Dell Opens First European IoT Lab In Ireland

Dell has opened its first European Internet of Things (IoT) lab in Ireland, promising it will help customers bring their M2M projects to life.

The Limerick-based facility, separate to the company’s ‘solutions centre’ in the Irish city, will provide resources and expertise to allow companies to discuss, build and test M2M applications.

Dell says customers will have access to all the equipment they need, such as gateways and sensors, with 100 racks worth of servers powering the lab, which will act as one of the bases for the company’s recently created IoT division.

All resources will be available remotely through Dell’s global network of 15 solution centres, four of which are in Europe.

Limerick IoT centre

“We started with Limerick because there we’ve got a hub of expertise and our proof of concept demo is there too,” Aongus Hegarty, president of Dell EMEA and Limerick native told TechWeekEurope at the company’s innovation day in Copenhagen.

“Our IoT lab will be remotely accessible from all of our solution centres, as is the proof of concept. Our expertise there will be available to our customers.

“We’re going to start there and expand further.”

Dell opened its first IoT lab in Santa Clara, California last year and has plans to open another site in Dubai before the end of 2015 as it seeks to accelerate its vision of providing end-to-end M2M services.

The Texan firm believes it is uniquely placed among its IoT competitors, claiming it can offer a full range of products and react more quickly to trends as it is a privately-held company.

Its IoT division announced its first product last month, an inexpensive gateway that can process sensor data on the edge of the network, filtering out information so only important data is sent to the cloud. This, it says saves bandwidth and time. No operating system is provided, so IT departments can install their own, such as Ubuntu Linux, Wind River Linux, Red Hat Linux or Windows IoT.

“The reality is that 90 percent of the data coming out of these sensors is meaningless,” said Andy Rhodes, executive director of IoT solutions at Dell, noting that most transmissions from a smart light bulb simply say whether it is on or not.

“There are gateways out there today but they’re not made by a tier 1 manufacturer like Dell,” he added, claiming it had an advantage over ‘Tier 3’ manufacturers which had limited production runs and customer support.

The product is already available in the US and Canada, starting at $479, but will be arriving in some European countries later this week.

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