Cloud-enabled portfolio updates offer consistent experiences for on and off-premises solutions to help customers maximize value of multi-cloud operations and modernize IT

Story Highlights

• Dell EMC boosts cloud capabilities of platforms, infrastructure solutions, consumption model and services to help customers leverage multi-cloud strategies
• Dell EMC VxRail and VxRack SDDC advancements simplify and accelerate paths to the software-defined data center and multi-cloud
• Infrastructure portfolio updates enable customers to quickly apply storage, data protection and security to applications and provide a consistent operating experience across on and off-premises cloud platforms
• Dell’s flexible consumption options offer public cloud-like economics and align resources with workload requirements
• Cloud consulting and technology services advance cloud strategy and execution
• New Dell EMC Cloud Marketplace self-service portal offers cloud flexibility and customer choice through the power of the Dell Technologies portfolio  

VMWORLD, Las Vegas , August 27, 2018 - 

Dell EMC, the number one provider of cloud infrastructure,1 is announcing several enhancements to its cloud-enabled infrastructure solutions portfolio to help customers maximize the value of their IT ecosystem and multi-cloud environments. Coupled with innovation from across Dell Technologies, Dell EMC is delivering a broad portfolio of cloud solutions that caters to all types of applications and creates a consistent experience across cloud platforms.

The increasing amount of data brought about by mobility, artificial intelligence (AI), analytics, Internet of Things (IoT), edge computing, along with traditional workloads, is driving demand for all types of clouds, including public, managed and on-premises. In a survey conducted by Forrester, commissioned by Pivotal, a Dell Technologies business, and Microsoft, 100% of respondents are using multiple cloud infrastructure and/or cloud application platforms. Additionally, 99% believe a consistent, unified approach to deployment, operation and use of combined infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) and platform-as-a-service platforms enables better IT service to business.2 Cloud decision-makers in this study also said they look for integrated PaaS and IaaS with consistent identity and access controls, development experience, runtime environments and migration services.

“As more applications and traditional workloads move into various clouds, the proliferation of cloud siloes will become inevitable, inhibiting organizations’ ability to fully exploit business differentiators like data analytics and burgeoning AI initiatives,” said Sam Grocott, senior vice president at Dell EMC. “Dell EMC’s focused innovation across its cloud-enabled portfolio of platforms, infrastructure, consumption models and services helps organizations evolve more quickly to a cloud operating model for the modern data center.”

Accelerate IT and business transformation with Dell EMC cloud platforms

Organizations increasingly are adopting a sophisticated mix of cloud platforms and are seeking a consistent user experience to balance their unique needs, costs, risks and preferences. Dell EMC offers best-of-breed, pre-engineered solutions to provide a variety of multi-cloud platforms and reference architectures. This includes IaaS with VMware for traditional applications; platform-as-a-service (PaaS) architecture and containers with Pivotal for cloud-native applications; an enterprise-class public cloud platform with Virtustream; and, Azure services on-premises with Microsoft Azure Stack. With hardware, software integration, tooling and documentation combined, organizations can accelerate time to results, simplify daily operations and achieve greater levels of efficiency and transparency.

Right now, Dell EMC and VMware are simplifying and accelerating paths to the software-defined data center (SDDC) and multi-cloud with Dell EMC VxRail and VxRack SDDC hyper-converged infrastructure (HCI) solutions. VxRack SDDC, pre-integrated and constructed to deliver the latest technology from VMware Cloud Foundation, offers the ultimate infrastructure foundation for realizing a VMware multi-cloud. With new capabilities to match the needs of customers’ own workloads, VxRack SDDC features the VMware SDDC software suite pre-integrated on a wide range of VxRail hardware. It also features automation and serviceability extensions in SDDC Manager, with extensibility to a choice of public cloud providers.

With Dell EMC VxRail as a pre-engineered and pre-validated IaaS platform and infrastructure foundation for PaaS, customers can more easily and quickly architect, implement and operate a complete SDDC, including VMware NSX and the VMware vRealize Suite, with less risk. New options of the VMware Validated Designs for VxRail now support distributed multi-availability zones architecture and multi-site deployments with disaster recovery. This enables customers to further reduce risk and simplify operations and maintenance with a validated, standardized SDDC design based on VMware’s best practices. 

Additionally, VMware Cloud Assembly, the new software-as-a-service (SaaS) based cloud management solution component of VMware Cloud Services, will feature unique integration with VxRail to speed time-to-value. Once generally available, Dell EMC VxRail will have a synchronized release and be the first and only HCI appliance jointly developed to provide integrations that seamlessly work with VMware Cloud Services.

Create consistent operations and flexible deployment options with Dell EMC cloud-enabled infrastructure

Today’s businesses demand that infrastructure support higher-value IT capabilities, such as AI or IoT, to produce better business outcomes. As a result, Dell EMC makes cloud-enablement infrastructure a critical element of its innovations and investments. To support customers’ IT and cloud operations consistently across on and off-premises cloud models, Dell EMC provides the following capabilities:

• Cloud Data Mobility enables organizations to move data to and from cloud storage seamlessly, providing the flexibility to augment on-premises data storage with cloud-based storage. Updates to the Data Domain Cloud Tier for long-term retention help further reduce transactional overhead by increasing the object size written to the cloud. Dell EMC also has improved data storage utilization by way of tight integration with Virtustream Storage Cloud and Dell EMC Elastic Cloud Storage.
• Cloud Data Protection protects data residing on various cloud platforms. Dell EMC Data Domain Cloud DR has been enhanced for application-consistent cloud disaster recovery in AWS, as well as recovery to VMware Cloud on AWS. Dell EMC Cloud Snapshot Manager provides backup and recovery for public cloud workloads, and now offers protection for Microsoft Azure. VMware vCloud Director features a new data protection extension that now enables cloud service providers to offer an integrated VMware and Data Protection self-service solution to customers. Additionally, Dell EMC Data Protection Suite was named an Advanced Technology Partner in the Amazon Web Services (AWS) Partner Network and a Microsoft Partner Gold Competency in Cloud Platforms.
• Cloud Control allows environments to be managed from anywhere. Powered by machine learning, CloudIQ, a free cloud-based application that allows users to proactively track storage health, predict capacity shortages and detect performance anomalies, is now introducing support for PowerMax, VMAX, and XtremIO. This support is in addition to Dell EMC Unity and SC Series. New VMware integration provides virtual machine-level performance and capacity insights, and new mobile apps provide access to CloudIQ from anywhere.
• Cloud Data Services – features comprehensive data services spanning all file types for applications running in the cloud, including Isilon Cloud for Google Cloud Platform, Elastic Cloud Storage and Virtustream Storage Cloud. Unity Cloud Edition is the latest addition to this family, offering a fully-featured software-defined unified storage deployed in the cloud. These capabilities enable users to easily deploy Dell EMC unity block and file storage with VMware Cloud on AWS. Additionally, users can leverage the flexibility of cloud deployment to support disaster recovery and as-needed operational demands, including test and development, and data analytics.

Realize public cloud-like flexibility with Dell’s cloud consumption models

With flexible cloud consumption solutions through Dell Financial Services (DFS), Dell EMC makes it easy for customers to acquire cloud-enabled infrastructure and achieve transformational goals .3For example, customers may choose to leverage cost and flexibility benefits of consumption solutions to accommodate unpredictable usage of new applications and seasonal spikes that drive buffer capacity requirements.

Cloud Flex for HCI minimizes the risk of moving to Dell EMC VxRail Appliances or Dell EMC Cloud for Microsoft Azure Stack. It requires no up-front investment and has declining payments over time with no obligation after the first 12 months. Dell EMC also offers Ready Capacity, which provides on-demand storage and buffer capacity that scales to match usage needs, and Flex on Demand, which allows customers to deploy base capacity now and pay for buffer capacity as it is used. With the flexibility to consume only what is needed as an operating expense, customers can improve efficiency and reallocate resources to innovation.

Make the most of cloud investments with Dell’s proven cloud consulting and technology services
To help customers more quickly realize the value of multi-cloud environments, Dell EMC also offers a wide range of expert cloud consulting and technology services. Dell EMC Services consultants help customers create roadmaps, profile applications, implement cloud management and automation platforms and transition to a cloud operating model. Experts are available to help deploy, transition to, and optimize cloud technologies and provide comprehensive hardware and software support 24x7 to help ensure optimal system performance and minimize downtime. With Dell EMC Managed Services, customers can gain greater efficiencies while expert advisors manage the cloud infrastructure for them. Dell EMC Education Services can also provide the multi-cloud skills and validation customers need to successfully plan, design and manage successful cloud infrastructures.

Empower customer choice in one-stop with Dell EMC Cloud Marketplace

The new Dell EMC Cloud Marketplace brings the power of the Dell Technologies family together in one place. The marketplace offers customers a choice of cloud platforms, enhanced cloud-enabled infrastructure capabilities, as well as consulting and technology services, and consumption models in a self-service portal.

• Offerings include hardware and software engineered to work together to support computer vision and machine intelligence
• Promises to speed return on investment  
• New IoT ‘Connected Bundles’  offer channel partners new revenue streams

Story Highlights

• Expands uCPE capabilities of Dell EMC Virtual Edge Platform with support for VMware vSphere 6.7 software
• Enhances Telco Cloud Ready Solution with VMware vCloud NFV 3.0 to accelerate adoption, speed service delivery
• New Dell EMC Service Provider Analytics Ready Architectures with partners Cardinality, Zaloni help service providers gain real-time insights into operations and experiences

MOBILE WORLD CONGRESS AMERICAS, Los Angeles, September 12, 2018 - 

Dell EMC introduces enhanced solutions for the modern service provider to help expand enterprise edge service delivery, accelerate telco cloud adoption, and enhance analytics to create more revenue opportunities and improve operational efficiency.

Dell EMC has systematically increased its investments in solutions engineered expressly for service providers including communication service providers, managed service providers and cloud service providers. These service providers are in a unique position as they represent the foundation for the evolving consumption models for enterprise IT. Simultaneously, in an effort to become more agile, these service providers are undergoing significant digital transformation initiatives, just like the customers they serve.

“We aim to be to the infrastructure company of choice for all service providers,” said Tom Burns, senior vice president and general manager, Dell EMC Networking and Solutions. “Our latest enterprise edge, telco cloud, and analytics solutions with partners are critical building blocks to enabling a profitable growth path for today’s service providers.”

Expanding capabilities at the Enterprise edge

Enterprises big and small are flocking to next-generation universal Customer Premise Equipment (uCPE) solutions as on-ramps to the cloud. These new platforms can help improve service provisioning and reduce CapEx and OpEx costs by replacing numerous legacy fixed-function devices with a single, virtualized platform that can perform a number of networking and security functions. To enable uCPE functionality, customers need to add specialized platform software. To that end, Dell EMC is expanding the software ecosystem for its Virtual Edge Platform (VEP) family with uCPE software from VMware vSphere 6.7.

With VMware vSphere 6.7, customers gain instant access to robust, proven platform software coupled with extensive ecosystems of on-boarded virtual network functions for SD-WAN, firewall, WAN acceleration, routing, and deep packet inspection. This means now enterprise do-it-yourselfers and managed service providers alike have a set of tested, validated options at their disposal to transform wide-area infrastructure, optimizing it for cloud access.

Accelerating Telco Cloud Adoption

According to research firm Gartner, Communications Service Provider Operational Technology network infrastructure, software, and services expenditures worldwide are expected to grow from $165.8B in 2018 to $188.2B by 2022.1 To help maximize the value of such investments and complement what Dell EMC is doing at the edge, the company enhances its Dell EMC Ready Solution for VMware NFV Platform with support for VMware vCloud NFV 3.0 edition software.

VMware vCloud NFV includes the latest Dell EMC 14th generation PowerEdge servers based on Intel® Xeon® Scalable Processors, from the world’s #1 server vendor.2

Dell EMC Consulting can also help set up an automated deployment option for VMware vCloud NFV to reduce deployment time. This accelerates time-to-service delivery and enables a consistent, repeatable experience to reduce errors and complexity.

Other key features include support for Kubernetes to facilitate adoption of containers for service providers. Kubernetes is the open source standard for managing containers and a foundation for building cloud native solutions. In addition, leveraging Dell EMC’s strength on Open Networking, the solution also provides network fabric support with our key ecosystem partner Big Switch Networks to help service providers build a data center fabric.

Bringing Big Data Analytics to Service Providers

Modern service providers need to deal with petabytes of operational data on a daily basis. This data is critical to their internal operations and to measuring and monitoring the customer experience. Intelligent data use is the key to success in meeting the inherent challenges and opportunities. To master the volume, variety and velocity of all this data and derive maximum value from it, modern service providers need a system that can manage, analyze, and act on data in a timely and intelligent way.

Dell EMC introduces two new Service Provider Analytics Ready Architectures – one for Cardinality and one for Zaloni. The Service Provider Analytics Ready Architectures build on Dell EMC’s proven Ready Solutions for AI, adding software from Cardinality or Zaloni to help service providers put data insights to use across a variety of use cases, including network operational intelligence, customer experience optimization, location-based services, campaign management, fraud detection, and network planning.

Dell EMC Service Provider Analytics Ready Architectures help service providers combine real time and historical analytics, allowing data to be acted upon before the window of opportunity passes, help to break down data silos for efficient data sharing, and help democratize data by giving developers and data scientists access to data they need to implement new use cases.

By working with Cardinality and Zaloni, customers gain access to cutting-edge software designed to address some of the most challenging use cases, building a path from big data to machine-learning to ultimately AI-enable service providers. By running Cardinality and Zaloni software on proven Dell EMC infrastructure for Big Data, service providers benefit from a scalable Big Data platform designed to get into production faster and yielding up to a 2X return-on-investment when compared to do-it-yourself analytics solutions.3

Supporting Quotes:

“We share a common vision with Dell EMC to help communication services providers around the world to modernize their infrastructure and realize new economics – and the connected edge is a critical part of the modern infrastructure,” said Shekar Ayyer, Executive Vice President, Strategy and Corporate Development and General Manager, Telco NFV Group, VMware. Together, we have a winning solution powered by Dell EMC’s leading PowerEdge portfolio and our customer-proven VMware vCloud NFV platform.”

"Cardinality sees a real opportunity to disrupt the analytics space” said Prashant Kumar, CTO, Cardinality. “By working with Dell EMC on this new Ready Architecture, together we can provide a global, scalable and supportable AI-focused analytics platform that enables fast ROI for service providers.”

“Making sense of all the data that comprises a modern service provider operation requires modern solutions,” said Michael Steed, VP Strategic Partnerships, Zaloni. “The new Ready Architecture with Dell EMC will make such solutions available for rapid deployment allowing service providers to quickly operationalize and take action on their data lakes.”

Availability:

• The Dell EMC VEP4600 outfitted with VMware vSphere 6.7 will be available starting on October 1, 2018
• The Dell EMC Ready Solution for VMware NFV Platform version 3.0 will be available worldwide beginning on October 8, 2018
• Dell EMC Ready Architectures for Service Provider Analytics with Cardinality and Zaloni will be available beginning on October 10, 2018

New software and services help customers isolate critical data from ransomware and destructive cyber attacks

Story Highlights

• New Dell EMC Cyber Recovery software manages and automates isolation and recovery of critical data backups to protect against ransomware and destructive cyber attacks
• Helps ensure copies of most critical data are protected and available so business processes can be resumed as quickly as possible in the event of a cyber attack
• Enables and integrates with security analytics tools that leverage artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) to deliver extensive analytics of protected data
• Dell EMC Services available to advise, design, deploy and implement a tailored Cyber Recovery solution

Hopkinton, MA, October 17, 2018 - 

Dell EMC today announced Dell EMC Cyber Recovery software, along with Dell EMC Cyber Recovery Services designed to help provide a last line of data protection defense against ransomware and destructive cyber attacks. The new software includes innovative automation, workflow and security analytics tools to ensure gold copies of critical data are isolated yet available so business processes can be resumed as quickly as possible in the event of a destructive cyber attack.

Cyber attacks have become a common occurrence, the worst of which often result in extended downtime that can bring business operations to a standstill for days and even weeks – costing millions of dollars. While many large organizations have strong cyber security and anti-malware detection capabilities in place, the impact of not being able to recover business processes and data in the event of a successful ransomware or destructive cyber attack can be devastating.

“Malicious insiders and sophisticated cyber attackers, especially those that employ ransomware, are known to deliberately target data protection and backup infrastructure,” said Beth Phalen, President, Data Protection, Dell EMC. “We take a layered approach to data protection within the portfolio and with our Dell EMC Cyber Recovery software and Services, helping ensure true data isolation and a last line of data protection defense for business-critical data from a variety cyber threats.”

Dell EMC Cyber Recovery is new software that integrates with Dell EMC Data Domain protection storage hardware. It provides a solution that combines the benefits of data isolation and business continuity to help minimize the impact of a cyber attack, while providing a faster and higher likelihood of success in the recovery of critical data and systems.

Dell EMC Cyber Recovery automates the retention of isolated secure copies of critical data within a Cyber Recovery Vault (CR Vault), removing them from the attack surface. Serving as the ideal test bed, the CR Vault allows customers to perform security analytics on the retained data without having to perform a restore and potentially activating malware that may be present in the protected dataset. A new REST API automation framework provides seamless integration with security analytics software packages such as Index Engines CyberSenseTM which applies over 40 heuristics to determine indicators of compromise.

Dell EMC Cyber Recovery Services

Dell EMC also offers Cyber Recovery Services focused on providing a solution which is tailored to the customer’s exact data protection and cyber security requirements. This is accomplished through an expanded set of services including:

Workshop: During this one-day workshop, consultants share Dell EMC best practices for business resiliency with a strong focus on cyber recovery.

Advisory: The advisory service builds on the Workshop by adding development of a high level cyber recovery strategy. The customer’s current and desired state is analyzed to create a tailored strategy for cyber recovery preparedness.

Advisory & Roadmap: The advisory & roadmap builds on the advisory service with a deeper dive into customer’s cyber recovery strategy to recommend an optimized implementation roadmap. This includes developing a cyber recovery maturity model report, which benchmarks the customer’s current state against industry best practices. Also included is a critical materials workshop and information session to collect data on the customer’s applications to understand criticality to the business. These considerations will help drive recommendations of data and applications which should be protected by the Cyber Recovery Vault.

Deployment: New deployment services help maximize the capabilities of Dell EMC Cyber Recovery Solutions. They can be added to the ProDeploy Enterprise Suite or purchased separately and are available in two variations to fit customer needs.

Implementation: Dell EMC Services can also customize the implementation of the Cyber Recovery Solution to account for a variety of additional use cases. This can include hardening of additional Dell EMC technology, developing detailed operational procedures and implementing custom dashboards and reporting.

Availability:

Dell EMC Cyber Recovery software is now available globally through Dell EMC at no additional cost with purchase of Dell EMC Data Domain (DDOS 6.0.x and higher). Dell EMC Cyber Recovery Services are available today.

Customer Quote:

Bob Bender, Chief Technology Officer, Founders Federal Credit Union “Financial institutions are among the most targeted organizations for cyber attacks and our responsibility is to ensure the highest levels of security for our members and the financial assets they entrust us with. All it takes is for one successful intrusion or ransomware attack to seriously disrupt any business and if the bad guys are smart enough to know where your backups are, you’re left with no protection. Dell EMC Cyber Recovery helps my team isolate all of our critical data off-network, giving us confidence in our business resilience in the event of a worst-case cyber attack scenario.”

Industry Analyst Quote:

Christophe Bertrand, Senior Analyst, ESG
“The most effective plans for cyber threat resilience must include provisions to protect and isolate the data protection infrastructure. By design data protection systems are architected on the same networks as production systems and are therefore part of the potential attack surface. Dell EMC offers a smart solution that employs an air-gapped Cyber Recovery Vault, along with automated software that helps isolate, analyze and recover an organization’s critical data so business can resume in the event of a cyber intrusion or ransomware attack.”

Partner Quote:

Tim Williams, CEO, Index Engines
“No one can guarantee 100% protection against cyber attacks. When attacks occur, and data is corrupted, it is important to quickly identify the attack vector and replace bad files to avoid business interruption. Dell EMC’s Cyber Recovery solution has met this challenge by integrating CyberSense from Index Engines. CyberSense’s ransomware and data integrity analytics incorporates a machine learning model that will detect if your data has been successfully attacked with a great degree of certainty. Once detected, its forensic analysis tools will help determine the compromised user account and the suspect malware. With CyberSense, a cyberattack can be minimized and organizations can recover with confidence in as little as one backup cycle.”

New VMware integrations for converged and hyper-converged infrastructure automate and simplify hybrid cloud operations

STORY HIGHLIGHTS

• Dell EMC VxRail enhanced as an integrated cloud platform with support for VMware Cloud Foundation and fully automated network configuration with Dell EMC Networking SmartFabric Services
• Dell EMC VxBlock 1000 joins the Dell EMC Cloud Marketplace with new automation software and integration with VMware vRealize Suite, revolutionizing converged infrastructure (CI) operations by enabling administrators to expand resources in minutes versus hours
• New 25GbE top-of-rack switches added to Dell EMC’s open networking offerings to help customers meet increasing network demands and migrate to a software-defined data center
• Expanded range of VMware-based cloud platform and cloud consumption options now available within Dell EMC Cloud Marketplace

VMWORLD 2018 EUROPE – BARCELONA , NOVEMBER 6, 2018 - Dell EMC, the number-one provider of cloud infrastructurei , announces key portfolio enhancements and integrations with VMware designed to help customers further automate operations of their modern data center and hybrid cloud environments. These new capabilities allow businesses to accelerate innovation, simplify operations and speed overall IT Transformation initiatives.

The increasing amount of data being driven by both traditional and modern application workloads is pushing greater demand for automation and bandwidth both inside and outside the data center. Through collaboration and joint engineering, Dell EMC and VMware are enabling organizations to derive more value from their IT investments.

“Organizations that digitally transform with a software-defined and cloud-ready modern data center infrastructure are able to execute a powerful hybrid cloud strategy that provides optimal control, simplicity and cost tolerance to match their own unique preferences” said Jeff Clarke, vice chairman, Products & Operations, Dell Inc. “Working together, Dell EMC and VMware continue to enhance VxRail and VxBlock System 1000, to automate the operations of integrated cloud platforms, so our customers can use them to maximize what’s possible with their data – resulting in better processes, innovative outcomes and operating efficiencies.”

“Dell EMC’s VxRail HCI and VxBlock CI engineered systems are among the most simple and powerful means for customers to modernize IT and rapidly scale their VMware environments to support a hybrid cloud operating model,” said Rajiv Ramaswami, Chief Operating Officer, Products and Cloud Services, VMware. “Both VMware and Dell EMC are making cloud adoption even easier for customers by introducing VMware Cloud Foundation on VxRail and VMware vRealize Suite integration with VxBlock – both integrated cloud platforms that automate deployment and simplify hybrid cloud operations.”

Dell EMC VxRail simplifies networking, management and access to latest VMware innovations
Organizations globally are choosing highly automated, scale-out VxRail HCI appliances, powered by VMware vSAN to support their digital transformation objectives and need to scale operations rapidly and efficiently. Applications and data are increasingly distributed across edge locations, core data centers, and hybrid cloud environments. Customers turn to Dell Technologies as a trusted partner to provide a seamless, simplified experience through a jointly engineered digital foundation between Dell EMC VxRail and VMware. Through this collaboration and co-engineering, VxRail is becoming even simpler to adopt, deploy and manage.
New advances to Dell EMC VxRail include:

• Simpler networking deployments with the first HCI appliances to integrate fully automated network awareness and configuration during set up, cluster expansion, and day-to-day management with Dell EMC SmartFabric Servicesii . To deploy VxRail at any scale more rapidly, SmartFabric Services, as part of Dell EMC Networking OS10 Enterprise Edition network operating system, automates up to 98% of the network configuration steps for VxRail hyper-converged environments through integration with VxRail Manager and VMware vSphere. SmartFabric Services also enable customers to quickly deploy and automate data center networking fabrics while being fully interoperable with existing data center infrastructure.
• More automation for the entire VMware cloud stack, along with networking, to more quickly deploy and manage hybrid cloud environments with VxRail clusters. The only VMware jointly engineered HCI appliance with VMware Cloud Foundation, coming soon, VxRail offers an integrated cloud platform that delivers an even simpler path to the VMware SDDC and hybrid cloud strategy that is future-proofed for next generation VMware Cloud technologies. It allows extensibility to public cloud providers, such as VMware Cloud on AWS, and hybrid cloud container services such as Pivotal.
• Transparent systems management with all VxRail tasks available to be managed directly from the familiar VMware vCenter Server console, making it even easier to move to and manage VxRail from the primary management platform for VMware environments.
• Greater flexibility by supporting a two-node VxRail cluster, instead of the previously required three. This makes VxRail more accessible at the edge for larger organizations, such as retailers with limited requirements at remote locations. Additionally, new, flexible vSAN licensing further enables customers to choose their desired level of HCI software functionality and investment.
• Tighter integration with next-generation VMware Cloud technology with VxRail now available on the latest vSAN release (version 6.7U1), support for VMware Validated Design for SDDC 4.3 and planned Project Dimension integration for data center, edge, and hybrid-cloud use cases. Project Dimension will combine VMware’s compute, storage and networking solutions with VxRail, managed as a Service by VMware. Additionally, customers can now also use VxRail with VMware Site Recovery for push-button failover to VMware Cloud on AWS for disaster recovery.

New Dell EMC VxBlock Central simplifies CI operations with enhanced awareness, automation and analytics
Enterprises worldwide modernize their data centers and run their VMware-based clouds using Dell EMC VxBlock Systems—turnkey CI systems that bring together compute, storage, networking and VMware vSphere virtualization. Continuing this long history of CI innovation, demonstrated with the introduction of the VxBlock System 1000, new Dell EMC VxBlock Central software provides converged awareness, automation and analytics to simplify daily CI administration. VxBlock Central includes a single unified user interface for accessing VxBlock System information in real time. It includes an integrated launch point to VMware vRealize Orchestrator for automating daily operational tasks and a launch point to vRealize Operations to provide detailed analytics and an easy way to manage VxBlock storage capacity.
Integration between VxBlock Central and VMware vRealize Suite provides a strong foundation for Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) and a simplified path to implementing a private/hybrid cloud operations model on VxBlock Systems. VxBlock Central’s CI-aware integration with vRealize Operations and vRealize Orchestrator software, provides greater visibility into CI system status and time-saving orchestration workflows. It also allows enterprises to leverage an additional layer of vRealize software tools, including vRealize Automation, to enable full cloud service delivery and management. Using the vRealize Suite on VxBlock opens the path for enterprises to achieve a consistent experience across other Dell EMC cloud platforms including VxRack SDDC and VxRail Appliances.
On Nov. 6, 2018, a live announcement and CrowdChat hosted by industry analysts from Wikibon will feature experts from Dell EMC, VMware and joint customer Cianbro. The online event will be available for on-demand replay.

Dell EMC Networking for data center and cloud operations
As Enterprises and service providers modernize operations for virtualization, cloud computing, Big Data and the Internet of Things (IoT) there is increasing importance on, and expectations for the performance of, traffic within the data center and out to public clouds.

Dell EMC’s latest lineup of 25GbE-enabled S5200-ON top-of-rack open networking switches help customers take advantage of the 25GbE connectivity that is necessary to meet growing in-rack and storage network traffic demands from these new technologies. The S5200 family also helps form high-performance 100GbE data center fabrics for traffic between racks and provide a robust network underlay for VMware NSX network virtualization and software-defined storage implementations. The S5200-ON also features enhanced buffering, higher forwarding tables and data plane support for VxLAN routing.

Dell EMC expands integrated cloud platform options in Cloud Marketplace to accelerate IT modernization and Digital Transformation
The Dell EMC Cloud Marketplace integrates the power of the Dell Technologies family to offer customers a choice of cloud platforms, enhanced cloud-enabled infrastructure capabilities, as well as consulting and technology services, and consumption models in a centralized portal. When it comes to implementing a cloud platform, Dell EMC offers multiple options to align with customers’ unique competencies and goals.

Cloud Building Blocks allow customers to design and build a custom cloud platform using best-of-breed cloud-enabled infrastructure such as Dell EMC Unity and Dell EMC vSAN Ready Nodes, providing flexibility as well as investment protection. Dell EMC Unity is the first NFS-based external storage array family to be validated with VMware Cloud Foundation (VCF), and Dell EMC vSAN Ready Nodes are validated by VMware to run VCF on the new PowerEdge MX modular infrastructure. Reference Architecture cloud platform implementation options are designed to reduce project risk and speed delivery by providing a choice of certified components and configuration guidance. Integrated Cloud Platforms, such as VxRail and VxBlock, are pre-engineered, so customers can be up and running quickly while delivering the most streamlined operational experience with simplified and automated lifecycle management.

Dell EMC Cloud Marketplace features a continuously expanding set of options to help customers build their hybrid cloud platforms. Data Center Utility is a newly available Cloud Consumption solution providing organizations the control of private cloud with the benefits of public cloud consumption including elastic capacity, metered usage and an OpEx model. Data Center Utility is a custom metered usage solution that provides maximum flexibility for resource consumption – with or without professional services.

Availability

New Dell EMC VxRail capabilities, from VxRail 4.7 software, will be available this month via web download for existing customers and this December for new node deployments and expansions. Additional functionality, including support for two-node ROBO clusters and vCenter transparent operations is planned for early Q1 2019, followed by VMware Cloud Foundation and Project Dimension within 1H 2019. Customers can sign-up for the Project Dimension Beta now.

Dell EMC VxBlock Central software will be available for download in December by current and new VxBlock System customers. The VxBlock Central Base software license is included with the purchase of a new VxBlock System.

Dell EMC S5200 ON switches are available now. SmartFabric Services for VxRail will become available in December with Dell EMC Networking OS10 Enterprise Edition 10.4.2 and VxRail 4.7.0 software. SmartFabric Services are included at no additional cost in the Dell EMC Networking OS10 Enterprise Edition license.

Dell EMC Customer Quotes

Rich Gagnon, CIO, City of Amarillo, Texas, USA
“Moving all of our city’s 46 departments onto Dell EMC VxRail and Dell EMC Networking is substantially simplifying and modernizing our IT infrastructure. Our hyper-converged infrastructure, combining VxRail with Dell EMC switches, is so simple to deploy and manage that we’re able to be more efficient with our IT resources. This enables us to move from building and maintaining systems to creating innovative new IT services that are more impactful for our departments and our city. We are excited to see the impact that Dell EMC SmartFabric Services will have on our ability to be more agile and responsive to changing infrastructure needs and to simplify disaster recovery response. Additionally, being able to manage VxRail directly from VMware vCenter will make management even simpler for our team.”

Ryan Deppe, Network Operations Supervisor, Cianbro
“The new real-time alerts from VxBlock Central and integration with VMware vRealize are huge, making it easier to get information than before. We are a growing business, and having the new automation from VxBlock Central integrated with vRealize in my back pocket means that I can quickly expand the VxBlock when my management asks for it.”

Story Highlights

• Dell EMC and Nokia to help historic City of Delft develop a smart goods distribution solution
• Public-private project to use semi-autonomous, fuel cell-powered barges on under-used canals to help reduce traffic congestion and carbon emissions
• Platform will use world-class technologies from Dell EMC and Nokia for compute, storage, data management, connectivity, analytics, IoT and blockchain.

HOPKINTON, Mass., November 13, 2018 - 

Dell EMC and Nokia have joined as lead technology partners in a public-private smart city initiative to help the historic Dutch City of Delft reduce truck congestion in the city center using semi-autonomous, hydrogen-powered barges in existing waterways for ‘last mile’ transportation. This collaboration is intended to help reduce traffic, in turn helping the region meet carbon emission, sustainability and economic development targets.

The world’s urban population is expected to double by 2050, and this only serves to increase the demand on already stretched municipal resources. City governments are adopting smart city initiatives to explore innovative technology to become more efficient, better manage resources and develop new services that enhance the lives of their citizens and communities.

Dell EMC and Nokia, in conjunction with Blue Turtle Associates, Aratos Systems, Circle Lines, City Hub, SPIE, the University of Delft and the Provence of South Holland regional government, have engaged in a trial to create a Common Information Space for Smart City Logistics. The Common Information Space serves as a scalable digital platform connecting the entire logistics chain in and around the city as well as a backbone for the navigation guidance system. This platform will be built using world-class technologies from Dell EMC and Nokia for compute, storage, data management, connectivity, analytics, IoT and blockchain.

Many areas in Holland have fine-meshed waterways, canals, or water storage areas that are now heavily underused. With the development of quiet and clean semi-autonomous barges, goods normally carried by trucks can be transported in the city’s waterways.

For the project, an automated and digitized hydrogen-powered river barge will be connected and controlled by a new type of mobility cloud using Nokia’s IMPACT IoT platform and Dell EMC Digital City Accelerator Platform, complemented by hydraulic gangway technology from Ampelmann for on-shore loading and unloading. Testing will progress through 2019 with goal of becoming fully operational by the end of the year.

The project concept has drawn interest from a number of industries looking to meet logistic and sustainability goals including shipyards, package delivery, logistic distribution centers, mechanical engineering, offshore operators, catering and waste management. The project includes several anticipated benefits for citizens, including:

• Unburden regional traffic infrastructure in the Metropole Region Rotterdam The Hague (MRDH)
• Develop a clean transport medium in combination with “silent” cargo logistics solution
• Contribute to sustainable living and enhance the business climate
• Contribute to development and stimulate new engineering centers and manufacturing industries

This project is part of a broader strategic alliance between Dell EMC and Nokia focused on driving digital transformation in a variety of key industries.

Quotes

“Cities are looking for digital transformation solutions to help them maximize and better allocate their resources, provide a safe and sustainable environment and foster economic development. In collaboration with our partners, this Digital City project has the power to demonstrate how information technology that is open, agile, software-defined and data analytics-driven really can be a force for positive change in our everyday lives,” said Amit Midha, president, APJ Commercial & EVP, Global Digital Cities, Dell EMC.

“Nokia has been putting considerable emphasis on bringing the benefits of digitalization to asset-intensive industries, such as transport. This collaboration is a perfect example of how Industrial IoT networks can be used to connect sensors, vehicles and machines to take advantage of the power of automation to address a daunting societal challenge – keeping goods moving while reducing the carbon footprint of that activity,” said Laurent Le Gourrierec, head of Strategic Partnerships at Nokia.

“The power of this project is the collaboration. Working together with a team of brilliant young engineers, government partners and business professionals can really make the difference in achieving sustainability goals. As a team, we’re redesigning not only the river barge but the entire process of city logistics. We are proud to be part of this initiative that was made possible by The Provence of South Holland who provided the seed funding,” said Peter de Bruijn, managing director of Blue Turtle Associates.

Story Highlights

• Dell EMC HPC solutions power next generation research in artificial intelligence, genomics and weather forecasting
• Dell EMC HPC storage and compute solutions advance to address growing analysis needs of businesses, academics and extended HPC community
• Dell EMC AI Challenge winner, the Center of Space, High-Performance, and Resilient Computing (SHREC) at the University of Florida, lands access to in-demand Dell EMC HPC resources

DALLAS , November 13, 2018 - 

At SC18, 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.

Ideal for technical, big data applications, the Dell EMC Ready Solution for HPC Lustre Storage with the new PowerVault ME4 delivers excellent throughput per building block with on-the-fly storage expansion. As an easy-to-use and fully redundant NFS storage solution, optimized for HPC environments, the Dell EMC Ready Solution for HPC NFS Storage on ME4 Series will offer greater overall performance and a denser solution. Both solutions are accompanied by Dell EMC global services and support.

Dell EMC PowerEdge servers to support latest accelerator technology

Dell EMC PowerEdge R640, R740, R740xd and R7425 servers will support the latest GPU and FPGA accelerators to speed results in data analytics and AI applications. This includes:

• NVIDIA® Tesla® T4, the universal AI accelerator ideal for distributed computing environments. It is packaged in an energy-efficient 70-watt, small PCIe form factor. Powering breakthrough performance, NVIDIA notes that Tesla T4 provides multiple times the performance of traditional CPUs for both training and inference.Developers can unleash the power of NVIDIA Turing architecture-based Tensor Cores directly through NVIDIA TensorRT and cuDNN software libraries and integrations with all AI frameworks.
• From video content streaming to financial services to defense applications, FPGAs allow hardware to be programmed and re-programmed for optimization. In addition to the Intel® Arria® 10 GX FPGA support today, Dell EMC is now the first server vendor to qualify the Xilinx® Alveo™ U200 accelerator card, adding it to Dell EMC PowerEdge accelerator options. Xilinx notes, for machine learning, Alveo accelerators can increase real-time inference throughput for machine learning by 20X versus high-end CPUs alone.

Dell EMC AI Challenge winner

Dell EMC has selected a research team at the Center of Space, High-Performance, and Resilient Computing (SHREC) at the University of Florida as the winner of the 2018 Dell EMC AI Challenge. The AI Challenge, launched in May 2018, encouraged entrants to demonstrate practical applications of AI technology with a transformational impact on business, research or society. The winner receives 200,000 core-hours on the Dell EMC HPC & AI Innovation Lab Zenith cluster and a spotlight in Dell EMC’s booth at the SC18 conference among other promotional activities

SHREC is comprised of more than 30 industry, government and academic partners working together to solve research challenges in missions and applications that drive and can benefit from reconfigurable, high-performance and reliable computing. For the AI Challenge, the SHREC team was recognized for developing and demonstrating a heterogeneous computing (HGC) system that can support a complete workflow–data analysis and pre-processing, model training, deployment and inferencing–for machine learning and be applied to any application domain leveraging machine learning, including healthcare, business, finance, science exploration and more.

“For the AI Challenge, our team leveraged CERN OpenLab datasets to determine the performance of the HGC workflow with CPUs, GPUs and FPGAs for machine learning. The study showed performance gains of 1.45-2.22x,” said Chao Jiang, Ph.D. student leader of the team. “These early results were promising, and we are continuing to experiment with more complex 3D-image based techniques such as volumetric segmentation with 3D U-net to improve performance, as well as 3D GAN for accelerated particle-simulation.”

Dell EMC at SC18

To learn more about the Dell EMC HPC portfolio, technology partners and customers, stop by its SC18 booth #3218 at the Kay Bailey Hutchison Convention Center.

Availability

• Dell EMC Ready Solution for HPC Lustre Storage on ME4 and Dell EMC Ready Solution for HPC NFS Storage on PowerVault ME4 available now.
• Dell EMC PowerEdge R640, R740, R740xd and R7425 servers have planned support for NVIDIA® Tesla® T4 Tensor Core GPUs in the first quarter of 2019 and Xilinx® Alveo™ U200 FPGAs in December 2018.

Customer quotes

Dan Stanzione, executive director, Texas Advanced Computing Center, The University of Texas at Austin
“Frontera represents our third top 10 and fifth top 25 system we have deployed in partnership with Dell EMC. The success we have had together reflects our close collaboration and a deep relationship, with attention to every detail, that lets us repeatedly deploy at the cutting edge of technology on time and on budget. With this new machine, we will further push the frontiers of science, offering researchers an instrument with capabilities they have never had before.”

Paul Calleja, director of High Performance Computing, University of Cambridge
“Conventional HPC clustering techniques present pre-configured static resource pools which, for the most part, satisfy a limited yet important set of users. By enabling a cloud paradigm, including bare-metal, the benefits of a software-defined infrastructure encompass conventional HPC clustering, without sacrificing performance, and provide additional agility in support of modern hybrid cloud-enabled workflows. We are witnessing considerable user growth in such new workflows, and Cumulus enables our users with easier access to HPC and HPDA class computing in a secure and flexible environment. Working with Dell EMC and partners has culminated in one of the most computationally and i/o efficient resources in the UK.”

Brock Palen, director, Advanced Research Computing – Technology Services (ARC-TS), University of Michigan
“We’re thrilled to be working with Dell EMC. Users of Great Lakes will have access to more cores, faster cores, faster memory, faster storage and a more balanced network. This new cluster will ultimately provide improved performance, flexibility, and reliability for U-M researchers."

David Hudak, Ph.D., executive director, Ohio Supercomputer Center
“We worked with Dell EMC to create the Pitzer Cluster, a highly efficient, dense and flexible petaflop-class system. This valuable new addition to our data center allows OSC to continue addressing the growing computational, storage and analysis needs of our client communities in academia, science and industry.”

James Lowey, CIO, TGen
“One of the keys to Precision Medicine is being able to analyze the human genome, find abnormalities, then target them with specific treatments. Data sets using multiple inputs are becoming so massive, we must rely on Artificial Intelligence (AI) to help make sense of it all.  Dell Technologies is a critical partner as we push the science forward, and Dell EMC Isilon gives us a simple scale-out solution to manage and consume petabytes of data and to expedite genome processing from weeks to hours.  When it comes to research that saves lives, where seconds matter, we rely on Dell EMC.”

MetTel is a US-based CSP with around 8,000 enterprise clients, and has been very successful as one of the first service providers to bring SD-WAN into the marketplace. It selected VMware VeloCloud as its SD-WAN provider to meet the demands of its customers to provide WAN services with SLAs per application and virtual LAN from branch to application source. As it continues to evolve its network services into a cloud-native model, MetTel plans to lean on the infrastructure that Dell EMC provides, along with the full suite of VMware Telco NFV software to grow and sustain the model.
One of the key benefits of the ‘Better Together’ initiatives with Dell EMC and VMware is that it allows customers like MetTel to very easily transform from a hardware infrastructure to Software Defined infrastructure, taking the platform and stack and putting it into their network for rapid service deployment. And with both companies continuing to innovate on their technologies, CSPs can be assured that their initial deployments will result in quick time to market.

Featuring:

• Edward J. Fox III, Vice President of Network Services, MetTel
• Kevin Shatzkamer, Vice President, Enterprise and Service Provider Strategy and Solutions, Dell EMC
• Honoré LaBourdette, Vice President Global Market Development, Telco Business Group, VMware

Filmed at: MWC19, Barcelona, Spain

• New distributed architectures to support 5G, IoT use cases
• Focused on common hardware spanning on-premise, radio, core
• Deal offers glimpse at scale of complexity that telcos face at the edge

• Dell EMC and ADVA have joined forces to create a properly open universal CPE offering
• The venture bundles ADVA’s Ensemble Harmony Ecosystem with Dell’s Virtual Edge Platform
• The aim is to steer service providers and enterprises to digitalize their infrastructure and automate their processes

• Enables IoT digital transformation for Enterprise, Industrial, Retail and Consumer
• Supports complementary products and services from global open ecosystem including commercial support, training and customer pilot programs
• Deployed in many end user projects; EdgeX also collaborates with IIC on AI testbeds and is the foundation for the Open Retail Initiative (ORI)

SAN FRANCISCO – July 11, 2019 – EdgeX Foundry, a project under the LF Edge umbrella organization within the Linux Foundation that aims to establish an open, interoperable framework for edge IoT computing independent of hardware, silicon, application cloud, or operating system, today announced the availability of its “Edinburgh” release. Created collaboratively by a global ecosystem, EdgeX Foundry’s new release is a key enabler of digital transformation for IoT use cases and is a platform for real-world applications both for developers and end users across many vertical markets. EdgeX community members have created a range of complementary products and services, including commercial support, training and customer pilot programs and plug-in enhancements for device connectivity, applications, data and system management and security.

Launched in April 2017, and now part of the LF Edge umbrella, EdgeX Foundry is an open source, loosely-coupled microservices framework that provides the choice to plug and play from a growing ecosystem of available third party offerings or to augment proprietary innovations. With a focus on the IoT Edge, EdgeX simplifies the process to design, develop and deploy solutions across industrial, enterprise, and consumer applications.

The fourth release in the EdgeX roadmap, Edinburgh offers a stable API baseline for the standardization of IoT edge applications that future-proof IoT investments by fostering an ecosystem of interoperable microservice-based capabilities and decoupling investments in edge functionality in areas such as connectivity, security and management from any given backend application or cloud. The EdgeX framework is designed to facilitate the secure deployment and management of devices and applications at the edge to accelerate time-to-market and enable new data-based services and capabilities such as Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Machine Learning (ML).

“Since its launch, EdgeX Foundry has experienced significant momentum in developing an open platform that can serve as the industry framework for IoT and edge-related applications,” said Arpit Joshipura, general manager, Networking, Edge and IoT, the Linux Foundation. “EdgeX Foundry is one of the anchor projects for LF Edge and Edinburgh release is a major step in unifying open source frameworks across IoT, Enterprise, Cloud and Telco Edge.”

“Having started the EdgeX movement with a small team at Dell before contributing the code to the Linux Foundation, it’s certainly amazing to see the traction we’ve gotten through open, vendor neutral collaboration in a few short years,” said Jason Shepherd, former chair of the EdgeX Foundry Governing Board and IoT and Edge CTO, Dell Technologies. “It’s a testament to the power of the network effect in the open source community which ultimately enables developers to focus on value rather than reinvention.”

Edinburgh is Ready for Production Deployment

EdgeX Foundry’s community adoption continues to accelerate. Currently, there are more than 100 unique contributors to the project and code downloads are approaching 5,000 a month at a 75% month-to-month growth rate. Momentum is expected to continue with EdgeX’s Edinburgh release and rapidly growing commercial support in the ecosystem.

Key features for this release include:

• Stability: Stable API’s protecting future investment and supporting future long term support
• Connectivity: More SDKs for north and southbound connectivity and a wider range of standard connectors
• New Features: Significant new features, including binary data support, database swapability and improved APIs to help facilitate management/monitoring capability
• Global Support: Support from the global EdgeX Foundry ecosystem – as well as the broader LF Edge umbrella community – that offers a range of complementary products and services

“With this EdgeX Edinburgh release, we will radically change how businesses develop and deploy IoT edge solutions,” said Keith Steele, chair of the EdgeX Foundry Technical Steering Committee and CEO of IOTech. “Edinburgh is a significant milestone that showcases the commercial viability of EdgeX Foundry and the impact that it will have on the global IoT edge landscape.”

Learn more about documentation, a new use case and the technical details for the Edinburgh release on the EdgeX website.

Market Utilization of EdgeX Foundry

Since the project inception, there have been tens of thousands of trials and pilot deployments of the EdgeX framework in the field and many of these are converting to production with the Edinburgh release. Several organizations already provide commercial solutions based on EdgeX, with many others folding it into their product roadmaps. For example:

• Edge Xpert: From IOTech Systems, Edge Xpert uses the latest stable release of EdgeX Foundry to create a commercially supported solution from the baseline open source technology. IOTech will also soon announce hard real-time extensions to EdgeX.
• MFX-1 IoT Edge Gateway : From Mainflux, the MFX-1 IoT Edge Gateway based on the EdgeX Foundry framework, is an edge computing solution supported with the EdgeFlux application for gateway management. Integrated with Mainflux IoT Cloud Platform it provides comprehensive Cloud /Edge IoT System.
• NetFoundry Ziti Edge: NetFoundry’s Ziti Edge provides programmable, software-only “Northbound” connectivity for EdgeX Gateway applications and services. Based on Zero Trust security principles, with integrations for HW root of trust based identity and Trusted Execution Environments (TEE), Ziti Edge delivers secure “Silicon-to-Cloud” connectivity, using any Internet connection, while keeping both sides of the connection “dark” to the Internet.
• VMware Supports EdgeX : Developers who deploy any combination of EdgeX Foundry and/or Project Photon OS with VMware Pulse IoT Center can receive support from VMware for both Pulse IoT Center and EdgeX open source software. When used with Pulse IoT Center’s device management capabilities, open source tools such as EdgeX offer developers increased control over how, when, and where they run their applications and manage their data.

The EdgeX framework is also being leveraged in various industry collaborations. For example, in collaboration with the Industrial Internet Consortium® (IIC) EdgeX is used as the foundation for the Optimizing Manufacturing Processes by Artificial Intelligence (OMPAI) testbed which explores the application of AI and industrial internet technologies, deployed from the edge to the cloud, to optimize automotive manufacturing processes. EdgeX is also the foundation for the Open Retail Initiative (ORI) which has the goal of facilitating open innovation within the retail/commerce space. Work for the ORI is manifested within the Commerce Working Group in the EdgeX project and initial target use cases include computer vision-assisted advanced loss prevention.

Planning Ahead

Later this summer, the first EdgeX Foundry ecosystem hackathon will be hosted in the Bay Area. This initial event will be tied to the Commerce Working Group, hosted by Intel within the EdgeX project, with various award categories for implementation of the EdgeX framework in retail use cases. The best all-around winner will get to showcase their solution at future LF Edge or EdgeX Foundry events. Details will be available in late July via the EdgeX website, email list and Slack channel.

Additionally, LF Edge will host a workshop entitled “State of the (LF) Edge” on August 20 in San Diego, Calif., co-located with Open Source Summit North America (August 21-23). More details are available here.

For more information about LF Edge and its projects, visit https://www.lfedge.org/

FRAMINGHAM, Mass., July 11, 2019 – Preliminary results for the global traditional PC market, inclusive of desktops, notebooks, and workstations, totaled 64.9 million units in the second quarter of 2019 (2Q19), according to International Data Corporation (IDC) Worldwide Quarterly Personal Computing Device Tracker. Year-over-year growth during the quarter reached 4.7%, which was notably higher than expected as the easing of supply shortages combined with looming trade tensions to propel the market forward.

"Supply for Intel's processors improved markedly during the quarter, allowing most PC vendors to fulfill old orders while also shipping a healthy supply of new PCs into the channels," said Jitesh Ubrani, research manager for IDC's Mobile Device Trackers. "Additionally, the threat of increased tariffs led some PC makers to ship a surplus of desktops and notebooks, thereby artificially propping up the PC market during the second quarter."

However, higher than anticipated growth was not driven solely by changes in the supply chain. "With the January 2020 end of service (EOS) date for Windows 7 approaching, the market has entered the last leg of the Windows 7 to Windows 10 commercial migrations," noted Linn Huang, research vice president, Devices & Displays. "However, the closing sprint is unlikely to generate the spike seen when Windows XP met its EOS because we are further ahead of the migration with two quarters to go. Still, organizations looking to finish their migration will create new opportunities for the market in the coming quarters."

Regional Highlights

After a sluggish start to the year, the traditional PC market in the United States seems to be back on track, recording high single-digit growth in the second quarter backed by volume increases in both desktops and notebooks. The improved sell-in was the result of multiple factors, including vendors filling in inventory ahead of back-to-school season, corporations refreshing systems ahead of the Windows 7 EOS deadline, and an overall strong inventory pull-in as the threat of additional tariffs on U.S. consumer goods remains high.

The traditional PC market in Canada posted its 12th consecutive quarter of growth. The preliminary figure is 11.0%, which is the highest year-over-year growth in nine years (since 2Q10). The commercial markets continue to outpace weak consumer demand with migration to Windows 10, increased adoption of Chrome in commercial, and strong growth in PC as a service (PCaaS) all contributing to commercial demand. Pent-up demand from component constraints are beginning to normalize, which also helped to push the numbers up this quarter. The fear of increased tariffs and a potential trade war are great topics for conversation but aren't manifesting into a tangible increase in demand yet.

Japan's commercial segment maintained strong momentum in 2Q19 after an already strong first quarter. Meanwhile, the consumer segment also saw healthy growth as many consumers were looking to make purchases before an increase in sales tax is implemented.

The traditional PC market in Asia/Pacific (excluding Japan) (APeJ) beat IDC's forecast with shipments posting modest year-on-year growth. India produced better than anticipated results primarily due to earlier than expected deployments to the ELCOT education tender, which reached close to 1.1 million units. However, other segments of this market remained soft, impacted by the recent elections, weak demand, and overstock. In China, consumer notebook shipments recorded an increase, fueled by good sales of low-end ultraslim devices, online channel promotions, and inventory build-up. On the other hand, China's commercial market remained weak with both the SMB and government segments impacted by the ongoing US-China trade tensions.

After two consecutive quarters of year-over-year decline, Europe, Middle East, and Africa (EMEA) witnessed growth in the traditional PC market in 2Q19. This was primarily driven by the commercial segment stemming from the strong demand for PC refresh ahead of Windows 7 EOS early next year. Despite the ongoing shift towards mobility adoption, a strong performance from desktops supported the overall results of the quarter. Fulfillment of order backlogs caused by the Intel CPU shortage from earlier this year contributed to the strong desktop shipments in the region.

The Latin America market continued its negative trajectory in 2Q19, although with better results than previous expectations. The improved results were driven by the commercial segment, mainly public investments and SMB, with some help from entry-level notebooks for consumers.

Company ** ** Highlights

Lenovo moved into the top position, capturing 25% of the market with more than 16.2 million units shipped. The company has won some large commercial bids, such as the ELCOT project in India, which helped drive shipments. Beyond that, the fear of additional tariffs led Lenovo (along with others) to ship additional units during the quarter.

HP ranked second with 3.2% year-over-year growth. EMEA, the United States, and Japan were the company's strongest performing markets as HP experienced positive growth in each region.

Dell Technologies maintained the third position with healthy 3.1% growth during the quarter. Desktops once again proved to be Dell's strong suit as the company managed to raise its share in the desktop market by 1 percentage point.

Acer Group was one of the few companies that saw a decline this quarter despite having shipped additional units ahead of potential tariffs. The company continues to perform well in the value segment of the market and regions such as North America and Japan remained strongholds.

Apple rounded out the top 5, shipping nearly 4.1 million units. Like other companies, Apple managed to move additional units into the channels to fend off potential tariffs. Additionally, the recent launch of new notebooks leaves the company in a position with plenty of inventory on-hand.

AT&T and Dell Technologies are jointly exploring the development of key open infrastructure technology areas for the next-generation network edge that will be required by service providers to support new use cases and service opportunities in a cloud-oriented 5G world.

Combining their respective expertise, Dell Technologies and AT&T will collaborate in the open source community to:

• Align on an overall vision of network disaggregation and accelerate the deployment of open infrastructure and AT&T Network Cloud utilizing Airship – a collection of loosely coupled, but interoperable, open source tools that declaratively automate cloud provisioning and life-cycle management utilizing containers as the unit of software delivery.
• Catalyze the broader Airship community to accelerate Airship toward a 2.0 release, delivering a streamlined aggregator of best-of-breed open technologies for declaratively deploying and managing Kubernetes environments and cloud software.
• Jointly develop and enhance additional open source efforts, including Metal3-io and OpenStack Ironic, and integrate the Kubernetes Cluster API.
• Deliver open source automation capabilities across the stack – from bare metal to network to storage – on Dell Technologies infrastructure.

5G is not simply an evolution from 4G. 5G requires massive transformation. It demands new, distributed architectures that use software-defined, disaggregated and open infrastructure to automate the delivery and management of mobile services and new analytics-driven telemetry to ensure consistent service levels.

The goal of edge computing is to move compute closer to the end user and applications, creating a low-latency environment for a new class of cloud-native applications. Combining edge computing and 5G extends cloud and “IT-centric” requirements beyond traditional fixed-function hardware to deliver more dynamic, agile edge compute, storage and networking solutions on an unprecedented scale. To capitalize on the new business opportunities that edge computing and 5G will create, communication service providers need open, validated, industry-standard architectures, combined with software-defined networking (SDN), network functions virtualization (NFV), cloud-native applications, and Multi-access edge computing (MEC).

“Dell Technologies’ addition to the Airship community reaffirms the industry’s growing trust and investment in the open infrastructure model,” said Amy Wheelus, vice president, AT&T Network Cloud. “This collaboration will not only enable us to accelerate the AT&T Network Cloud on the Dell Technologies infrastructure, but also further the broader community goal of making it as simple as possible for operators to deploy and manage open infrastructure in support of SDN and other workloads.”

“Dell Technologies is working closely with AT&T to combine our joint telco industry best practices with decades of data center transformation experience to help service providers quickly roll out new breeds of experiential Edge and 5G services,” said Kevin Shatzkamer, vice president, Dell EMC Service Provider Solutions. “As the world leader in servers, storage and personal computers, Dell’s world class supply chain is best positioned to deliver the cost structure, predictability and access to emerging infrastructure technologies required to enable the transition to a more open, disaggregated mobile network.”

AT&T blog by By Chris Rice

If it feels like a lot of our focus has been up in the clouds recently, you wouldn’t be wrong. Last month, we announced our intention to move AT&T Business applications to IBM Cloud. A week later, we made Microsoft our preferred cloud provider for non-network applications. And just last week, we highlighted a new collaboration with Dell to accelerate the deployment of our AT&T Network Cloud by enhancing common infrastructure functionality through open source communities.

On the surface, all of this talk might seem a bit, well, cloudy, but in reality, our cloud strategy has never been clearer.

Today, we’re using cloud technologies to modernize and streamline our business applications, accelerate innovation and new services with customers, and quickly deploy software-defined network (SDN) technologies and virtual network functions to power our own network.

All this work isn’t happening in the same cloud, though. To better understand our approach, it’s helpful to understand the difference between what kinds of workloads and applications we’ll run in each cloud, and how and why we utilize them.

Our 5G Network Lives in Our Network Cloud

We started on a path for a single cloud, called AT&T Integrated Cloud (AIC). This was our private cloud, meaning we managed all the workloads and infrastructure within it. Originally, AIC housed both our network and several of our “non-network” IT workloads and applications.

But we quickly learned it wasn’t optimal to combine both types of workloads on a single cloud. It required too many compromises, and the IT and network workloads needed different profiles of compute, network and storage.

We opted for a better approach: Create a private cloud for our network workloads, optimize it for those workloads, and drive the software definition and virtualization of our network through this cloud approach and through the use of white boxes for specific switching and routing functions.

Last year, we introduced Network Cloud as our next-generation cloud platform. As its name implies, it’s optimized specifically for AT&T network workloads. It’s powered by open source software running on commodity and white box hardware. That lets us keep costs down and innovate at a speed unmatched in the industry.

This is the path we’re on now, and the one aligned with our recent cloud announcements

At the foundation of our Network Cloud is an under-cloud platform called Airship, an open infrastructure project we jointly launched last year with SKT, Intel and the OpenStack Foundation. While there’s a lot more to this platform than I’ll go into here, Airship uses containerized software in a declarative way to automate what used to be the mostly manual process of building, managing and upgrading our cloud.

What does that mean? In short, that automation also lets us deploy, manage and upgrade our software-defined network, as well as the workloads that run on it, more quickly and seamlessly than we could in AIC – think days rather than weeks and minutes rather than hours, all without major service interruptions. And because it’s open source, it’s a platform others in the industry can take advantage of, too.

That’s why our Network Cloud was the perfect environment to house our new mobile 5G packet core. In fact, our commercial 5G network was the first network born in the cloud.

And while our internal teams are hard at work bringing 5G capabilities into the market at break-neck speed, open source collaborations with technology leaders like Dell and others will continue playing a vital role in our success as well. The more we work with others to fine-tune open source platforms like Airship, the faster we can improve our Network Cloud to quickly deliver new functions and capabilities into our 5G network.

But we’re also becoming a public cloud-first company

We’re turning to public cloud providers to host our non-network workloads. Think traditional IT applications like billing and customer care, and corporate applications like HR and finance. By 2024, most of these cloud workloads will be housed in the public cloud

Moving these applications and workloads to the public cloud allows us to take advantage of the elasticity and cloud economics while letting us focus on what we as a company do best: deploying and running world-class networks. We can empower our employees to create and bring new, innovative network services and products to our customers while lowering costs. We can deliver a faster, more reliable, more responsive and more agile network, both in the core and at the edge. And, we can do so while simultaneously optimizing IT systems necessary to run it.  

These shifts are already paying off

Last December, we became the first U.S. carrier to launch standards-based 5G service. And we’re well on our way to bringing our commercial 5G network nationwide by 2020.

While impressive in their own right, those feats wouldn’t be possible had we not recognized early on that when it comes to cloud, a hybrid approach lets us put the right workloads on the right clouds. That’s a model we know works, and one we’ll continue leading to deliver a best-in-class network for our customers.

KUBECON, SAN DIEGO, CA — Wind River, a leader in delivering software for the intelligent edge, today announced that it is collaborating with Dell EMC as a key hardware partner for distributed edge solutions. A combined software and hardware platform would integrate Wind River Cloud Platform, a Kubernetes-based software offering for managing edge cloud infrastructure, with Dell EMC PowerEdge server hardware. The initial target use case will be virtual RAN (vRAN) infrastructure for 5G networks.

“As telecom infrastructure continues to evolve, service providers are facing daunting challenges around deploying and managing a physically distributed, cloud native vRAN infrastructure,” said Paul Miller, vice president of Telecommunications at Wind River. “By working with Dell EMC to pre-integrate our technologies into a reference distributed cloud solution, we can cost-effectively deliver carrier grade performance, massive scalability, and rapid service instantiation to service providers as their foundation for 5G networks.”

“In a 5G world, new services and applications will not be driven by massively scaled, centralized data centers but by intelligently distributed systems built at the network edge,” said Kevin Shatzkamer, vice president of Enterprise and Service Provider Strategy and Solutions at Dell EMC. “The combination of Dell EMC and Wind River technology creates a foundation for a complete, pre-integrated distributed cloud solution that delivers unrivaled reliability and performance, massive scalability, and significant cost savings compared to conventional RAN architectures. The solution will provide CSPs with what they need to migrate to 5G vRAN and better realize a cloud computing future.”

Wind River Cloud Platform combines a fully cloud-native, Kubernetes and container-based architecture with the ability to manage a truly physically and geographically separated infrastructure for vRAN and core data center sites. Cloud Platform delivers single-pane–of-glass (SPoG), zero-touch automated management of thousands of nodes.

Versatile, highly configurable and well suited to low-latency applications, Dell EMC hardware delivers potent compute power, high performance and high capacity memory.

A commercial implementation of the open source project StarlingX, Cloud Platform scales from a single compute node at the network edge, up to thousands of nodes in the core to meet the needs of high value applications. With deterministic low latency required by edge applications and tools that make the distributed edge manageable, Cloud Platform provides a container-based infrastructure for edge implementations in scalable solutions ready for production.

• Deutsche Telekom-backed edge startup is trying to rally the edge computing community
• Collaboration identified as key to use of edge-based applications, but initiative appears to have limited initial supporters
• Research suggests demand for edge computing capabilities exists, but ability to deliver against that demand appears limited

• Nokia to cut more than 1,200 jobs in France
• Germany’s United Internet mulls 5G Open RAN build
• Whale Cloud launches OSS/BSS on Alibaba Cloud

• 3GPP warns of 5G specs delays
• Google Cloud signs up Shatzkamer
• Colt has a new COO