Digital transformation is not only changing businesses and operating models, it’s putting more pressure on IT organizations to automate. Many IT teams have already achieved some efficiencies by virtualizing and automating compute resources. However, the management and delivery of provisioned resources on top of critical compute, storage, network, and most importantly, data protection resources need improvement. Automation solves many of these problems. Automation enables IT agility in a way that’s standardized, consistent, scalable, repeatable, and secure. A fully automated environment can reduce the time it takes to deliver production-ready resources to business stakeholders from weeks to less than a day.
Automated and Orchestrated Cloud Data Protection
To keep up with the demands of the business, organizations need a modern data center with a unified platform for managing private, public, hybrid cloud and multi-cloud environments. With VMware vRealize Suite (vRS), the foundation of the VMware Cloud Management Platform (CMP), is designed to help your organization gain the agility and speed that are essential to claiming and maintaining a competitive advantage. At the same time, the IT team gets the tools they need to manage uptime, performance, and cost of infrastructure and applications.
As more users adopt VMware and VMware vRealize Automation (vRA), Dell EMC’s deep integration with VMware’s user interface becomes more and more important. Pair VMware vRealize Suite with Dell EMC Data Protection and the solution offers automation, governance and compliance for users with the deepest integration points for your cloud orchestration portal.
Automate and Simplify Data Protection
The vRA Data Protection Extension from Dell EMC delivers Backup as a Service and self-service data protection for VMware environments. The extension offers data protection natively as part of vRA Advanced Services and all data protection tasks occur from within the vRA UI. Data protection is embedded into the blueprints, ensuring that data protection is automatically included during the deployment of applications and compute services. The extension also supports application consistent backup and recovery through built in agents.
Benefits of vRA and Dell EMC’s vRA Data Protection extension:
Data protection offered as part of vRA advanced service
Application consistency
Backup as a Service with Self-service data protection
Business agility
Get transparency and control over the costs/ quality of IT services
Control/optimize IT budget
Align IT with business priorities
Ensure automated data governance and compliance
Our experts say about Dell EMC Certification Exams
Every few years a new-hype technology becomes the shining star. It sucks all the oxygen out of the room and becomes the headline darling for a while. The list of technologies that move the needle forward on managing the business better or help to grow a business are impressive. They provide great gains, but sometimes have a shelf life. This might be due to an eventual lack of impressive results. But more often, they are displaced by a newer, shinier technology that simply does their job better, faster and stronger. Business management software is but one example market that is no stranger to, and beneficiary of, new tech, and the gutter is littered with market losers that failed to adapt.
Harvard Business Review recently published an article that points to the peril businesses will face if they don’t adopt AI sooner than later. This initially sounds like fear-mongering journalistic headlines, but they have a few very fine and accurate points. They aren’t claiming AI is the end all be all, but are a natural progression. All the latest shiny tech tools have matured over time to build the AI tools that exist today. They are natural accretions instead of massive replacements. On the flipside, these risks could be disruptive, dilutive, or outright company ending.
Are you ready to start with AI now? Or are you planning to wait?
My recommendation? Start now.
Now, let me tell you why.
First, AI systems are accretive. One doesn’t wake up one day with a PhD, completing Ironman Kona, or implementing fully successful AI systems. These things take time. There is a life cycle similar to the crawl, walk, and run analogy of how companies can move from introducing AI, implementing successful models, and then building a fully successful scaled AI implementation. Scaled AI implementations aren’t a few Data Scientists with a handful of GPUs that sporadically create successful models that implement one off results. There is a holistic environment where Data Scientists and Data Engineers can label and wrangle data, visualize results, create models, and review efficacy of those models at scale. This might be multiple models trained off of large data sets per day for each Data Scientist and constant wrangling by Data Engineers.
The latest #RapidsAI announcement from Nvidia found here targeting GPUs for Data Science and Engineering is certain to provide yet another disruption in the changing environment. It is another game-changing evolution that is modernizing Data Science and Data Engineering tools. The efficiency of accelerating and scaling Data Engineering tasks with GPUs will take time to roll through environments, however. This is part of the accretive nature of building the large environments. Like Rapids, there will always be a next new innovation.
Second, Governance doesn’t happen overnight. Do not confuse governance of AI and advanced analytics with regulatory related oversite. They are complimentary, but not exclusive. Good governance of advanced analytics includes reviews for bias (or the chance a model has some inherent incorrect assumptions and affiliations), for outdated models (where the demographic or historical data set on which is was built has materially changed), and for alignment (where the model and results are in line with the companies mission and don’t broadcast an incorrect statement about the company).
In my work with the automotive industry around ADAS (Advanced Driver Assistance Systems), most of the major model systems for the OEMs and Tier 1 ADAS manufacturers are built for a daily recalibration. To be more precise, they have created an SLA and environment where they can re-train the entire simulation of a model in a single day…. This is an example of an industry where regulatory governance (of safety) is currently limited (but coming). By anticipating the need for fast turn-around, to quickly address any sudden safety issues, their AI governance is ready for any future changes any government may mandate. The ability to get products to market sooner is a bonus. This is what a mature AI governance looks like.
Third and probably the most under thought of is the investment path into AI. Regularly I am approached by technology managers struggling to insource their AI endeavor. All to often these companies rushed onto the AI bandwagon without fully mapping the path. These companies all too often relied on a 3rd party’s fully embedded AI technology to bootstrap their effort. This accelerated their first steps into the AI environment and bought them speed in the first bullet above. Unfortunately, this often comes at the lack of any intellectual property (IP). At the end of the day, all the IP is owned by the 3rd party – leaving the company’s product differentiation controlled someone else’s technology. This is often strategically challenging and often leads to issues around cost or around how the company wants to inevitably mature the technology into its own offering. They cannot as they do not own the IP. This is the difference between a platform as a service (PAAS) model where you consume the infrastructure and own the technology and a software as a service (SAAS) model where you only own specific models built on someone else’s technology. It is important to understand the difference and the impact to your business.
Our experts say about Dell EMC Certification Exams
Surveillance is rapidly changing across the world, and the technology supporting it is getting pretty complex fast. Gone are the days of analog cameras and single-person control rooms. Today, effective surveillance spans an interconnected, intelligent ecosystem of high-definition imaging, multi-modal sensors, data-sharing networks, and powerful analytics—a combination resulting in insights derived from digital images and video, otherwise known as “computer vision.”
Industries from just about every vertical are leveraging advanced surveillance technologies to protect employee well-being, safeguard communities, and improve overall processes and services, but perhaps none more than these six key industries where surveillance solutions are achieving some of the most impressive results around the world.
Education
Just ten years ago high schools were one of the primary users of surveillance cameras. Today, however, we see nearly every division of education integrate and adopt new surveillance technologies in order to keep students, faculty, and employees safe—whether that’s from vandalism, theft, or a potential active-shooter situation.
On college campuses, surveillance is more than just a tool for safety. It’s become a powerful recruiting device and persuader for students and parents who are increasingly conscientious of campus safety. In fact, popular sites such as US News & World Report include campus safety as part of their college rankings, referencing safety data compiled by the U.S. Department of Education.
State and Local Government (SLG)
When it comes to government, surveillance is largely about safe communities. From small-scale town-wide initiatives to major country-wide overhauls, state and local CIOs are leveraging quicker, smarter, and more secure surveillance infrastructures in order to keep their communities feeling safe and to meet the rising demand for more efficient interaction and information transfer. According to a recent IDC report, intelligent transportation and data-driven public safety leveraging video surveillance and street lighting represent a quarter of spending by smart cities this year.
For many state and local governments the top priority is modernizing mission-critical legacy systems to support integration with newer, more secure infrastructures, and government leaders are seeing the successful impacts right away. For example, 78 percent of those who have deployed cloud-enabled solutions say they have lowered their asset-investment threshold and improved their ability to innovate. That includes decreasing response times to criminal activity and emergencies, deterring criminal and gang activity, providing digital evidence and documentation, and improving safety on roads and sidewalks.
Effective SLG surveillance includes counter-terrorism, and when it comes down to it, it’s about creating an environment where the community as a whole can feel safer, knowing police and other emergency responders are equipped with the best tools to react and respond quickly.
Transportation
Branching out from state and local government, the transportation industries that create and connect these communities share several of the same problems. Mass transit—including trains, subways, buses, planes, etc. all have crime. Theft, assault, vandalism, and terrorism are most effectively prevented and stopped with intelligent end-to-end engineered surveillance systems that not only document current crimes but deter them in the future.
When it comes to airport security, the first thought that tends to come to mind is Customs and Border Protection, but it’s about so much more—including safety and crime prevention at TSA checkpoints, baggage claim areas, tarmacs, and terminals.
Transit systems are also incorporating computer vision to improve surveillance for traffic incident management, first-responder alerts, analyzing behavior of travelers, and helping to eliminate overcrowding during peak travel hours. For example, busy subway systems can leverage people counting to alert engineers when trains have reached capacity.
Healthcare
Healthcare as a leading surveillance market may come as a surprise to some, but a remarkable determining factor that consistently comes out of industry surveys as to whether healthcare employees leave or stay in their positions is how safe they feel in the workplace. This is critical in such an extremely competitive industry where one of the largest challenges is attracting and retaining highly qualified employees—employees who need to feel safe walking around the hospital, being with patients, and walking to and from parking lots often in the middle of the night. Computer vision is also being deployed in healthcare facilities to help identify workplace-comp fraud and undue claims as well as to help prevent theft of prescription drugs.
An up-and-coming surveillance use case in healthcare is remote patient monitoring and digital patient sitters. Video surveillance and computer vision help provide round-the-clock virtual care to those that need it most while helping to minimize overcrowding in hospitals, giving patients the freedom to be at home versus a hospital bed. The right visibility of those patients in turn helps caregivers administer the best care possible.
Casinos and Entertainment
Casinos are unique in that they differ from most other industries in one major way: strict surveillance requirements are legally required to be fulfilled before business doors can even open. Because so much surveillance technology becomes a business line item, budgets are set aside. That being said, it becomes the utmost importance for casinos to invest in the right technology that’s reliable and consistently operating for business continuity.
For example, since each gambling table is required to have three cameras covering it at all times, losing one camera can force a table to shut down. A lost table means lost profits. Now consider if a larger percentage of cameras fail, then the entire casino floor or even beyond would be required to shut down. Issues with surveillance hardware or software can translate to substantial losses for a casino business.
Retail
Many modern retailers are using video surveillance in some fairly straightforward use cases like traditional loss prevention, but some are leveraging edge-to-core-to-cloud architecture and hybrid strategies to stand out from their competitors in a way that is anything but traditional.
Classic loss prevention is a cornerstone of all retailers—looking for stealing either internally or externally and reducing the amount of loss that occurs so that every dollar saved goes towards the bottom line. Retailers are now able to use computer vision not just to identify losses that are actively occurring, but to predict complex patterns like customer insights. For instance, what kind of display will engage a customer the most, or for warehouse-style retailers, what are the risks associated with stacked items that may potentially collapse and cause injury and a lawsuit?
End-to-End Surveillance from Camera to Core to Cloud
A recurring pattern across industries comes down to the difficulty in deciding what kind of technology stack and surveillance solution is appropriate for a particular organization and how to navigate the complexities of testing, validating and deploying an integrated system. Ideally, the solution needs to be flexible and scalable enough to solve today’s problems while effectively preparing for problems that may arise tomorrow—whether that’s terrorism, vandalism, theft, or a potential active-shooter situation. And on the flip side, what opportunities can be had from this new age of computer vision, whether it’s automated traffic alerts, virtual sitters, or customer-retention programs?
That’s where Dell Technologies IoT Solution for Surveillance comes into play. As the number one surveillance infrastructure provider in the world, we’re transforming the way surveillance technology is delivered with an open, holistic and integrated platform, offering customers their choice of devices, software, and analytics. Our lab-validated solutions built on Dell and Intel® technologies combined with our expert strategic consulting services and backed by the Dell EMC Global Services and Support team equip organizations across all industries—from public to private sector—with the right solutions, skill sets, and services needed to meet their surveillance needs today and well into tomorrow.
Our experts say about Dell EMC Certification Exams
The launch of five new Dell EMC PowerEdge servers presents fantastic opportunities for your business – see how you can use them to help your customers solve their IT challenges…
Are you up to speed with this month’s launch of the new exciting Dell EMC PowerEdge servers?
The five new servers have all been purpose-designed to help meet organizations’ specific workload needs while also enabling IT Transformation – and there’s something to suit every typical customer segment.
There are three brand new Dell EMC PowerEdge rack servers and two tower options for you to now introduce to your prospects and customers:
PowerEdge R740xd2
PowerEdge R340
PowerEdge R240*
PowerEdge T340*
PowerEdge T140
All these new products are now ready to ship – so it’s time for an end-of-year push to make sure all your customers are aware of their capabilities.
Introducing our new enterprise content server
The new Dell EMC PowerEdge R740xd2 is being marketed as ‘the enterprise content server’. The R740xd2 offers a high-capacity design that is ideal for organizations with data-intensive workloads like media streaming, messaging and software-defined storage (SDS).
The PowerEdge R740xd2 was developed to enable your customers to:
Respond effectively to data growth;
Simplify management across the data center;
Help ensure uptime and data security.
It offers large internal storage in a 2S/2U rack content server that’s purpose-built to support demanding, data-heavy workloads – everything from streaming media like video surveillance and content delivery networks to Exchange and SDS – all in a high-capacity space-saving design.
Built from the ground up to enable IT Transformation and featuring the latest generation Intel® Xeon® Scalable processors, the Dell EMC PowerEdge R740xd2 was developed to help enterprises compete in today’s fast-moving business environment.
It includes automated intelligence to simplify management and enable rapid deployment of new servers and updates. Automating server administration in this way helps your customers to reduce the time required to manage mid-to-large scale environments.
The PowerEdge R740xd2 helps deliver continuous reliability and uptime with enterprise-class drives and integrated security features – so your customers can use it to fortify their server operations.
In short, this new server is the perfect choice for customers looking for:
Cost-effective, high-capacity storage with two-socket server performance
Automated administration that’s easy to manage with proactive and predictive support options
High availability features (front-serviceable, hot-swappable drives) and built-in security to help protect critical data
Superb new single-socket 1U rack solutions
For organizations seeking single-socket solutions, the two new 1U rack servers now added to the PowerEdge portfolio are great options to start promoting.
The Dell EMC PowerEdge R240 is the perfect choice for budget-conscious small businesses and service providers looking for an affordable and simple-to-use dense server that they can rely on for web hosting and remote tasks. Marketed as ‘compute made easy’, it offers your customers affordability, versatility and simplicity.
Meanwhile, the Dell EMC PowerEdge R340 is an ideal entry-level option for medium-sized businesses that require an efficient, scalable, dense server to address productivity and maximum uptime. Combining efficiency and scalability with automation, it’s designed to accelerate business growth.
Take a look at our new tower options too
The all-new availability of two impressive tower format servers rounds out the expanded PowerEdge portfolio.
The Dell EMC PowerEdge T140 is a great entry-level option for small business owners who need an affordable and simple-to-use server – it’s perfect for file and print management and point of sale activity. This server is specifically designed to support a growing business, making the IT infrastructure easy and worry-free while also keeping data safe and secure.
For growing small or medium businesses with remote employees, the PowerEdge T340 provides high availability and storage – making it the ideal choice for collaboration and sharing needs. It enables your customers to run their operations reliably, manage their IT easily and to scale dynamically, so they can grow their business without limits.**
These exciting new products are all now RTS
The addition of these new servers to the already impressive Dell EMC PowerEdge portfolio presents fantastic opportunities for you and your business.
They’re all now RTS – so make sure you get up to speed and explore all the sales opportunities with customers looking for high-capacity and entry-level options
Success Secrets: How you can Pass Dell EMC Certification Exams in first attempt
Over the course of the last 12 months the Future-Proof Loyalty Program has matured into a comprehensive customer experience program spanning a rich set of IT infrastructure products including primary storage, unstructured storage, data protection and hyper-converged infrastructure. The program’s benefit pillars include technical capabilities, financial options and support offerings, with an eye to a world where your customers desire peaceful coexistence between on-premises and off-premises infrastructure (i.e. hybrid/multi-cloud).
For us, the big news is the innovations we’ve encapsulated to support one of Dell Technologies’ three primary corporate goals – customer satisfaction¹. We’ve been able to take a few powerful concepts – guaranteed satisfaction, investment protection, and timeless technology – and make them part of the purchase experience across the Dell EMC Infrastructure Systems Group’s (ISG’s) products.
For you, the big news is that the program now spans 13 product families, across three of our product lines, and offers nine pillars, many of which contain multiple features like our multi-faceted Cloud Consumption and Cloud Enabled pillars. So, how has our program evolved this year? We listened to your suggestions and are proud to share the progress we have made
What a difference a year can make – What started out as a way to make life simpler for users in a crowded midrange storage segment became a way to make almost everyone’s life simpler, and to enable IT infrastructure users to take advantage of the latest product technologies and financial innovations in a multi-cloud world.
“Dell EMC’s Future Proof Program allows the community to have a piece of mind for the lifecycle management of their infrastructure purchasing decisions. Being able to have an upfront understanding in place of the expectations on things such as data reduction services, maintenance support, data migrations, and trade in programs drives confidence throughout organizations that their IT vendor will be partnering with them for the long haul.” – Tech Data.
What this means for you?
Through timeless technology and our continued commitment to provide investment protection, the Future-Proof Loyalty Program gives you the confidence to sell Dell EMC. Seize the opportunity to use this program to start new conversations, handle competitive objections and claims, drive strong customer loyalty and at the end of the day drive more revenue.
Our experts say about Dell EMC Certification Exams
Thankfully, Dell EMC can guide you through every step of your IT journey – from helping choose the right server to optimizing it to meet the needs of your business. For small and medium business who might be looking for their first rack server, Dell EMC offers the PowerEdge R240. For medium and large business looking for an entry-level server for their data center deployment, the PowerEdge R340 is the ideal solution.
The PowerEdge R240 is a 1U single-socket rack server designed with enterprise features at affordable prices. It’s easy to deploy and ideal for:
File/print – offering the right level of performance and storage for transactions sent to the network to be printed or stored
Mail messaging – providing enough storage capacity to handle receiving and sending emails
Collaboration and sharing – ready to enable collaborative applications for sharing information and processes on-site or remotely
Web hosting – with the right mix of performance, storage, and memory capacity
To give you a sense of what the PowerEdge R240 offers, here is what one our customer had to say regarding their experience with this server:
“Our number one priority as a global service provider is to keep people connected anywhere, anytime, all of the time. For our web hosting requirements, we need a server that is efficient, reliable, and scalable. After long hours of rigorous testing, The Dell EMC PowerEdge R240 was able to handle our customer’s applications and multiple benchmarks without a hitch. In addition, this server offers the right mix of features based on our specific requirements at any given time. We trust Dell EMC to deliver technology leadership, product quality, and reliable support” Cindy Jordan-Ford, Vice President & General Manager, US & LATAM, Cogeco Peer 1
The PowerEdge R340 is a 1U single-socket rack server designed to boost productivity, scale at your own pace, and help you simplify your IT infrastructure. The R340 is great for file and print, mail and messaging, and collaboration and sharing. In addition, this server can be your backup recovery solution with features like hot-plug drives and power supplies.
The PowerEdge R240 and R340 are designed with customers in mind. They are built to grow with your business and offer leading-edge innovations that provide value today and protect your investment well into the future:
Increase performance with up to 50% * higher core counts. Customers can choose a 4- or a 6-core Intel® Xeon® E-2100 processor
Harness data growth with a choice of cabled or hot-plug storage. The PowerEdge R240 offers up to four 3.5″cabled hard drives and the PowerEdge R340 offers up to 8 x 2.5 and up to 4 x 3.5” hot-plug hard drives
Address data sets with a maximum of 64GB of DDR4 memory
Reduce operational costs with multi-vector cooling that automatically calculates and delivers the proper airflow needed for optimal cooling
Success Secrets: How you can Pass Dell EMC Certification Exams in first attempt
Dell EMC is announcing momentum in high performance computing (HPC) deployments and new portfolio expansions, designed to help accelerate time to insights in a variety of disciplines, including artificial intelligence, bioscience, weather forecasting and more. Dell EMC also announces that the University of Florida’s Center of Space, High Performance, Reconfigurable Computing (SHREC) has won the 2018 Dell EMC AI Challenge.
“Advances in IT are making HPC systems increasingly more powerful and innovative to accelerate the time necessary to reach new discoveries, but many still believe implementations can be complex,” said Thierry Pellegrino, vice president and general manager of HPC at Dell EMC. “Based on decades of experience with leading institutions, technology partners and strategic customers, Dell EMC provides an extensive portfolio of technologies that simplify HPC adoption to advance research and further democratize HPC. We remain focused on leading the way in HPC innovation and helping organizations of all types and sizes further advance expanding opportunities in artificial intelligence and machine learning.”
Dell EMC fueling research for human progress
Dell EMC continues to be at the forefront of helping customers adopt the latest HPC technologies to fuel a wide range of discoveries and research. Recent customer momentum demonstrates Dell EMC’s commitment to deliver world-class HPC systems that bring together the latest advances in servers, accelerators, liquid cooling and networking:
Texas Advanced Computing Center (TACC) at the University of Texas at Austin has selected Dell EMC to develop and deliver its new Frontera supercomputer in 2019, funded by TACC’s $60 million award from The National Science Foundation. At the time of its announcement, in August 2018, Frontera would have been the world’s fifth most powerful system, the third fastest in the U.S. and the largest at any university if completed. The Dell EMC PowerEdge system plans to combine several technical innovations such as CoolIT Systems high-density Direct Contact Liquid Cooling, high performance Mellanox HDR 200Gb/s InfiniBand interconnect and next generation Intel® Xeon® Scalable processors. Frontera’s early projects are expecting to include analysis of particle collisions from CERN’s Large Hadron Collider, global climate modeling, hurricane forecasting and multi-messenger astronomy.
The University of Cambridge has expanded its supercomputing capabilities with its “Cumulus - UK Science Cloud.” This new OpenStack system is the UK’s largest academic supercomputer, providing more than two petaflops of performance, powered by Dell EMC PowerEdge servers, Intel® Xeon® processors and Intel® Omni-Path Architecture. To help solve the UK’s most challenging data driven, simulation and AI tasks, Cumulus is open to all UK academics and industry and delivered in partnership with Dell EMC and StackHPC, a UK start-up specialising in the convergence of HPC and Cloud. It is funded with investments totalling over £13 million from STFC (DiRAC/IRIS), EPSRC (Tier 2) and the university.
The University of Michigan is deploying its Great Lakes computing cluster for simulation, modeling, artificial intelligence, machine learning, data science, genomics and more. The new system is powered by a Dell EMC-enabled HPC infrastructure built on Dell EMC PowerEdge servers. Great Lakes is the industry’s first system to benefit from Mellanox HDR 200Gb/s InfiniBand networking, enabling faster data transfer speeds and increased application performance.
The Ohio Supercomputer Center is deploying its Pitzer Cluster, delivered by Dell EMC. Like TACC’s Frontera system, the Pitzer Cluster will utilize Dell EMC PowerEdge servers with CoolIT’s modular, rack-based Direct Contact Liquid Cooling solution, which allows for increased rack densities, higher component performance potential and better energy efficiency. As a result, it will offer nearly as much performance as the center’s most powerful cluster but require less power and less than half the space. The system will power broad research areas from human genomics to the global spread of viruses.
Dell EMC eases HPC adoption with Ready Solutions advancements
Today’s HPC workloads require storage infrastructure that scales endlessly and delivers unmatched bandwidth at high concurrency for deep learning algorithms and AI initiatives. To meet these needs, Dell EMC is committed to expanding its HPC portfolio to offer a range of high performance storage options that complement its portfolio of Ready Solutions with the Dell EMC Isilon Scale-out NAS storage powered by the Isilon OneFS operating system.
The Dell EMC Ready Solution for HPC Lustre Storage and Dell EMC Ready Solution for HPC NFS Storage are now available with the new Dell EMC PowerVault ME4 storage arrays. Dell EMC built the ME4 Series with 75 percent more drives than the PowerVault MD3 to increase raw storage capacity by 122 percent, while also boosting read IOPS performance by 4X. Its modular design allows for flexible and custom designs, offering increased density, when compared to the PowerVault MD3, and the ability to scale as customers’ businesses grow
