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Tag: Dell EMC

  • Vertica in Eon Mode Now Available for Dell EMC Elastic Cloud Storage to Deliver High-Performance Analytics in On-Premises Environments

    Combined Offering Provides More Choice to Leverage Cloud Innovation for Predictive Analytics

     

    Santa Clara, CA – March 10, 2021 – Vertica and Dell EMC today announced the general availability of Vertica in Eon Mode for Dell EMC Elastic Cloud Storage (ECS), delivering data-driven organizations more freedom to leverage cloud innovation for analytics. This combined predictive analytics offering gives data-driven organizations more freedom to leverage cloud innovation for analytics wherever their data resides, supporting hybrid deployments and on-premises data center use cases. By “right sizing” the compute resources for analytical queries and storage resources for data, data engineering teams can more cost-effectively and confidently manage variable workloads.

    Most companies are embracing a multi-cloud and hybrid approach to infrastructure, and many workloads will remain on-premises. Modern analytics architectures must ensure that operational efficiency and workload flexibility is not limited to only data that resides in the public clouds. Vertica in Eon Mode for Dell EMC ECS delivers the advantages of separating compute from storage to enterprise data centers as a highly scalable, highly performant solution for the most demanding analytic workloads.

    “Our customers trust us to provide the greatest freedom in how they consume the highest performance analytics – flexibility for the broadest deployment options, whether it’s deploying Vertica on any major public cloud or on-premises with more leading object storage options,” said Colin Mahony, senior vice president and general manager of Vertica. “With Vertica in Eon Mode for Dell EMC ECS, organizations can choose our cloud-optimized architecture to manage variable workloads in hybrid or on-premises environments with Dell EMC’s market-leading software-defined cloud object storage platform.”

    Vertica in Eon Mode for Dell EMC ECS provides organizations with operational simplicity and workload isolation to meet ever-stringent SLAs and business objectives. Dell EMC ECS provides customers with the flexibility to deploy object storage as an appliance-based solution or in a software-defined model to fit the performance and financial requirements of organizations. Together, Vertica in Eon Mode and Dell EMC ECS give companies a consistent platform for analytics across all of their environments, whether their data resides in the cloud or on-premises, or in a hybrid architecture.

    “Building our partnership between Vertica and ECS enables our joint analytics customers to deliver a flexible and efficient architecture by separating compute and storage,” said John Shirley, Vice President of Unstructured Storage Product Management at Dell.

    Vertica in Eon Mode for Dell EMC ECS provides organizations from any industry with analytically intensive needs to achieve fast analytical insight from the largest volumes of data to:

    • Scale infrastructure resources independently – Storage can grow without adding expensive compute, and compute can be scaled up or down with variable or intermittent workloads.
    • Isolate workloads – Business analysts and data scientists can work independently from a single source of truth without competing for resources.
    • Simplify database options – Customers can experience improved node recovery, superior workload balancing, and more rapid compute provisioning.
    • Hibernate compute nodes – Customers can start and stop analytics more efficiently by hibernating compute nodes when they’re not needed.

    Additional Information

    For more information about Vertica, please visit www.vertica.com and www.dell.com. To learn more about Vertica on Twitter, please follow @VerticaUnified and join Vertica on LinkedIn.

    About Vertica

    The core analytical platform within the Micro Focus software portfolio, Vertica is the Unified Analytics Platform, based on a massively scalable architecture with the broadest set of analytical functions spanning event and time series, pattern matching, geospatial, and end-to-end in-database machine learning. Vertica enables many customers – from Philips to The Trade Desk to MassMutual to many others – to easily apply these powerful functions to the largest and most demanding analytical workloads, arming businesses and its customers with predictive business insights faster than any data analytical platform in the market. Vertica provides its Unified Analytics Platform across all major public clouds and on-premises data centers and integrates data in cloud object storage.

    About Dell EMC

    Dell Technologies (NYSE: DELL) helps organizations and individuals build their digital future and transform how they work, live, and play. The company provides customers with the industry’s broadest and most innovative technology and services portfolio for the data era.

     

  • VMware Drops Managed Cloud Onto Dell EMC Appliances

    VMware Drops Managed Cloud Onto Dell EMC Appliances

    At the Dell Technologies World conference, VMware today announced it will make available an instance of its managed cloud platform on appliances from Dell EMC in the second half of this year.

    VMware Cloud for Dell EMC is a turnkey platform that combines VMware compute, storage and networking software in a single offering managed and updated by VMware on behalf of its customers. It is similar to VMware Cloud for AWS, a managed service that VMware provides for Amazon Web Services, said Wei Wang, director of product marketing for VMware.

    VMware Cloud for Dell EMC represents the first commercial instance of Project Dimension, an initiative launched last year that promised to make available a software-defined data center (SDDC) as a managed service for on-premises IT environments in an effort to “ruthlessly automate IT.” In addition to supporting VxRail appliances from Dell EMC, VMware plans to make available instances of Project Dimension on other platforms, Wang said.

    Pricing for the managed service initially will be based on a flat monthly subscription, but Wang said VMware plans to provide a metered option that will enable customers to pay for VMware Cloud for Dell EMC on a pure consumption basis.

    In the meantime, VMware Cloud for Dell EMC, coupled with VMware Cloud for AWS, will provide IT organizations with a consistent control plane across a hybrid cloud computing environment based on vSphere, vSAN and NSX software that virtualizes compute, storage and networking, noted Wang. VMware is already managing infrastructure running more than 25 million workloads on AWS, a number that is expected to increase substantially as it rolls out instances on Project Dimension on additional public clouds including Microsoft Azure and on-premises IT environments.

    By opting to rely on VMware to manage IT infrastructure, organizations should be able to shift more of their own internal IT resources toward developing and deploying more applications. The VMware approach also potentially reduces the scope of the operational challenge many organizations now face when trying to manage virtual compute, storage and networking software in tandem.

    The challenge those organizations will face is implementing a set of best DevOps practices that match the cadence of the updates being made to the IT environment by VMware. It’s not clear to what degree organizations will want to relinquish operational control over IT infrastructure to VMware. Historically, roughly a quarter of all IT is consumed as a managed service usually provided by an IT services firm, but as vendors such as VMware begin to offer those managed services, the number of organizations that might switch to the model may increase.

    Many organizations already rely on cloud service providers such as AWS to manage infrastructure on their behalf. This latest offering essentially extends that same concept to on-premises IT environments.

    The degree to which organizations will save money by relying on a managed service is going to be difficult to quantify. In some cases, relying on a managed service might prove more expensive, while in other cases the savings on IT administrators alone might pay for the service. Whatever the path chosen, the number of workloads that will running on IT infrastructure managed by vendors such as VMware will increase sharply in the months and years ahead.

    — Mike Vizard

  • Dell EMC Bets on Machine Learning to Drive IT Agility

    Dell EMC Bets on Machine Learning to Drive IT Agility

    Dell Technologies announced it is infusing machine learning algorithms across its portfolio of server and storage infrastructure to optimize the performance of each individual application using artificial intelligence (AI).

    At the Dell Technologies World 2018 conference, the Dell EMC arm of Dell Technologies announced it has joined the Intel AI Builders program. Dell EMC and Intel will enable customers to benchmark Deep Learning and high-performance computing (HPC) workloads running on Intel Xeon Scalable processors and Intel field programmable gate arrays (FPGAs) integrated in the company’s PowerEdge R740 servers at the Dell EMC Innovation Lab and the Dell EMC customer Solution Centers.

    Dell EMC also unveiled Dell EMC PowerMax, an NVMe-based storage array that takes advantage of an embedded machine learning engine into the storage operating system to optimize I/O performance. Dell EMC said that engine is capable of making 6 billion decisions related to optimizing 40 million data sets a day.

    Finally, Dell also announced Dell Precision Optimizer software that compares the behavior of each application deployed on a Dell workstation against a machine learning model that automatically optimizes system settings. According to the company, Dell Precision Optimizer can improve workstation application performance band delivery up to 394 percent.

    Ashley Gorakhpurwalla, ‎president and general manager for server and infrastructure systems at Dell EMC, said the plan is make it possible to compare the state of an IT infrastructure deployment against AI models that Dell EMC is constructing in the cloud using all the data gathered from the company’s systems connected to Dell EMC support services. Armed with that data, it will become possible to optimize system settings for every type of application deployed on it, said Gorakhpurwalla.

    He noted that despite advances in DevOps, provisioning resources in a local data center on demand is still too time-consuming. Many IT organizations have adopted converged and hyperconverged infrastructure (HCI) platforms to unify the management of compute, storage and networking. But machine learning algorithms combined with other emerging technologies should make it possible to make IT infrastructure resources on demand in a cloud-like manner. That increased level of automation should enable IT organizations to allocate more resources to developing applications than managing the infrastructure those applications run on.

    Each IT organization today is at a different stage of maturity when it comes to IT infrastructure. Dell EMC has one customer with a single administrator who manages more than 80,000 servers, Gorakhpurwalla said. Over time, IT infrastructure will become increasingly automated across a much broader range of customers, he noted—critical because it will allow local IT teams to be as agile as any cloud service providers. Today, many workloads are deployed in the cloud because of the perceived agility of the cloud, regardless of the actual costs.

    It may take some time for developers to regain confidence in the agility of local IT departments. But as AI models continue to evolve it’s now a matter of when rather than if local IT infrastructure will become much more responsive to the needs of any given application.

    — Mike Vizard

  • VMware CEO Stakes Out DevOps Position

    VMware CEO Stakes Out DevOps Position

    At the Dell EMC World 2017 conference this week, VMware CEO Pat Gelsinger waded into an increasingly heated DevOps debate by suggesting that most developers are too “lazy” to be really interested in IT operations.

    At a time when factions within the DevOps community are making the case for developers to be responsible for DevOps on an end-to-end basis, Gelsinger contends that most developers want to get out of being involved with IT operations as quickly as possible so they can spend more time developing applications.

    The VMware approach to DevOps is closely aligned with Pivotal, a sister company operating under the Dell Technologies umbrella that curates an instance of the platform-as-a-service (PaaS) environment developed by the Cloud Foundry Foundation.

    Gelsinger notes that the two primary reasons developers have shifted workloads to public clouds is perceived costs and the fact that invoking infrastructure as a service (IaaS) via an application programming interface (API) is simpler. To combat both those issues, Dell EMC has been rolling out preintegrated converged and hyperconverged infrastructure that, for certain classes of workloads, is less expensive to own over multiple years. Those systems are optimized to run either VMware or Microsoft virtualization software within a software-defined data center that exposes IT infrastructure resources via APIs. In effect, Dell EMC is applying a cloud operating model on top of IT infrastructure deployed inside the data center to close what Gelsinger describes as an “easy gap” between public clouds and internal IT operations. As those systems are more widely deployed, Dell EMC and VMware jointly contend that IT organizations will be in a better position to inject more agility into their DevOps processes.

    Many IT operations professionals have a vested interest in the outcome of those efforts because developers have been doing an end run around internal IT operations teams by deploying applications directly on to a public cloud. The challenge VMware recognizes, says Gelsinger, is that the entire DevOps space currently is chaotic. Each IT organization not only has a different view concerning to what level of DevOps integration it wants to achieve, but none of them are at the same point in making that DevOps journey. In fact, there’s a raging debate over the merits of PaaS environments versus lighter-weight container-as-a-service (CaaS) environments.

    Dell EMC, in collaboration with VMware and Pivotal, has invested heavily in a Cloud Foundry platform that it makes available as a Pivotal Cloud Foundry (PCF) offering is increasingly automated, from an IT operations perspective. The latest version includes a rolling update capability that requires no human intervention. Pivotal claims one financial services customer has deployed 10,000 application containers on an instance of PCF that is managed by only four IT operations people. Couple that level of automation with the automation that VMware and Dell EMC are driving into the underlying IT infrastructure, and it shows that DevOps will be profoundly different than today. Less clear is who inside the IT organization will be exactly managing what.

    — Mike Vizard