Dell Launches Multi-Cloud Challenge at Dell Technologies World 2023

Dell Technologies World will be held in Las Vegas on May 22, 2023. For me, this show was his 11th consecutive participation at Dell’s annual event, and it was one of the most defining and inspiring events I’ve attended in a while. One of the first things I do at these shows before I sort through the various announcements is to gauge the confidence of the senior management team. In this case, CEO Michael Dell, co-COOs Chuck Witten and Jeff Clarke, and others were confident and easy to talk to. .

Over the years, Dell is a company that has learned how to weather the storm. Today I believe the wind is blowing at Dell. I think you’ll agree when I sort out the various announcements and initiatives at the show.

“Multicloud by design”.

Patrick Moorhead

Approaching hybrid cloud from a position of strength

Regular readers will know that I have been advocating for hybrid multicloud for over a decade, long before hybrid multicloud was cool. It was good to see Dell building a managed services portfolio to enable customers to use multi-cloud. Strategically, Dell is using its strength in the storage space as a starting point. Distributing storage to data and data to AI across multiclouds is a successful strategy. Dell APEX Storage for Public Cloud applies the performance and capabilities of Dell’s block and file enterprise storage to his AWS and Microsoft Azure for management, data mobility and security. Customers can seamlessly move data between their on-premises environment and his Dell APEX Storage for public cloud deployments.

Dell Co-Chair Explains Multi-Cloud APEX Navigator

Patrick Moorhead

It must have warmed the hearts of many to see Dell embrace all the major players in the cloud space. APEX is Dell’s brand as a service for almost everything Dell offers as a service. Central to the announcement is the seamless extension of public cloud operating environments to on-premises IT deployments. New products co-developed with Microsoft, Red Hat and VMware join the Dell APEX cloud platform portfolio. These are integrated turnkey systems that bring together Dell’s infrastructure, software and cloud operating stack.

Meanwhile, Dell APEX Navigator’s new SaaS software addresses data mobility, storage, container management, and Kubernetes storage management across multi-cloud environments.

PC-as-a-Service

Dell is the largest commercial PC provider, and businesses want everything as a service. So this is a given. Dell APEX PC-as-a-Service (PCaaS) enables businesses to deploy the latest client technology at a predictable cost. Businesses can customize products across the PC portfolio, including devices, software and services, for flexible terms of one to five years and scale up or down as needed.

Discussions about AI, as everyone expects these days

Dell is collaborating with Nvidia on Project Helix to make it easier for enterprises to adopt generative AI on-premises. In this effort, Dell and he will provide a full-stack solution with expertise and pre-built tools based on Nvidia’s infrastructure and software. It includes a blueprint for enabling companies to deploy generative AI responsibly and accurately using private datasets.

As companies now try to find the best compute locations for AI training and inference, Dell’s biggest challenge is convincing people that these AI operations run best in private clouds and at the edge. That’s it. That said, Dell is entering the AI ​​arms race by providing the infrastructure needed to train models and deploy enterprise AI. Hyperscalers offer this as a service. Still, large enterprises also need to decide how to enable on-premises with data privacy, security, and governance as key considerations.

Project Helix is ​​interesting as a way to preconfigure, build, and image servers and devices for use in generative AI applications. We expect this initiative to eventually spread across the industry. Dell already has many of the core technologies and other requirements to be a major player in this transition.

Software that transforms edge operations

Dell has released a new edge operations software platform, Dell NativeEdge (formerly Project Frontier). The software enables remote management, multi-cloud connectivity, and secure device onboarding at scale. The new platform installs solutions consistently and integrates multiple applications and use cases into a single architecture. Even better, users can apply automated workflows to thousands of devices in all locations simultaneously.

For example, a retailer wants to deploy edge solutions across hundreds of stores to run new retail applications. Traditionally, specialists had to pre-provision and deploy the infrastructure, software and applications at each store, which required a local team to go through the deployment process at every site, taking several hours to complete. It could take months. Additionally, a centralized management process is required across all stores, typically divided into infrastructure and applications. This creates risks to ongoing operations ranging from poor customer experience to vulnerability to security breaches and system failures.

in contrast, Dell Native Edge This allows customers to run applications pulled from the platform’s catalog in sync with their continuous integration and deployment pipelines. Each store will be shipped with NativeEdge enabled devices that do not require professional assistance for installation. Preconfigured applications are automatically deployed to new devices and remotely monitored and managed throughout their lifecycle.

Analyst summary

Overall, Dell Technologies World 2023 was a great show. I think Dell scored some points and broke the multicloud gauntlet in a new way that I like.

Ten years ago, my company said the future would be hybrid multicloud. A large organization I’m talking to now has multiple IaaS providers of hers. The problem is that he has different AppDevSecOps teams for each IaaS provider. It reminds me of the “good old days” when there were separate mainframes, minicomputers, RISC servers and X86 server teams. Very complicated. AWS, GCP, and Azure will never provide a magic API for working together, so the next decade will set companies on their own path and speed.

Dell Tech aims to simplify this by using what I call a hybrid multi-cloud “fabric” to connect your on-premises data center, Colorado facility, edge, and multiple IaaS providers. We want to be a “reliable” vendor. Run this as a service in APEX. Starting with storage and some data fabrics like DR and ransomware protection, Dell is moving to the compute fabric. These starting points make sense, as this is an area where Dell is strong. Dell doesn’t offer as many on-premises services as its competitors, but I’m confident that over time these areas will fill. And remember, unlike most other companies, Dell spans datacenters, edge and PCs. of competitors. A natural product progression would be to add specific horizontal services followed by vertical functionality. Horizontally, we want the company to create more IP for the data management layer. A company like Cloudera could be a great partner for this and I think it’s necessary in the portfolio. Partnering with companies like Snowflake, databricks, Starburst, and Teradata are great, but none of them solve the data management problem across hybrid multicloud.

If you take a step back and look at why Dell got to where it is today, its multi-cloud strategy reflects that. Integrate the capabilities of different partners for the benefit of end customers. This is what Dell did on day one and this is what they are doing in the cloud. The only thing that can be argued with this approach is profit. My answer is that I know Michael Dell and his management team, so no one should worry.

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