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At the beginning of May, Dell Technologies organized its major annual conference in Las Vegas. A 2022 edition under the sign of “software defined” storage and multi-cloud. A strategy that the American wants to push with its professional customers.
Dell is going through a pivotal period, the company having just passed a few turbulent years, after the takeover of EMC, the return to the stock market and the separation from VMWare. Michael Dell and his teams had a lot to do to restore order and define a new strategy. Its annual conference was therefore an opportunity to say a little more about their plans for the years to come.
They go through a better consideration of software layers and developers, who are now seen as the cornerstone of the group’s B2B strategy. Because if the PC has long been its main center of attention, servers and the public cloud are gaining ground, all the more so with the health crisis and a more hybrid approach to work in business.
This therefore represented the bulk of the event, even if upstream, there had been talk of a 13” laptop PC (2560 x 1600 pixels, touch screen with Gorilla 6 DX) of the 2-in-1 Latitude 9330 type, integrating a 12th generation Core processor, up to 32 GB of LPDDR5, 6E wifi and potentially enough to manage the mobile network, but also more “responsible” materials, features that strengthen security and respect for privacy, a touchpad with shortcuts to (de)activate the microphone, the camera, start a conversation or screen sharing. It should be available by the summer, at a price that remains to be defined.
Developers, Developers, Developers
The new Dell is therefore well supported by the movement towards hybrid work and the cloud with its customers and their teams. A choice that seems wise as the DevOps trend is gaining ground, with developers now in charge of automating and managing part of the infrastructure (sometimes as-code).
An evolution driven by the rise in the use of containers, Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) in the cloud and open solutions such as Kubernetes. Dell also embraces it through the one who is now a partner: VMWare and the Tanzu offer.
It is through a resolutely multi-cloud offer that the American wants to position itself as a player both very present among professionals and with major platforms, while being an independent third-party player, even offering its own cloud offer. public Apex.
Michael Dell recalled during his keynote that companies already use both on-premise and public cloud services, sometimes from three or four different providers. Their approach is already multi-cloud, only missing the tools to make their life easier.
We must also take into account the trend towards peripheral data processing (edge computing) which will gain momentum in companies in the years to come. For Dell, by 2025, this will concern more than 75% of processing rather than via servers in datacenters in the traditional way or a cloud offer. This is also what should in part drive its growth over the next three years, estimated at 26%.
Data protection and multi-cloud, Alpine is coming
One of the important bricks of this strategy is of course in the field of security, through the Cyber Recovery offer. Dell wants, as its name suggests, to offer tools to protect and/or restore the data of its customers in the event of a problem, wherever they are.
Thus, this solution is offered within the in-house public cloud offer via the Recovery Services. But we are also entitled to levels of protection specific to offers from Amazon (AWS) or Microsoft (Azure). This trend towards openness is reflected in the announcement of a partnership with the cloud storage and data analysis platform Snowflake.
But also through the Alpine project, announced at the beginning of the year, which is now the subject of the first demonstrations in partnership with AWS and Microsoft Azure. More concretely, the aim is to make the public cloud and on-premises servers work together through Dell’s storage offer (block, file and object) which will be offered through the major marketplaces. platforms.
A different approach from that of NAS manufacturers such as QNAP or Synology, but which nevertheless seems to pursue the same objective: the latter are also turning to companies by offering to make hosted services work together with their machines and software tools, but from their interfaces where Dell is establishing itself in cloud services.
New PowerMax, PowerStore and PowerFlex, with NVMe/TCP
Jeff Clarke, Vice President and Co-Chief Operating Officer of Dell opened the second day devoted to the big piece of this edition: storage. No less than 500 improvements have been announced for these products. The different ranges of servers have also been renewed with a transversal evolution: they now all manage the NVMe/TCP standard.
As a reminder, it makes it easy to share SSDs using PCI Express connectivity on the network, a bit like iSCSI, which was not very suitable for these storage devices and their NAND Flash. It is thus possible to connect to it on demand from another server and better separate the equipment. A trend known as storage disaggregation within data centers.
Such operation was allowed by other standards of the NVMe-over-Fabrics (NVMe-oF) standard, but whether it is Infiniband, Fiber Channel, RoCE or Intel’s iWarp they generally required equipment or specific configurations. This is not the case with NVMe/TCP which can be used from any Linux server if its kernel is correctly configured.
A more accessible and more easily exploitable solution therefore, which still has some flaws, since its latency is slightly higher than the other alternatives. The transmission of NVMe commands via TCP packets is also processed by the CPU, which can thus be more solicited, unless you have a network card equipped with a specific accelerator.
Dell nevertheless had the good idea of developing an entire software ecosystem around NVMe/TCP to facilitate the discovery of SSDs on the network and the connection phase. Some bricks developed must also be open source, allowing others to use them. These new servers should be available in the third quarter.