Dell’s Edge and IoT Solutions bring new live to streaming video applications. Dell also expands portfolio of VMware solutions.
VMWorld presented by VMWare brought a crowd to Las Vegas this week—but not me. I know of bunch of Dell people there, but I’m not tapped in to VMWare. Know the company, though, and important technology for IT.
Last week Dell held a virtual conference for analysts and bloggers previewing some of the announcements that would be coming from the event.
This one reminds me of the history of video surveillance technology I’ve followed for at least 10 years. Maybe more. As I listened to the presentations, I thought about how all this IoT stuff we hear about is actually a confluence of technologies enabling realization of many dreams.
Dell Technologies’ Edge and IoT Solutions Division announced solutions and bundles to simplify deployment of secure, scalable solutions for edge computing and IoT use cases. This will drive workloads for computer vision – enabled by imaging sensors – and machine intelligence – characterized by structured telemetry from sensors and control systems. Dell Technologies has collaborated with Intel, who has helped advance these solutions with their computer vision and analytics technologies.
Cameras provide rich information about the physical world, but the deluge of video data creates too much data for humans to cost-effectively monitor for real-time decision making. Applying analytics, such as Artificial Intelligence, to these data streams automates powerful, actionable insights. Events driven by computer vision and analyzed together with telemetry from machines – including data that imaging sensors cannot provide, such as voltage, current and pressure – results in even more powerful insights.
By enabling computer vision with Dell Technologies IoT solutions, customers can more accurately, efficiently and effectively “see” relevant information pertaining to areas such as public safety, customer experience, and product inventory and quality. Surveillance is the first use case to which Dell Technologies has applied computer vision, so customers can more cost-effectively monitor events in the physical world and automate decision‐making.
The IoT Solution for Surveillance is specifically built to transform and simplify how surveillance technology is delivered with an easy to deploy and manage hyper-converged, software-defined solution. Available later this year to purchase as a package, the engineered, pre-integrated solution will provide a consistent foundation from edge to distributed core to cloud. It will also be ready to run on day one with customer data to speed the return on investment. The solution is currently available as a reference architecture to align systems and build a framework for computer vision learning and adoption for other use cases.
Dell Technologies IoT Solutions Partner Program
Through this program, Dell Technologies has identified several partners demonstrating strong use case focus and clear return on investment to create the new Dell Technologies IoT Connected Bundles. The bundles include sensors and licensed software from partners tailored for specific customer use cases, together with various combinations of Dell Technologies infrastructure spanning edge gateway, embedded PC and server hardware. This is in addition to complimentary software like VMware Pulse IoT Center for securing, managing and monitoring these solutions at scale.
Dell Technologies continues its commitment to openness and standardization in IoT. It actively participates in EdgeX Foundry, a vendor-neutral open source project focusing on building a common interoperability framework to facilitate an ecosystem for edge computing. The project, which has grown to more than 60 member organizations, recently announced the ‘California’ code release, a major step in evolving the EdgeX framework to support developer requirements for deployment in business-critical IoT applications. Dell Technologies Capital recently invested in IOTech Systems, a startup offering a commercially packaged version of this framework that enables customers to focus on their preferred value-add instead of supporting the open source code.
Dell Technologies also participates in the Industrial Internet Consortium (IIC), the OpenFog Consortium and the Automotive Edge Computing Consortium (AECC).
Other VMWorld News
At many companies, the time it takes for a product or service to go from concept to general availability depends on where a company is on its IT transformation journey. A more responsive IT department allows the business to respond more quickly to evolving external customer demands.
The benefits of the enhancements to Dell’s portfolio of VMware-based solutions include:
At the Edge:
- A ready-to-work experience enabling employees to boot up, log in, and be productive in minutes. Preconfigured apps and settings reduce time and resources associated with manual device imaging, repackaging and shipment. The Dell Provisioning for VMware Workspace ONE service enables automatic device setup and extends the efficiencies of cloud management to configuration and deployment.
- Simplified PC lifecycle management with expanded Dell PC-as-a-Service offerings for more customers and regions, including PCaaS for Business (20 to 300 units) and PCaaS for Enterprise (more than 300 units). Dell offers the latest PCs, deployment options – including Dell Provisioning for VMware Workspace ONE, software, peripherals, lifecycle services and financing – at a single, predictable price per seat per month.
- Scalability and stability with a consistent foundation from edge to distributed core to cloud with the new Dell IoT Solution for Surveillance, which automates scaling enterprises on day one with customer data, speeding up return on investment.
To the Core:
- Increase workload capacity, performance, scalability and control with the new Dell EMC VxRail G560, which delivers greater density in a 2U form factor. The Dell EMC VxRail G560 outperforms the previous Dell EMC VxRail G Series with 1.75X more cores; 2X increase in processing power; 4X more memory; and 3X capacity increase improvement in the boot device.
- Save time and lower operational expenses with synchronized Dell EMC VxRail Appliance and VMware vSAN update releases, so customers get the latest technology features as quickly as possible to rapidly address changing business needs.
- Continuous innovation and reduction of risk with Dell EMC VxRack SDDC engineered with Dell EMC VxRail E, P, V and now S Series models, all based on 14th generation PowerEdge servers.
- Faster time to production with the Dell EMC Networking Fabric Design Center, now including Dell EMC VxRail. The Fabric Design Center, an intuitive online tool, helps ensure the most efficient and effective networking design for deployment success.
- Investment protection with Dell EMC’s Future-Proof Loyalty Program protects customers’ core, edge and cloud investments, now including first-time HCI solution support with Dell EMC VxRail, for a set of advanced technology capabilities and programs that enable Dell EMC solutions to offer value for the entire lifetime of customers’ applications.
- Software-defined storage environment flexibility is further extended with Dell EMC vSAN Ready Nodes support on the new Dell EMC PowerEdge MX, which provides a highly flexible platform for vSAN Ready Nodes as HCI building blocks. The PowerEdge MX can hold up to eight vSAN Ready Nodes and help create a foundation for a self-sustained VMware Cloud Foundation cluster. It offers right-sized compute, storage and top-of-rack switching all in one high-density package, with the infrastructure managed through a single interface. The PowerEdge MX also supports SATA, SAS and NVMe storage devices, offering the cost benefits of storage tiering with VMware vSAN.
