Dell Kicks Off Dell EMC World With Storage, Cloud And Data Protection Updates

Dell has kicked off Dell EMC World 2017 in Las Vegas, the company’s second major conference since the completion of last year’s historic merger, with a multitude of product upgrades and releases.

The data centre-focused updates span areas such as all-flash storage, software-defined storage, hyper-converged infrastructure, hybrid cloud and data protection.

And they are all centred around the much-worn path that is digital transformation, which is of course enabling businesses to create new services and revenue streams and interact with customers in new ways.

Conference kick-off

In an effort to lead this transformation, Dell EMC is basing its services on a hybrid cloud architecture and offering cloud-like pricing models so customers can scale up or scale down their environments depending on their needs.

The pricing structure aims to help businesses become more flexible and move away from having to commit to long-term contracts and large upfront investments, with consumption models tailored to the specific technology being implemented.

Today in his keynote speech, Michael Dell, Chairman and CEO of Dell Technologies, credited the new pricing to the fact that Dell EMC is a privately owned company, meaning it can take a long term view of its strategy and investments.

He also outlined Dell EMC’s strategy, highlighting the company’s ambition to lead the digital transformation revolution and become the one-stop-shop for organisations as they modernise their operations.

Dell was joined on stage by other execs, such as Dell EMC’s president David Goulden, who echoed his thoughts: “The digital transformation mega trend will only intensify, reinforcing the need to start the IT transformation journey now.”

“Dell EMC is the ideal partner to help customers take this first step. The creation of Dell EMC has rapidly accelerated our ability to develop and deliver technologies that will underpin the next wave of innovation and progress for our customers.”

Here’s a quick overview of some of Dell EMC’s early announcements.

New and improved

The first update Dell EMC is showcasing here in Sin City is the 14th generation of the PowerEdge server portfolio, which provide the foundation for cloud, analytics or software-defined data centre initiatives.

It was described as being “the bedrock of the new data centres”, featuring intelligent automation, integrated security and scalable business architecture for workload requirements, as well as providing protection against modern cyber threats and simplifying systems management.

The servers are built on Intel Xeon processors and Diane Bryant, general manager of Intel’s data centre group, joined Goulden on stage to declare the servers as being “huge” for meeting modern business needs.

Furthermore, the company has set its sights on ‘modernising the data centre’ to keep pace with the growth of structured and unstructured data by updating its all-flash storage systems and investing further in software-defined storage (SDS).

With updates to ScaleIO, ECS and IsilonSD Edge on the SDS side, combined with improvements to its VMAX and XtremIO storage systems, Dell EMC is putting its money where its mouth is and staking its claim to drive today’s digital transformation narrative.

And in terms of data protection, The Michael Dell-led juggernaut is expanding its portfolio with the Dell EMC Integrated Data Protection Appliance (IDPA), a purpose-built appliance that converges protection storage, software, search and analytics.

It can be integrated with key business applications to ensure all types of data  are protected against attacks, disasters and outages and will be generally available from this summer.

In addition, Dell EMC is rolling out new capabilities to its cloud data protection portfolio to enable customers to protect and back up their data anywhere, anytime through a portfolio of multi-cloud services that are already available with the latest versions of Data Domain Virtual Edition and Data Protection Suite.

Michael Dell highlighted the importance of data security during his keynote, describing security transformation as being “the greatest enabler or disabler for your digital ambitions” as the modern attack surface continues to grow.

Silicon will be live on the ground at Dell EMC World 2017 this week, so stay tuned for more news and updates.

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