AI workloads power Dell’s next-gen infrastructure strategy – News

The rapid growth of generative AI and machine learning has sparked a new era of digital transformation, one in which enterprises must reassess how data is stored, accessed and used to create value for the business. 

Dell Technologies Inc. has moved quickly to adapt its portfolio of products and services for a new age where data centers are now the nerve centers for innovation. Customers need power-efficient compute, scalable storage and secure, integrated networking to drive enterprise AI.

Dell’s recent “Is Your IT Infrastructure Ready for the Age of AI?” event framed this urgency, encouraging IT leaders to transform their on-premises environments into engines for innovation. The event underscored that infrastructure is no longer just a support system — it’s a competitive edge in the AI-driven enterprise.

“Dell provides the essential building blocks, all designed from the ground up to support AI workloads,” said Rob Strechay, executive analyst for theCUBE, News Media’s livestreaming studio. “Organizations today are confronting a powerful reality: AI will only be as effective as the infrastructure and processes that support it.”

This feature is part of News Media’s exploration of Dell’s efforts in enterprise AI and how its infrastructure solutions are evolving to meet rising demands. The discussion will continue during theCUBE’s analyst-led coverage of Dell Technologies World, May 19-21, where Dell’s AI infrastructure, server and storage teams are expected to showcase new advancements. (* Disclosure below.)

Optimized servers for AI workloads

Dell’s PowerEdge server lineup plays a central role in the company’s AI infrastructure market strategy. The company has made a steady release of enhancements to PowerEdge over the past year, with increased optimization for fine tuning models and generative AI inferencing, along with offering flexible configurations to meet ever-changing IT needs.

An example of how Dell has been able to increase optimization can be seen in its collaboration with Intel Corp. Dell has integrated Intel’s Xeon 6 processor and Gaudi 3 accelerator into PowerEdge, creating efficiencies at scale for running AI workloads.

“What we are doing with PowerEdge … is we are enabling AI inferencing workloads on Gaudi 3 by enabling [application programming interface] calls that you can directly do on this PowerEdge infrastructure,” said Rakesh Mehrotra, vice president of strategy, product management and operations of data center and AI at Intel , in an interview with theCUBE.“We are enabling all of that. You have an API into PowerEdge, and you can run the application by making a call through this API.”

In addition, Dell has partnered with Advanced Micro Devices Inc. to enhance PowerEdge with the chipmaker’s Turin processors that support 12-channel DDR5 memory. Many AI application workloads today are data-heavy, and Turin helps provide fast, efficient data handling for purpose-built, large-scale AI solutions.

“You’ve got memory to core ratios that have to keep scaling,” explained David Schmidt, senior director, PowerEdge product management at Dell, in conversation with theCUBE. “Workloads are scaling with the core counts, but it’s only because we’re able to design the systems that are providing the right amount of memory.”

OpenManage for real-time insight

As workloads scale with core counts, it becomes even more important to have an ability to track performance and control the many moving parts of an increasingly complex AI infrastructure. One of the ways that Dell provides this capability is through OpenManage, a suite of management tools that can provide real-time telemetry, power and thermal insights, along with automation to manage PowerEdge infrastructure.

This has become especially significant as AI workloads demand increasing amounts of compute power, which translates into heavy demand on the electrical grid. Customers have become more energy conscious, according to Dell’s Schmidt.

“If you asked folks a couple of years ago how much power they were getting in their rack, maybe you get an answer four times out of ten,” said Schmidt, in a recent discussion with theCUBE about OpenManage. “Now, if I’m asking a customer how much power they have for their rack, it’s ten times out of ten, they know exactly how much power. They need the ability to measure it and everything that’s influencing consumption of power. That’s what we’re focused on providing through OpenManage.”

Being able to optimize configurations and manage server resources effectively has an added benefit for IT administrators. It facilitates workload consolidation, according to theCUBE’s Strechay, by as much as five to seven times.

“This not only frees up power and rack space but also lowers TCO while supporting diverse needs across AI, analytics, and enterprise apps,” Strechay said.

Building intelligence into PowerStore

As part of its work to build AI-ready infrastructure, Dell has integrated a number of intelligence features into its PowerStore storage offering. The intent is to make life easier for IT organizations seeking more from storage hardware than being mere repositories for data.

To accomplish this Dell has built AI and machine learning into PowerStore itself. This includes Dynamic Node Affinity, which autonomously enhances block storage performance in real-time through better responsiveness and reduced latency. The goal is to provide administrators with more time to focus on strategy and not get bogged down in routine management.

“I affectionately call it DNA because I think there’s a lot of intelligence and logic built into [it],” said Jodey Hogeland, PowerStore global evangelist at Dell, in an appearance on theCUBE in January. “What if … in real-time, as I was coming into the infrastructure … I can guarantee you better performance [and] lower latency if I just flip this back in path and nobody cares? What if it did that for you? Well, we’ve solved the ‘what if.’ That’s what DNA is actually doing.”

Dell has also introduced SmartSupport as part of the PowerStore offering. With SmartSupport’s AI-driven analytics, users can receive support alerts and performance analyses that can predict and resolve up to 79% of potential issues before they affect operations, according to theCUBE’s Strechay.

To support storage resiliency, Dell has integrated Dynamic Resiliency Engine into PowerStore. DRE employs a 100% software-based approach to redundancy that accelerates rebuilds and provides drive flexibility while eliminating the need for RAID configuration. This improves overall performance and enables scalability as more drives are added to an appliance.

Dell has built flexibility into its PowerStore portfolio to allow older and newer systems to be clustered together without loss of functionality. This form of system clustering allows customers to migrate workloads to newer hardware while optimizing performance.

“We’ve got hardware offloading capabilities where there’s no performance impact, but also, data placement,” Hoagland said. “It’s being able to cluster, put multiple appliances together, manage them from the same pane of glass, from the same interface, being able to say, ‘I just need to create a volume, and I want that volume to land where it needs to land without having to make all these different decisions,.’”

Providing resilience and data protection

Dell’s activity in the areas of servers and storage highlights the importance of infrastructure as a mission-critical priority in the building of AI-ready solutions. This has also placed more emphasis on the need to develop a secure and resilient architecture as workloads scale across hybrid environments.

The need for cyber resilience has led to the development of a three-pillar strategy by Dell to implement a comprehensive, defense-in-depth approach. At the center of this strategy is PowerProtect, the company’s centralized backup and data protection solution.

PowerProtect Data Domain systems protect, manage and recover data at-scale. They can be paired with cyber recovery vaults and anomaly detection solutions such as CyberSense to isolate clean data for trusted recovery in the event of a breach.

“A lot of this is all underpinned by zero-trust principles to reduce the opportunity for people to get into your backup infrastructure,” said Rob Emsley, director of data protection marketing at Dell, in a recent interview with theCUBE. “Then, you take that across all of the Dell portfolio of infrastructure, and every team within Dell is building intrinsic security into the platform.”

An ability to detect and respond to threats is the second element of Dell’s three-pillar strategy. The company has formed a partnership with CrowdStrike Inc. to provide Managed Detection and Response or MDR services that monitor systems for attacks and potential intrusions.

MDR is powered using CrowdStrike’s Next-Gen SIEM, a platform that integrates data, AI, and threat intelligence into a single solution. “We are using the Next-Gen SIEM technology by which we integrate our telemetry, which is proprietary telemetry coming from Dell’s backup portfolio,” said Mihir Maniar, vice president of product and services at Dell, during an appearance on theCUBE. “We integrate that inside the Next-Gen SIEM from CrowdStrike to collect all of the log information. We built jointly with them 60 indicators of compromise that can be used to go and detect threats that could be occurring inside the backup portfolio.”

The third part of Dell’s approach involves recovery with clean data. This is where cyber recovery vaults play a key role, available both on-premises and in the cloud. Vaults are used to store isolated, tamper-proof data copies that can be quickly accessed for file restoration.

Dell has also taken steps to integrate various elements of its product portfolio with PowerProtect. This includes links to PowerStore’s asynchronous replication system, ensuring that data can be replicated in a range of compute environments.

“You start to look at the better together story we have within ISG with our data protection products fully integrated to our PowerProtect portfolio with what we call storage direct,” said Drew Schulke, vice president of product management at Dell, in conversation with theCUBE. “So from within PowerStore, I, as the storage admin, can set my backup and my restore policies to a Dell PowerProtect system. Incredible flexibility in terms of your ability to be resilient if something bad goes wrong.”

Confidence through deep integration

There are not many tech companies with the enterprise portfolio, customer base and industry longevity that Dell owns. The 41-year-old firm is seeking to capitalize on its strengths by providing infrastructure flexibility and management tools for the demands of artificial intelligence in the full stack.

Dell’s ability to provide high-density GPU racks and modular systems is geared toward helping organizations scale AI workloads while optimizing for performance and cost. The company’s focus on hybrid solutions speaks to a desire among enterprise customers for maximum flexibility in getting the most out of IT infrastructure while continuously adding new capabilities at the same time.

Expect more insights from Dell at Dell Technologies World, where the AI infrastructure, storage and server teams will unveil innovations building on the vision shared during the “Is Your IT Infrastructure Ready for the Age of AI?” event. These announcements are expected to reinforce Dell’s message: Infrastructure can be an AI differentiator.

Dell must also meet expectations for operational efficiency while offering solutions that minimize risk and protect critical data assets. It’s a tall order at a time when it seems as though customer requirements and technology needs are changing daily.

“We believe one of the major factors that sets Dell Technologies apart in the AI infrastructure market is its deep, longstanding commitment to co-engineering across the entire compute ecosystem, coupled with a pragmatic focus on operational realities,” Strechay said. “Dell doesn’t just offer compute; it provides confidence through deep integration between compute, storage and networking, along with a zero-trust security posture and built-in sustainability features. Dell aims to deliver infrastructure that’s efficient, secure and built to evolve.”

(* Disclosure: TheCUBE is a paid media partner for the “Is Your IT Infrastructure Ready for the Age of AI?” and Dell Technologies World events. Neither Dell Technologies nor other sponsors have editorial control over content on theCUBE or News.)

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