying customer loyalty is certainly at the heart of any company’s game plan, the influence of a sound CSR strategy goes beyond increasing the bond between customer and company.

The push to create and maintain a business model with social purpose often leads to increased efficiency and the development of new ways of working, with the positive effects felt both globally in terms of the environment and impact on the community, and internally, in the form of increased ROI and optimized performance on a company-wide scale. To those corporations who have already implemented long-range sustainability strategies, it has become increasingly clear that working in conjunction with Mother Nature is not only easier, more ethical and more sustainable than fighting her – it can also be more profitable.

Take Dell EMC, for example. Our own CSR vision began at the very top. When Michael Dell started this business in 1984, he wanted to enable human potential through technology, and our corporate responsibility efforts are an extension of this mission he set out to accomplish 30 years ago. This has led to the creation of our Dell 2020 Legacy of Good Plan, a set of ambitious goals related to the environment, our people, and the communities where we live and work.

We have found that championing CSR has been the catalyst for the development and adoption of new techniques for doing business, which have helped to reduce our corporate environmental footprint and cut down on waste throughout every step of the value chain. Here are the results of a few of our efforts:

• Innovative, sustainable packaging – We are the first technology company to create packaging from fast-growing biodegradable materials such as bamboo and mushrooms. Currently, 94 percent of packaging materials (by weight) are made from sustainable sources, helping us toward achieving our goal of delivering waste-free packaging by 2020.
• Reinventing ocean-bound plastics – Our drive to keep plastics in the value chain and out of the ocean benefits everyone. Plastics collected from beaches, waterways and other coastal areas are being incorporated into a new packaging system for our XPS 13 2-in-1 and XPS 15 2-in-1 laptops. This initial pilot project will start by keeping 16,000 pounds of plastics out of the ocean, and in support of UN SDG Goal 14, we are committed to increase annual usage 10x by 2025.
• Recycling precious metals – A ton of motherboards contains up to 800 times more gold than a ton of ore from the earth. With this in mind, Dell’s Circular Gold initiative has teamed with activist Nikki Reed to increase awareness of the need to recycle technology by upcycling our reusable gold into a jewelry line. We are also piloting the use of recycled gold in motherboards for select Dell laptops, continuing our leadership in supporting a closed loop supply chain and circular economy.
• Reshaping delivery processes – Flexible shipping strategies can have a dramatic effect on a company’s carbon footprint. When transporting products to 180 countries at a rate of one system per second, we partner with SmartWay, who provides us access to thousands of product carriers committed to collecting and sharing data with the goal of transporting goods efficiently and responsibly.
• Promoting better work environments – We work diligently with our suppliers to ensure that high working standards and labor practices are implemented within the supply chain. Our policies and standards are aligned with the Electronic Industry Code of Conduct (EICC), of which Dell is a founding member. This allows us to work together with industry partners to drive systematic change in our supply chain.

As a concept, CSR marks the spot where positive global initiatives, changing customer priorities and a company’s bottom line intersect. Properly nourished, it has the ability to positively impact all three. Incorporating a solid CSR plan into long-range strategies makes good common sense as well as sound business sense. More and more, we recognize that customers are putting their trust in forward thinking companies whose innovative outlook strives to create a more sustainable future.

It’s accepted knowledge across industries that companies that don’t undergo a digital transformation will find it difficult to survive in the coming decade. Legacy technology simply can’t support the performance and virtualization that businesses need to operate efficiently and provide modern products and services to their customers.

But demand for modern infrastructure really begins upstream, with the Communications Service Providers (CoSPs) that own the networks powering business connectivity. The problem is that many large CoSPs are still operating on a wide range of proprietary, legacy technologies themselves. These technologies require a large number of people to maintain and operate them. In addition, these technologies deliver network speeds and responsiveness that are less-than-optimal for the businesses downstream.

To start the transformation process based on this starting point, CoSPs have the seemingly insurmountable task of becoming virtualization experts, sorting through hundreds of vendors and products to architect the ideal infrastructure, and implementing the new technology in an optimal way, all without disrupting existing services.

More realistically, CoSPs need a reliable, knowledgeable partner to help them set a digital transformation strategy, prioritize and select technologies, and undergo digital transformation in a way that sets them up for success.

5 Key Focus Areas

CoSPs’ most pressing need (and opportunity) is to infuse infrastructure with more cloud technology to make it faster, more responsive and more automated. To do so, they need to adopt a significant amount of compute and virtualization technology across nearly every aspect of their infrastructure, starting with the following five areas:

• CoSP cloud – Central Offices need to evolve beyond physical appliances to provide cloud-based services to customers. This means upgrading to virtual appliances, then implementing virtual network functions, including software-defined networking (SDN). This will serve as a mechanism to stitch services together as well as help scale the networking topology between virtual functions.
• Next-gen access – Today’s companies need higher bandwidth to support their day-to-day operations and provide products and services in a fast and reliable way to their own customers. Providing next-gen access typically means migrating from static and expensive multiprotocol label switching (MPLS) virtual private network (VPN) circuits and physical customer premise equipment (CPE) nodes to more virtualized CPE nodes and secure access technologies, along with software-defined wide area networking (SD-WAN).
• Operations and business support systems (OSS/BSS) transformation – CoSPs need to make it faster and easier to launch new services to customers by incorporating automation and telemetry and ensuring the systems they use to deliver network-based services have application plug in (API) -driven capabilities.
• Edge computing – To deliver services more rapidly across widespread markets, CoSPs will need to adopt enterprise edge computing in the next 12-18 months. There are a number of approaches for doing this, from evolving the Central Office with architectures such as Central Office Architected as a Data Center (CORD), to building an edge services cloud incorporating capabilities such as multi-access edge computing (MEC) to the evolution of the edge outside of existing physical facilities with modular data centers.
• 5G infrastructure – When 5G becomes available in the next 18-36 months, CoSPs will be tasked with a new set of challenges. The requirements of 5G are roughly between 100-1000 times the performance and scale of 4G, at 1/1000^th the latency, with significantly different economics on the monetization and operations. SDN will no longer be contained within the Central Offices, and CoSPs will need to embrace end-to-end SDN principles, such as network slicing. Network functions virtualization (NFV) will no longer be a centralized function running inside a virtual machine (VM), but inside containers or even running on top of bare metal.

The Partner CoSPs Need

Dell EMC makes digital transformation much easier for CoSPs. Not only are we a worldwide leader in compute and cloud-enabled IT infrastructure, we have the partnership framework in place to strategically and holistically guide CoSPs through the process of modernization across all five key areas.

Our experts give CoSPs the technology and tools to assemble the right combination of infrastructure and service capabilities to serve their business customers and remain competitive for years to come. Dell EMC’s focus on open-standards-based, disaggregated architecture means CoSPs won’t relive the mistakes of the past, trading proprietary solutions and vendor lock-in for a flexible, future-ready, scalable architecture.

The harsh reality is that most CoSPs won’t achieve the levels of virtualization and optimization they need without the right partner on their side. Dell EMC is poised to play a pro-active role in reshaping the future for service providers as they achieve digital transformation and provide the modern technology that will power the coming evolution of business.

Five short years ago, Hyper-converged infrastructure (HCI) was a disruptive technology, and today it’s become a mainstream IT solution for all virtualized workloads. Customer adoption and year-over-year demand growth – estimated at 60% in 2018 – are evidence this trend is undeniably real and will continue.

As the leading HCI system sales vendor, according to IDC, Dell EMC has played a primary role in enabling and supporting this transition, and our goal is to offer a broad set of approaches that deliver the best fit for customers’ unique needs. One example of this is our XC Series, the best platform for those customers who have committed to Nutanix software.

We are continuing to expand the XC Family, and today we are announcing XC Core, a new offering that provides customers with an additional way to acquire Nutanix software licensing while leveraging the benefits of the Dell EMC XC platform. XC Core, available today, uses the same Dell EMC hardware and software as the XC Series appliances while the software is licensed and supported directly by Nutanix. This alternative lets customers buy Nutanix software licenses directly from authorized partners, and then add the licenses to pre-validated XC Core systems that are configured, built and tested by Dell EMC. It also enables license portability across infrastructure components and separate management and support of hardware and software lifecycles.

The XC Family – comprising XC Series appliances, XC Xpress appliances and now XC Core – is arguably the most complete and robust platform for customers deploying HCI with Nutanix software. Here’s why:

1. The XC platform is based on industry-leading and proven Dell EMC PowerEdge servers that are configured and optimized for HCI and Nutanix software. These latest 14^th generation PowerEdge servers were built with more than 150 custom requirements specifically for software-defined storage (SDS).
2. PowerEdge server BIOS and firmware for the XC Family are tuned and optimized for performance to run Nutanix software.
3. The XC platform includes Dell EMC IP that enables streamlined deployment, rapid restore to factory settings and bare metal recovery, rich in-band hardware monitoring and management, 1-click firmware and software upgrades, and workflow orchestration across a cluster.
4. Customers can choose the Nutanix licensing and support model that is best for their needs while still leveraging the benefits of the XC platform.
5. The XC Family comes with an ecosystem that includes reference architectures, network validation tools and integration with other Dell EMC and Microsoft technologies, including Pivotal, Avamar, Data Domain and Azure.
6. Customers can rely on global service and support that includes support centers and teams in 167 countries, over a thousand spare parts depots around the world, and technical experts fluent in 55 languages.

Dell EMC’s HCI leadership is based on building a world class portfolio of industry-leading technologies and solutions to address essentially any adoption model for consuming HCI. Working with customers around the world, we know there’s no single way—no silver bullet—to address every opportunity or challenge. Customers know they can turn to Dell EMC to find the solution that makes the most sense for their own unique requirements.

Based on our industry leading portfolio, we’re excited to offer yet another onramp to Dell EMC and our proven technologies and support. As customers increasingly turn to HCI, we look forward to continuing to offer them the industry’s best options to simplify and transform their IT.

Several years ago the industry coined the phrase “big data” and we discussed what this new term meant for Dell EMC. We framed our thought process using the three Vs: velocity, volume, and variety. Taming the three Vs meant significant business insights and dramatically improved financial results for our customers.

But looking back, it hasn’t worked out quite that way. We are now living in a post-big data era where we are dealing with an increased compute capacity and massive data sets.

Over the years data took the steering wheel while compute sat in the back seat. What has been missing over the last few years (as John Roese points out in his 2018 predictions blog) is the reality of Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning. Our massive data sets are being processed by new systems that not only need to learn and reason with huge data sets, but also need to do that in a quick and reliable way at the speed of business.

Extracting the expected insights and business value from all of that data is a challenge – and an opportunity – for organizations. John Roese mentions that Big Data will become Big Intelligence; we need to embrace “Data Valuation with Big Intelligence”. We’ve moved beyond simply Big Data.

Why Data Valuation?

• “Data”: the Dell EMC journey continues to feature the handling of mission-critical data in all its forms, from mission-critical databases to unstructured data stores.
• “Valuation”: the process of calculating or reasoning about data’s value is a matter of computing intensity.

To process this critical business information in the age of data valuation we are going to need to process data differently. This requires the combination of storage and compute innovation. It’s a good thing we’ve already been at this for a few years!

In 2014, Dell EMC launched a data valuation research partnership with Dr. Jim Short of the San Diego Supercomputer Center. Our research findings, published last year in MIT’s Sloan Management Review, highlight billion-dollar data valuation examples:

• The most valuable asset in Caesar’s Palace bankruptcy filing is the Total Rewards Customer Loyalty database. It has been valued at one billion dollars by creditors.
• LinkedIn’s acquisition of Lynda.com was mainly a data valuation exercise that also exceeded one billion dollars.
• Tesco placed an internal valuation of over one billion dollars on their Dunnhumby data asset, which contained the shopping habits of some 770 million shoppers (Kroger purchased the data for less than one billion).

The key to performing this type of data valuation will be to continually reason and value data at speed.

The “brains” of the IT infrastructure will evolve to quickly and efficiently recognize, analyze and label data, know what data goes where, identify how it needs to be stored and accessed in the future, and decide where it needs to live specifically. – John Roese

Data valuation will require the combination of multiple forms of data: legacy mission-critical data, recently-collected Big Data, and emerging forms of IoT data. Combining all three types of data together is crucial: they each represent evolving patterns of business activity over time. John Roese explains the transition from mission critical to Big Data (second wave) to IoT:

All three types of data must exist in a way that enables compute-intensive valuation. This valuation must extend from the cloud to the edge, and in future years to gateway devices.

The “Age of Data Valuation” will also require additional innovations in the areas of data trust (e.g., blockchain) and data visualization (e.g., AR/VR).

In future posts, I will expand on these technologies and their relation to data valuation.

Technology changes, it’s a fact of life, and sometimes making a multi-year commitment can be a difficult decision.  The Dell EMC Future-Proof Storage Loyalty Program gives you additional peace of mind with guaranteed satisfaction and investment protection for those future technology changes.

The program covers the Dell EMC Storage Portfolio including; VMAX All-Flash, XtremIO X2, SC Series, Dell EMC Unity, Data Domain, Integrated Data Protection Appliance (IDPA), Isilon and Elastic Cloud Storage (ECS) appliance.

Dell EMC Storage and Data Protection offers unbeatable value with a modern, efficient and feature rich product portfolio at no additional cost to you with purchase of a support agreement.

Brian Henderson (@BHendu), Storage Portfolio Marketing Director, gives us the details on the 3-Year Satisfaction Guarantee, Hardware Investment Protection and Predictable Support Pricing along with 4:1 All-Flash Storage Efficiency Guarantee, Never-Worry Migratio, All-inclusive Software and Built-In Virtustream Storage Cloud.  www.dellemc.com/futureproof

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

The current draft of the coalition agreement for the new German government does not include keywords such as the Internet of Things or IoT; however, there are a number of references to Industry 4.0 that could be pointing to IoT. The passage talking about the “central goals are…the creation of open and interoperable standards” garnered much attention. It succinctly explains the actual, miserable situation of IoT; every service provider is following their own design for developing software for IoT solutions, machines, and robots. They could hardly be considered compatible with one another, which only catapults us back to the fragmented IT landscape of the 1980’s. Haven’t we learned anything? It is costly to implement these proprietary systems and operating them is ineffective. And it also enables hackers to flourish because it’s difficult to protect so many different devices and equipment.

However, the various manufacturers are not to blame. The problem is the lack of standardization, but of course, the question is how we can develop this if our sights are set on creating a new and dynamic market. There are many attempts being made by many players (manufacturers, for the most part) who are mixing up their own batch of standards in the meantime. Yet none has pushed to the forefront. Individual countries like France are even trying to develop their own standards. The next German government has also finally announced that it would start to tackle the issue (see above). It doesn’t really matter if these individual entities serve up specific results because it will only end up in a patchwork of standards at best, which defeats the purpose of standardization in IT. Cooperation with global standardization bodies and other countries will play a major role in the process. The current coalition agreement rightly states that “the development of common global standards and norms needs to be pushed forward.” 
But it’s one thing when politicians state their intent, and it can take a while before things are implemented.

Nevertheless, the delayed development hasn’t stopped market researchers from churning out forecasts using nothing but superlatives and publicizing their very optimistic forecasts. For example, BI Intelligence speaks of a five-year market volume of $6 trillion. Other analysts foresee very similar things.

It’s no wonder that we are seeing rapid growth. IoT offers many advantages: streamlined processes, more rapid response times on the market, predictive maintenance, improved capacities for machines/equipment, traceability of products, new and innovative markets, more satisfied customers, and lower costs overall for IT, product R&D, and companies.

However, these advantages exact their price: gigantic quantities of data. New analysis procedures based on machine learning and artificial intelligence are necessary in order to manage this amount of data and to extract high-quality (business) insights from it. Both technologies are being implemented more and more in IoT, and I am willing to bet that AI and IoT will soon be inseparable. I will even double down and predict that, in a few years, we will look back to a time when IoT and AI changed the very essence of how we live and how our economy works.

Automated driving provides a wonderful example. It will not only replace conventional vehicles and demonstrate the purest form of innovation, but it will also change the lives of millions of businesspeople who will no longer consider the time spent behind the wheel of their personal vehicles as wasted time. It will mean that they can finally combine their time spent at work with their commute more effectively. At the same time, millions of people with an aversion to driving or those unable to drive will experience tremendous gains in unlimited mobility again. Automated driving will shake the very foundations of our lifestyles.

Dell Technologies is also in the vanguard of IoT. Michael Dell confirmed this fact at a presentation of new IoT strategies last fall: “IoT is fundamentally changing how we live, how organizations operate and how the world works.” And these words have been heeded: A new business division for IoT has been created, and we will invest $1 billion in the Internet of Things over the next three years.

The recent news of side-channel analysis vulnerabilities affecting many modern microprocessors has, as you can imagine, generated more than a few inquiries from our customers about updating their PowerEdge servers. If you’re in the same boat, asking yourself “What comes next? How do I apply these BIOS updates?”, then this post should help.

First things first, applying a BIOS update to a PowerEdge server is easy. Dell supplies different tools so you can choose the method best suited to your particular IT environment and needs.

Updating One or Two Servers?

If you’re just updating one or two servers in a small shop, a BIOS update packages can be obtained from support.dell.com manually by keying in your server’s system tag and then looking for a BIOS update such as that shown in figure 1.

Fig 1 – support.dell.com showing a BIOS update for PowerEdge server

NOTE: Dell EMC downloads and driver updates are free. That’s always been the case and there are no plans to change that.

Downloading this file and then applying it manually to a local server is straightforward, but if you have hundreds or more servers in a remote data center you’ll want to keep reading because we have better options for you.

Updating Lots of Servers, Even Automatically

Intelligent Automation is a Dell EMC hallmark, and Dell EMC offers a range of OpenManage solutions that can simplify mass server updates. With Dell EMC Repository Manager, new updates from Dell EMC online catalogs can be automatically downloaded, as shown in figure 2.

Fig 2 – Dell EMC Repository Manager interface

You can tell Repository Manager when to download updates, which servers you own, and what kind of updates you want. You can also command Repository Manager to download different sets of updates for different logical or physical groups of servers, and then to separate them into repositories in different locations. This gives you the flexibility to support different deployment methods.

So now you have a BIOS update. You’ve tested it and you want to deploy it to the production servers in your datacenter. Now what? Dell EMC recommends one of the following approaches to automate updates:

• Use OpenManage Essentials or OpenManage Enterprise
• Use an OpenManage integration for either Microsoft System Center or VMware vCenter
• Create a custom automation script that operates with standard management APIs provided by the iDRAC with Lifecycle Controller embedded in every PowerEdge server.

As an example, OpenManage Enterprise, the next-generation Dell EMC management console, provides a simple click-and-go process to schedule and perform BIOS updates for thousands of servers (see figure 3).

Fig 3 – OpenManage Enterprise screen showing target servers to update

Those systems will process the update as scheduled and with no further intervention. If you’re new to managing PowerEdge servers, this is an easy way to efficiently update thousands of servers without a lot of effort.

If you already manage your IT environment with an existing management platform such as System Center or vSphere, our integrations and connections make short work of incorporating PowerEdge servers.

And you use scripts to perform IT operations, we offer resources on Dell TechCenter as well as open source PowerShell and Python Scripting repositories http://github.com/dell. These assets provide a good starting point for automation, and can be adapted to the specifics of your IT environment.

Dell EMC Advantage: Dell EMC provides the tools to deploy updates in a manner that best suits your needs. We realize that one method does not fit all situations.

Final Thoughts

Dell EMC makes a variety of tools so you can perform server updates quickly and securely, particularly as part of an automated one-to-many update workflow. And because Dell EMC provides easy-to-use tools that integrate well with each other and with third-party tools, they are readily adapted to a variety of IT environments.

If you want to download a slightly longer version of this post, you can find it online at http://dell.to/2CpiSEg. For detailed, technical information on performing updates on Dell EMC PowerEdge servers, please visit this Dell TechCenter archive: http://dell.to/2o04cSn or for more on OpenManage systems management tools and technologies, please reference the Dell TechCenter wiki at http://dell.to/2w4myYE.

Introducing a Single Product to Bundle Data Protection with VMware workloads in Amazon!

As more organizations continue to move applications and data to the cloud, the value of data protection is now more important than ever. Solid and reliable data protection workflows guarantee data is always available and ready for recovery when needed, and ensures little to no downtime for our customers’ business operations. For our customers virtualizing with VMware in the cloud, Dell EMC makes it easy to now protect VMware workloads on Amazon Web Services (AWS) with an all-in-one bundle that is cost effective and provides simplicity in purchasing and management.

Top Customer Advantages of the Dell EMC Data Protection for VMware Cloud on AWS” Bundle:

• Purchased as a single product that includes all necessary Dell EMC software for backing up and recovering VMware Cloud on AWS workloads
• Similar to VMware Cloud on AWS, bundle is priced on a per host subscription model
• 1 or 3 year subscriptions are available for flexible procurement options
• Industry leading Data Domain deduplication to reduce backup storage capacity needs
• vSphere integration and attractive pricing that makes it painless to protect VMware Cloud

Top Partner Advantages of the Dell EMC Data Protection for VMware Cloud on AWS” Bundle:

• Simplifies sales campaign by providing one complete solution to sell
• Improves sales cycle by reducing number of resources that need to be engaged
• Enables partners with upsell opportunities by selling more value with pre-bundled solution

Top Solution Benefits of Running Dell EMC Data Protection for VMware Cloud on AWS:

• Proven enterprise data protection for the enterprise public cloud
• Seamless integration with on-premises data protection
• Industry’s best-in-class deduplication leads to lower consumption costs
• Protects VMware workloads on AWS storage for increased resiliency
• Natively integrates into VMware management tools for the ultimate automation experience

Ways to Learn More:

• Get a deep dive about Data Protection for VMware here
• Check out the announcement of VMware Cloud on AWS
• Download and review the latest assets from this announcement on the Partner Enablement Center.
• Questions? Email us at askdps@emc.com

We are excited to go big and win big with you this year! Good selling!

The Dell EMC Heroes Program was launched at Dell EMC World 2017.  The program is designed to create a technical community between Dell EMC Systems Engineers and our Partners Systems Engineers globally.  The Heroes Program is all about you, our partners and connecting you with the latest information on our products, solutions and technologies.  Attend Quarterly Heroes Exchange events featuring the latest details on product features, roadmaps, and a solution showcase in your area.  Other offerings include a Semi-annual Partner Technology Advisory Board and Annual Partner CTO Summit, the Heroes Program is designed to enable you our partners to fully understand the scope of Dell Technologies and Dell EMC solutions.

I sat down with Patti Moy, Director Dell EMC Heroes Program, to get a mid-year update on the program and what to expect leading into Dell Technologies World and the Global Partner Conference.  Patti talked about a holistic approach to Data Center Design, not just storage, not just servers but everything in the Data Center.

If you’re a Dell EMC Partner, you can learn more about the Heroes Program on the Partner Portal, from your local Partner SE or by dropping a note to DellEMCHeroesProgram@dell.com; there is also a LinkedIn community here

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)

Today’s business world demands continuous operations across the data center, including mission-critical data protection procedures. As some admins have learned the hard way, any amount of downtime can mean a loss in revenue and productivity for an organization. This is why business continuity has become a top IT priority for global enterprises – and why Dell EMC has implemented support for high availability configurations in our latest generation of Data Domain systems for midsized and large enterprises.

High availability empowers organizations with greater resiliency through a second line of defense via Data Domain, ensuring continuous operations in the event of a failure. This month, Dell EMC has introduced a new promotion around high availability configurations for Data Domain systems, enabling customers to purchase their second controller at a 50% discount.

By adding a second Data Domain controller to your protection storage investment, you create the active/standby configuration need to achieve high availability. During any unplanned system downtime, a simple failover between the two controllers is activated.

Since the two controllers are attached to a shared storage pool, with one handling data ingestion and the other on standby, the backup jobs can resume in just minutes on the standby controller. Plus, this whole process can be easily monitored and managed via Data Domain System Manager. In addition to minimizing unexpected downtime, high availability configurations can also complete Data Domain Operating System upgrades without taking the system offline.

Gain this feature with a new Data Domain DD9800, DD9300 or DD6800 that is preconfigured for high availability. Customers can purchase a second Data Domain controller at a 50% discount from Dell EMC and our partners now. The promotion will run through Friday, August 3, 2018. To learn more about Dell EMC Data Domain, please visit the Dell EMC Store to compare products and follow @DellEMCProtect on Twitter for the latest announcements, customer case studies and topical content.

Are you leaving money on the table by not recommending comprehensive, must-have data protection in every proposal for servers, storage or VxRail hyper-converged infrastructure (HCI) that you make to your prospects and customers? You could be. Watch this video, also hosted at channel campaign playbook, explaining why Data Protection is a critical criteria when selecting a converged infrastructure solution.

In 2016, Dell EMC commissioned the Global Data Protection Index report about the maturity of data protection strategies of 2,200 IT leaders across the 18 most developed nations worldwide. The results of this landmark survey showed vast opportunities for Dell EMC partners to cross-sell comprehensive data protection to their prospects and customers.

You may recall reading this report, and it’s worth money in sales to revisit it now because of a key finding: While true IT transformation requires sound data protection, the vast majority of enterprises are still way behind the curve in their ability to provide that.

Data Protection Opportunities Are as Big as Ever

According to the survey, 36 percent of organizations had suffered unplanned systems downtime or data loss due to hardware/ software failure or loss of power. The average cost of those losses? $914,000.

Of course, since 2016, many respondents may well have deployed data protection solutions. Or they may have just gotten around to upgrading their data protection as part their 2017 plans and budget cycles.

Contrary to the above, many IT leaders and their teams are still too busy fighting their day-to-day fires and juggling multiple priorities to have time and resources to get comprehensive, mature data protection in place. That’s where you, as a Dell EMC reseller, can help by adding Dell EMC data protection into every proposal you make for Dell EMC solutions.

Fact is, with the explosion of enterprise data, organizations of all sizes simply must have data protection. And it’s absolutely essential for software-defined data centers.

Better Together: Dell EMC Data Domain and Dell EMC Data Protection Suite

To serve your customers as their data protection expert and consultant, you couldn’t have a better partner than Dell EMC. Dell EMC is #1 in the Data Protection¹ market. By combining Dell EMC Data Domain with the Dell EMC Data Protection software, your customers can cover the entire data protection continuum, including replication, snapshots, backups and archive and achieve up to 81% lower cost of capacity to protect² over 3 years vs. the competition.

With three core value propositions, it’s:

1. SIMPLE, providing scalable protection with single-pane-of-glass management to reduce administrative burdens
2. FAST, with optimized data deduping and throughputs to meet strict SLA backup windows
3. EFFICIENT, with highly integrated hardware and software to help reduce costs and better manage risks

What’s more, Dell EMC data protection portfolio provides specific suites, so you can tailor solutions to your customers’ specific needs: backup, applications, VMware, archive, and cloud-based, long-term retention. The Dell EMC Data Protection Suite Enterprise Edition meets all these requirements. In addition, when combined with Dell EMC Data Domain, your customers can achieve up to 20x faster backup and up to 10x faster recovery for mission-critical apps while eliminating back up impact on servers³.

To help you fully capitalize on this must-have, data-protection solution opportunity, we have an array of sales & marketing resources you can take advantage of. They include highly effective sales call scripts and FAQs that you or your sales teams can use to qualify prospects. Customer presentations, infographics and many more assets can help you and your teams highlight core Dell EMC data protection advantages.

To find out more about how our Dell EMC Data Domain and Data Protection Suite software can help ensure you’re not leaving money on the table in all your customer deals, visit Dell EMC Data Protection Sales Plays.

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¹Data Protection defined by Dell EMC as the combination of IDC’s Purpose-Built Backup Appliance Hardware and Data Protection & Recovery Software market segments, IDC 12/17.

²Based on ESG whitepaper commissioned by Dell EMC, “The Economic Value of Data Domain,” May 2017. Data Domain deduplication capacity savings based on ESG analysis of call-home support data from over 15,000 Data Domain systems deployed worldwide.

³Based on Dell EMC internal testing, July 2016 compared to traditional backup.