Dell Technologies is unveiling a series of innovations across its server, storage, and data protection portfolios that empower data center modernization in the AI era. Needing to support the nuances of both traditional and modern workloads—all while mitigating against evolving cyber risk—Dell’s latest offerings enable a new approach to IT infrastructure that values performance, security, scalability, and simplicity.
These innovations from Dell were prompted by the “incredible amount of change and the pace of change that our customers are seeing in their technology space,” noted Varun Chhabra, senior vice president, ISG Product Marketing. Managing both traditional and modern workloads while meeting various demands of AI technology—such as an open ecosystem, efficient resource utilization, a consistent, shared data layer, and more—is a difficult task.
A disaggregated architecture is the key toward overcoming these infrastructural challenges, according to Chhabra, where compute, storage, and networking are abstracted into shared resource pools to boost scalability, efficiency, and flexibility. Dell’s new offerings target different aspects of the disaggregated infrastructure stack, ensuring organizations can effectively tackle the intricacies of modern IT.
The first of these innovations include new Dell PowerEdge servers with Intel Xeon 6 Processors and P-cores, offering single and double-socket servers in 1U and 2U form factors. These powerful new servers “offer 2.5 times more power and more cores compared to their predecessors, enabling enhanced computational power for demanding applications,” said Chhabra.
“And because they're leveraging these latest Intel Xeon 6 Processors, they are also applicable for…scaling AI workloads as well as traditional workloads, offering customers greater flexibility—no matter what kind of workloads they're looking to run,” Chhabra continued.
The Dell PowerEdge R470, R570, R670 and R770 servers offer:
- Improved workload consolidation of legacy platforms, ultimately freeing up power and up to 80% of space per 42U rack with the Dell PowerEdge R770, as well as cutting energy costs and greenhouse gas emissions by up to half while supporting up to 50% more cores per processors and 67% increased performance
- Record-breaking Intel performance per watt, driving increased performance while offering energy cost savings
- Future-ready designs with a Modular Hardware System (DC-MHS) architecture that standardizes server design to support later integrations
- Streamlined management paired with robust protection through Dell OpenManage enhancements and Integrated Dell Remote Access Controller (IDRAC 10) updates, including real-time monitoring
The next innovation includes enhancements to Dell PowerStore, Dell’s intelligent, adaptable storage for block, file, vVols, and container workloads. As an automated, highly programmable platform uniquely suited for disaggregated architectures, according to Dell, Dell PowerStore enables:
- AI-powered analytics that optimize efficiency and performance through Smart Support, reducing costs and manual effort
- Enhanced zero-trust security with control access and boost availability with DoD smart card authentication support, automated certificate renewal, and enhanced Storage Direct Protection integrations (delivering up to 4x faster backup restores)
- Advanced file system support that enhances system performance, delivering advanced file management capabilities, robust data protection with secure file snapshots, capacity insights for smarter storage planning, and streamlined migration from Dell Unity systems
This release also debuts the next generation of Dell ObjectScale, the industry’s highest-performing object platform, according to Dell. In modernizing the Dell ObjectScale architecture, Dell has augmented the solution to deliver the massive scalability, performance, and efficiency necessary for AI workloads. New capabilities include:
- Industry-leading AI workload performance of ObjectScale XF960, offering up to 2x greater throughput per node than the closest competitor and up to 8x greater density than previous-generation all-flash systems
- Accelerated modern workloads including media ingest, backups, and AI model training with 83% faster read throughput
- Advanced efficiency and resiliency that makes operating and securing AI data lakes easy, delivering multi-site federation, copy-to-cloud, geo-replication, global namespace, and data governance capabilities
“I've seen a huge wave of interest and adoption in object storage for the new wave of AI applications and use cases that we're seeing both at AI-native companies and inside enterprises experimenting with AI,” said Martin Glynn, senior director, product management, unstructured data, Dell. “The new Dell object scale platform is really helping these large operations deliver for the incredible amounts of data that they're now working with storing and creating at scale.”
Enhancements to Dell PowerScale, the world's most secure, flexible and efficient scale-out NAS, according to Dell, perfect its applicability for AI operations. These advancements include:
- High density all-flash storage, improving performance-per-terabyte and supporting massive AI throughput
- Hybrid and archive nodes that deliver reduced latency and improved performance, enabling customers to future-proof their data centers and retain AI training data longer
“With recent advancements we've made in both the software and hardware architecture, the platform can now deliver up to 220% faster data ingestion and up to 99% faster data retrieval overall,” said Glynn. “We continue to be the number one storage vendor for scale-out file storage.”
Finally, Dell is introducing updates to Dell PowerProtect engineered to help its customers fortify their cyber resilience while driving cost efficiency. These data protection offerings include:
- Dell PowerProtect DD6410 offers scalable and efficient data protection ideal for commercial, small business, and remote site environments
- Dell PowerProtect All-Flash Ready Node innovates in all-flash performance and efficiency, delivering more secure and efficient data protection with a 220 TB capacity system
- PowerProtect Data Manager updates empower strengthened enterprise resilience with faster security risk identification as well as the ability to manage Microsoft Hyper-V and Red Hat OpenShift Virtualization virtual machine backups with streamlined archival to Dell ObjectScale
To learn more about Dell’s latest innovations, please visit https://www.dell.com/en-us.