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Blog • • 7 minute read

Recap and Key Takeaways from Dell Technologies World 2023

The final curtain has dropped on Dell Technologies World 2023, and WWT was proud to be a Platinum Sponsor of the event. The WWT team in attendance included representation from our Corporate Leadership Team, Global Engineering Teams, and Key Client Teams. The dedicated WWT representatives actively participated in over 40 whisper suite sessions, presented in multiple technical sessions, and took part in hours of videos and live streams. The team wasted no time in regrouping to collaborate and formulate our key takeaways from the exceptional event.
Listen to Bob Olwig, Executive Vice President of Global Partner Alliances at WWT, talk with Dell's Rola Dagher in this Uncut podcast recorded at Dell Technologies World. 

The keynote and breakout sessions at Dell Technologies World focused on the integrated solutions that Dell is bringing to the market aimed at helping organizations with the challenges they are facing today with the future of work, multicloud, artificial intelligence, edge computing, and security. Below is a list of the key technology announcements from the conference that we will dive into within this article.

  • Expansion of the APEX for The Future of Work and Multicloud
    • APEX Cloud Storage
    • APEX Navigator
    • APEX Cloud Platforms
    • APEX Compute
    • APEX PC-as-a-Service
  • Artificial Intelligence 
    • Generative AI – Project Helix
  • Edge Computing
    • NativeEdge (formally Project Frontier)
  • Security
    • Project Fort Zero

 

2023 Partner of the Year

2023 Partner of the Year

Before we get into the overview of the key focal points above, we would like to celebrate the high-performance team of WWT and Dell for being recognized as Dell Technologies' "Partner of the Year!" This is not a recognition taken lightly and truly appreciate the prestigious honor of being named "2023 Partner of the Year."

 

APEX Multicloud Solutions Announcements:

At its highest level, APEX as a brand got a sizeable expansion.  APEX originally focused on cloudlike consumption of on-premises infrastructure.  It now broadens its vision to include a complete multicloud customer experience.  Dell believes multicloud environments must be agile, elastic, and easily consumed.  Furthermore, Dell's cloud-to-ground and ground-to-cloud strategies are designed to help organizations looking to optimize their cloud initiatives, shifting the thinking from 'cloud-first' to 'cloud-smart.'  

Dell introduced their new APEX Cloud Storage for Public Cloud, which is the next generation of Project Alpine, extends its enterprise block and file software-defined storage solutions to AWS and Microsoft Azure later this year.  They complimented this news with detailed information about the new APEX Console capability called APEX Navigator.  APEX Navigator will have a component that is dedicated to helping customers manage storage activities across multiple cloud deployments (APEX Navigator for multi-cloud storage) and a component for Kubernetes deployments (APEX Navigator for Kubernetes).  The goal of these capabilities is to help customers manage and deploy their workflows whether they are in their data centers or in the public cloud with the need for re-platforming or retraining their IT Staff.

APEX Cloud Platform

Jeff Clarke introduced the new APEX Cloud Platform solutions during the Day 2 Keynote. These three fully integrated solutions were developed with a collaborative effort between Dell, Microsoft, Red Hat, and VMware to provide organizations with validated integrated solutions designed to provide consistent operations of their workflows regardless if they are deployed on-premise, at the edge, or in a public cloud. Customers are not forced into a single solution and are able to select the solution right for their environment.

 

Additional APEX Announcements:

In addition to the new multicloud APEX solutions, Dell has announced new APEX as-a-Service solutions for personal computers and for PowerEdge servers. The new APEX PC-as-a-Service includes offerings for desktops, laptops, and peripherals. The new APEX Compute solution provides customers with a bare metal as-a-service offering that leverages Dell's PowerEdge server line along with a range of GPU accelerator options, hypervisors, and operating systems.

 

Project Helix

Jensen Huang (NVIDIA Co-Founder, President, and CEO) joined Jeff Clarke to discuss a collaborative effort called "Project Helix". Project Helix is an integrated solution combining NVIDIA H100 GPUs, Dell PowerEdge servers, and full-stack software components from NVIDIA's NVAIE solution. The platform will provide customers with validated blueprints enabling them to build the right-sized environments within their own data centers or in a co-location. Generative AI is one of the targeted workloads that Project Helix is designed to help organizations with. The combination of NVIDIA's H100 GPUs, Intel 4th Generation Xeon Scalable Processors, with either a Dell PowerEdge XE9680 or an R760xa server, and NVIDIA's NeMo large language model framework & NeMo Guardrails provides customers with the necessary hardware and software components to successfully begin their generative AI journey. Customers can also choose to team the high-performance compute solution with Dell PowerScale arrays or Dell ECS Enterprise Object Storage along with CloudIQ observability to complete the high performance architecture design. Customers also need to make sure they check the lead times of the different components that make up the enterprise HPC/AI/ML environments.  The excitement around AI solutions such as Generative AI, Computer Vision, and Digital Twin environments has already created lead times that are currently a little longer than normal.

 

Dell NativeEdge

Dell NativeEdge, formerly known as Project Frontier, is an edge operation platform designed to provide secure device onboarding at scale along with simplified management and multi-cloud application orchestration to devices located at the edge or in a data center. Chuck Whitten (Dell Technologies Co-COO) discussed the edge in his Day 1 Keynote presentation and had this to say: "The perfect storm of data and technology and competition is accelerating innovation at the edge. The problem? The edge is everywhere. And it's hard to operate edge infrastructure at scale. Existing models don't solve the challenges of running multiple critical and disparate OT workloads operating in remote and harsh environments operating without skill local IT managing distributed infrastructure and applications and doing it all securely."  The NativeEdge solution is an open-design solution that gives customers the freedom to choose the software and multicloud environment that's right for them. Key features include zero-touch onboarding, centralized orchestration of applications and devices combined, and zero-trust security components. Jeff Clark (Dell Technologies Chief Operating Officer) spoke about the importance of the Edge as well during his Day 2 Keynote. Jeff called out that over 50% of a customer's effort spent on Edge deployments is spent on battling the complexity of the environment. He also called out that 76% of the lifecycle management work done at the Edge is routine, repetitive tasks.  These are challenges that Dell's NativeEdge solution will help with.  WWT is already validating the new Dell Edge XR hardware solutions within its' Advanced Technology Center and will soon look to integrate those hardware solutions with the new Dell NativeEdge operations software platform designed to simplify edge operations, optimize investments, and secure the data like never before.

 

Project Fort Zero

With security at the top of every organization's priority list, Dell announced their forthcoming zero trust solution called "Project Fort Zero". Dell's Project Fort Zero is a collaborative effort incorporating solutions from Microsoft, NVIDIA, and Palo Alto Networks and is scheduled to be released within the next 12 months. Project Fort Zero is an extension of Dell's Zero Trust Center of Excellence that was announced last fall and leverages US Department of Defense-approved architecture. Dell will look to use a private cloud approach to handle the orchestration and integration of the technology.  Once available, customers can leverage the solution to secure their data centers, remote and branch offices, and edge deployments all from one platform. The solution is currently in the test phase and has plans to have the U.S. Department of Defense conduct penetration testing in early 2024. Once all testing is completed Dell's Project Fort Zero will allow customers to their own zero trust defense solution from validated Dell blueprints.

 

Conclusion

These were just a few of the key takeaways WWT gathered from this year's Dell Technologies World conference. We know there's a lot to unpack here and many will require additional details on one or more of the topics highlighted within this blog.  Please reach out to one of our teams if you would like to learn more.

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