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Tag: Dell

  • Dell Brings DevOps to Edge Computing Environments

    Dell Brings DevOps to Edge Computing Environments

    Dell Technologies today updated its edge computing platform this week to make it simpler to programmatically provision infrastructure using DevOps best practices.

    Phil Burt, senior director of project management for edge computing at Dell Technologies, said version 2.0 of Dell NativeEdge adds additional declarative blueprints based on YAML files and the Topology and Orchestration Specification for Cloud Applications (TOSCA) framework.

    Blueprints for Telit, Litmus and PTC for manufacturing use cases, Deep North for retail, Dell Streaming Data Platform for analytics and Rancher Labs K3s for Kubernetes environments are provided.

    Those blueprints make it simpler to either deploy applications on a lightweight operating system that Dell developed optimized for edge computing platforms or any other software stack an IT organization may prefer, he added.

    Dell is also adding support for the virtual Trusted Platform Module (vTPM) and UEFI Secure Boot capabilities to apply zero-trust IT principles to edge computing platforms using hardware-based cryptography and secure storage for encryption keys, certificates and passwords.

    Finally, Dell is also making available a three-year subscription plan for NativeEdge to lower the total cost of deploying edge computing platforms.

    Dell relies on virtual machines it developed for edge computing platforms to deliver software. IT teams can then opt to deploy monolithic applications or container-based applications running on an instance of Kubernetes deployed as an extension of the virtual machine provided by Dell. Those platforms can then also automatically connect to a network to provide the connectivity required.

    Regardless of approach, Dell is providing a method to programmatically orchestrate the management of highly distributed edge computing environments, noted Burt.

    In the longer term, Dell is also researching how to apply generative artificial intelligence (AI) to the management of edge computing environments using the data its monitoring tools provide, he added.

    While edge computing has been around in one form or another for decades, as more organizations start to process and analyze data at the point where it is created and consumed, the number of applications deployed at the network edge has increased substantially. As such, the number of applications that need to be built and deployed at the edge using DevOps best practices is growing exponentially. In fact, managing those workloads is only going to become that much more challenging as more AI models are deployed at the network edge.

    Of course, not every workload at the edge is managed by an IT team. For years, many organizations have relied on operational technology (OT) teams that have historically deployed applications at the network using manual processes. Organizations that embrace DevOps practices to automate the deployment of workloads at the edge will naturally have to navigate some cultural issues alongside the technical challenges encountered when programmatically deploying software.

    It’s not clear how much software will be running at the network edge in the years ahead, but as the capabilities of the IT infrastructure made available continue to increase, so will the complexity of the applications that will be deployed. The challenge, as always, is going to be finding the best way to manage all that distributed software at what will soon be an unprecedented level of scale.

  • KubeCon 2023: Dell, DevOps and DevRel

    KubeCon 2023: Dell, DevOps and DevRel

     

    Speaker 1: This is Techstrong TV.

    Alan Shimel: Hi everyone. Hey, we’re back here live in Chicago, KubeCon + CloudNativeCon, day two, continuing our coverage, we’ve got some great people lined up to bring you today. We started just now with Dan Garfield from Argo and Codefresh, and my next guest is my friend Brad Meltzer…

    Brad Maltz: Maltz.

    Alan Shimel: I screwed this up… He’s my friend, and why do I think Meltzer?

    Brad Maltz: I don’t know, it’s a good New York name.

    Alan Shimel: No, I knew a Richard Meltzer.

    Brad Maltz: There you go.

    Alan Shimel: I’ll tell you a great story about him off camera, he was a tech entrepreneur, a miserable failure of a tech entrepreneur.

    Brad Maltz: Okay.

    Alan Shimel: His wife though, invented the things, you know how you’ve got holes in Crocs?

    Brad Maltz: Yes.

    Alan Shimel: His wife invented the things that go into those holes. He closed down his venture backed startup, his wife sold those to Crocs, and they’ve lived happily ever after.

    Brad Maltz: And I hope he’s watching this.

    Alan Shimel: Richard Meltzer. He’s from Boulder, Colorado. Hey man, how are you, Meltzer?

    Anyway, that took me down a rabbits nest. Brad is with us… Actually shout out, right? Dell Technologies is sponsoring our broadcast this year from KubeCon again, as they did in Amsterdam last year, and a large part of it is due to Brad, Brad is a director…

    Brad Maltz: Senior director of-

    Alan Shimel: Senior director.

    Brad Maltz: Of the DevOps portfolio and DevRel.

    Alan Shimel: There you said it. Now a lot of you may be asking at home, wow, I didn’t know Dell was involved in DevOps and DevRel, or in CNCF.

    Brad Maltz: Yep.

    Alan Shimel: I got a Dell, right? I got a Dell box-

    Brad Maltz: You’ve got your laptop.

    Alan Shimel: I got the Dell server and stuff like that, but there’s more to today’s Dell than the boxes. So Brad, I don’t want to embarrass you, but I’m going to put you on the spot here.

    Brad Maltz: Go for it.

    Alan Shimel: Talk to us about, I want everyone at home to understand what your group does and how involved you are, not just in CNCF, but in the DevOps community, the DevRel community.

    Brad Maltz: Yeah, so basically over the past year and a half, we’ve been making sure to kind of expand our community outreach, specifically around the DevOps stuff. When I took over the role in product management to help kind of build out further our container strategy, our infrastructure as code strategy, we didn’t realize that we needed a DevRel-like function to help kind of expand our community outreach, our advocacy back into Dell.

    And the reason for that is, what a lot of people don’t know is, I mean, we play across the entire ecosystem of CNCF, right?

    Alan Shimel: Absolutely.

    Brad Maltz: We bring Containers and Kubernetes solutions to market, we play in the AIML space, the security spaces. We’re enabling ecosystems around us with our technology.

    So because of that, having DevRel was extremely important. We spun up podcasts, we have what we call our DevOps Dispatch, which we’re actually recording here at CNCF, and you can get that on YouTube and Spreaker. We have developer.dell.com which we relaunched last year, and now it’s kind of taken off, hands-on labs and blogs and a whole bunch of stuff on there. So for us, the evangelism’s important, but the advocacy for our end users is more important back into Dell.

    Alan Shimel: Got it. So we talked about the… I don’t want to use the word infrastructure, but the infrastructure of how you’re reaching out.

    Brad Maltz: Infrastructure matters.

    Alan Shimel: Absolutely. But I want people at home to understand that behind that infrastructure though is real solutions.

    Brad Maltz: Exactly.

    Alan Shimel: Right? Because part of the whole Dell Technologies thing, it’s solutions. It’s not just a PR marketing kind of… Though we see it here on the show floor, and the podcast and all these things. Let’s talk about the solutions you guys bring.

    Brad Maltz: Yeah, so I mean, a great example is, and this show is actually a big one for us, we just recently have launched our APEX Cloud platforms, and we did one with Azure Stack, we just did one with Red Hat with OpenShift, and that’s actually one of the big things here.

    And what you’re going to see more and more of from us is the ability to take our compute, with our storage, our networking, integration with our ecosystem partners, but give you more of that easy button experience, give you more of the turnkey experience, or even the DIY. We’re always been good at the DIY.

    Alan Shimel: Yeah, that was DNA…

    Brad Maltz: But right now, can we get you more of those easy buttons, right? And that’s exactly where something like ACP for Red Hat here, is if you just want to be able to get OpenShift up and running from the factory as quickly as possible with the least amount of hands as possible, you’re looking at things like our solutions like ACP. And the trick is when you look at solutions, are they just white papers, [inaudible 00:04:57], which are really invaluable to certain people?

    Or is it a factory delivered end-to-end platform experience that delivers that Cloud-like experience and developer experience, on top of the infrastructure, plus plus.

    Alan Shimel: Guys, let’s not minimize that, that makes life a lot easier. I mean, I think back to the first DockerCon… It wasn’t the first, but it was the first one in Austin, because before that DockerCon was in Seattle, this is going back a while. And I saw Kubernetes there, I think it was maybe 0.8 was the release, it wasn’t-

    Brad Maltz: It was early.

    Alan Shimel: It was early. I came home, because at the time, we hadn’t launched Cloud Native Now, and before that it was Container Journal, we hadn’t launched it yet, we were still coming up with the names, and we were toying around with names with Docker in it, which would’ve been a mistake… Well on multiple levels.

    But I came home and told the team, I said, “Look, everybody at DockerCon is talking about this thing called Kubernetes, but it’s never going to catch on. It’s so God damn hard, I don’t know how anyone would use it.”

    Brad Maltz: Why do you think you didn’t bet on that?

    Alan Shimel: Well, this is why I still work and I’m not retired, Brad.

    Brad Maltz: Okay.

    Alan Shimel: Yeah… Another brilliant insight from Alan Shimel… So now with that being said, I’ll stand by my original point, Kubernetes is still hard.

    Brad Maltz: Yes,

    Alan Shimel: It is. I don’t care, I’ll work till I die, I guess, but it’s hard.

    Brad Maltz: Kubernetes is hard, and I think… So Kubernetes hit a maturity point, right? So definitely it won.

    Alan Shimel: No doubt.

    Brad Maltz: And everybody needs it. It’s leading the Cloud Native application kind of abstraction battle, so it’s there, but that doesn’t mean you don’t need to be a jack of all trades to be able to understand all the nuances in the abstraction. And you basically have to be able to operate everything under the covers of Kubernetes to make Kubernetes work properly.

    Alan Shimel: Absolutely.

    Brad Maltz: So what is the real long-term easy button? That’s I think an open question right now for Kubernetes. Opportunity.

    Alan Shimel: Absolutely, I don’t want to get [inaudible 00:07:10], maybe the easy button is something other than Kubernetes?

    Brad Maltz: That is always a potential.

    Alan Shimel: Yeah. But let’s get back to our point here though, so now you get Red Hat OpenShift, right?

    Red Hat OpenShift is probably, I guess the most, certainly in the top two Kubernetes platforms, if you will, if you’re using Kubernetes. And it’s still a little hard, right? I mean, you could go download it from Red Hat-

    Brad Maltz: You can get it running, but you’ve still got to have some knowledge behind it to do the basics.

    Alan Shimel: But this is where the easy button comes in.

    Brad Maltz: Yes.

    Alan Shimel: And also, I want to make clear, when we talk about this easy button, a lot of people say, look, why do I get it from Dell? I don’t want hardware, I’m hosting it in the cloud.

    Brad Maltz: But are you? That’s the question. So when people talk about-

    Alan Shimel: I wouldn’t have asked you if it was the… Okay…

    Brad Maltz: With cloud, it’s always, yeah, you have the super easy button in the public cloud, they’ve done an amazing job there. But you get to deal with things like egress fees, you got to deal with things like costs for ongoing costs for a lot of services behind that. And at some point people start to become cost conscious, so that’s one angle that you deal with.

    The second angle, in this new AI world that we’re now officially in as of 2023, you do start to wonder where’s your data living? Where do you want your data to live? And you’ve got the governance compliance side of it. Not security as much, but it’s more the ownership governance. And we’re seeing a lot of people say, you know what, with all those GPUs, there’s a cost and a governance angle to hosting it in my data center, in a Colo, Cloud adjacent and Cloud aware.

    Alan Shimel: Yep.

    Brad Maltz: So that’s where I see things like ACP for Red Hat 100% making sense.

    Alan Shimel: I agree with you 100%. I think there’s another angle here though, and that is this: Unless you’re really in it, and you may not realize this, but Kubernetes on bare metal, Kubernetes in a data center, not in the public cloud, has always been a big component of the Kubernetes footprint.

    Brad Maltz: Yes.

    Alan Shimel: Everybody just assumed, puts the words Cloud Native and Kubernetes Cloud Native, that it’s all in the big three clouds, right?

    Brad Maltz: Yep.

    Alan Shimel: Well, even beyond Oracle, IBM and the rest, but there’s always been a Kubernetes on-prem.

    Brad Maltz: There always has been, and there always will be.

    Alan Shimel: It’ll continue, it will be-

    Brad Maltz: I think it’s going to grow.

    Alan Shimel: Right, well, I think for the reasons you’ve outlined, right? People are worried about control, they are worried about compliance, they are worried about how’s AI play in all this and cost containment and FinOps and everything else.

    So I think that again is an insight that if you’re not really wired into the Kubernetes community, you don’t-

    Brad Maltz: You don’t think about it.

    Alan Shimel: Recognize… Yeah, excellent. Let’s talk about the show a little bit, so you guys are podcasting here live as you said, but what about conversations? I don’t know, I heard today there’s maybe eight, maybe up to eight to 10,000 people or something like that.

    Brad Maltz: Feels like that, yep.

    Alan Shimel: Conversations with people; what are you hearing? What are you seeing?

    Brad Maltz: A lot of the conversations right now are actually… So I’ve had a lot of AI discussions, which-

    Alan Shimel: So do we.

    Brad Maltz: I mean I expected it, but they’re kind of interesting because they’re not just about how do I build AI things, it’s how do I use AI operationally?

    And I think that’s the nuance that I’m seeing CNCF, maybe in the forward-looking view of the world, is how do we apply AI in the operational side of things like Kubernetes and security and all of that. That’s been a handful of, not a large percentage of conversations. There’s always… Actually the easy button thing, honestly, that’s probably been one of the biggest things.

    People are just, they don’t have enough skills out there, and actually one of the other things is Platform engineering. So one of the things you can see on my shirt, right? We have this-

    Alan Shimel: I saw it, I saw it when you came in.

    Brad Maltz: This is our logo that we have here, at Amsterdam, we kind of have this DevOps operating model yin yang where Dev and Ops have to play well together, cats and dogs have to come and be nice.

    Well enter Platform engineering, and these folks building the platforms that are like products inside of the end user environment, they need to adopt and embrace the DevOps operating model in their world. Platform engineering has been one of the buzzwords, I think it has been a big conversation for us here as well.

    Alan Shimel: Absolutely. Hey, just a quick plug for Techstrong, if you don’t mind, on the topic of operationalizing AI.

    We actually, I mentioned to you off camera, we did this hackathon about two months ago at our office with some of the founders of the DevOps movement, around operationalizing AI. And we recorded it-

    Brad Maltz: Oh, that’s awesome.

    Alan Shimel: We recorded all the sessions and we’ve just about got done editing now to make it manageable, and it’ll be out on Techstrong TV, I think in the next week or so. So if operationalizing AI is something you are into, go check that out. Edited, created totally by our Techstrong video team and starring some really cool people, so-

    Brad Maltz: That’s awesome.

    Alan Shimel: Looking to hear that about it. All right, enough of my own plugs. Brad, what else have you got for us?

    Brad Maltz: I mean, right now I think it’s just an exciting time to be in CNCF, in the community, in the industry, right?

    I mean, what’s interesting, I had seen, funnily enough a meme, that popped up in one of my social media threads, it talked about over 2000 years, the acceleration was like: The horse and buggy to the horse and buggy and everything was very flat, and all of a sudden the last 100, 150 years… Right now it feels like this year, and the past of one or two years, technology is accelerating at such a fast rate that we as an industry, can we keep up with it skills wise and people wise and career-wise?

    I feel like going into the next few years, we’re definitely going to have this skills challenge, and I think that’s one thing that I’m going to be focusing on a lot is how do we enable the industry, as technology just keeps evolving around us? I think that’s a big thing personally for me.

    Alan Shimel: So I will tell you, I’m a little older than you, a little… I don’t disagree with you except I think it’s even bigger than… It’s not just about this industry.

    Brad Maltz: Yep.

    Alan Shimel: I think the kinds of changes we’re seeing now is almost akin to when the internet first went public, right? So this is how I divide things, there are technology innovations that have a profound impact on the technology industry. I’ll give you a perfect example, the cloud. The cloud changed a lot of how we do tech, right?

    I mean, your grandma may say, “Where’s your pictures, grandma?”

    And she says, “They’re in the cloud…”

    Whether they were in the cloud or in the server [inaudible 00:14:33] or whatever, it didn’t make a difference to grandma, but it made a difference to us in this industry, we had to know about cloud security and deployments and everything that goes along with cloud and it kind of rocked our world.

    Then there are technology innovations that rock civilization: the internet rocked civilization, think about life before the internet. It’s a very different-

    Brad Maltz: Cell phones.

    Alan Shimel: Cell phones rocked civilization. So there are things that transcend technology markets, and I think we’re in one of those layers right now where things like AI and quite frankly, look, quantum is going to be real-

    Brad Maltz: At some point, it’s just going to magically happen to everybody.

    Alan Shimel: Boom. I read an article last week the very first time they broke RSA 256.

    Brad Maltz: Yeah, I saw that.

    Alan Shimel: With quantum. That’s crazy stuff, if you’re not up on it out there. But I feel like all of these things are converging to create another civilization changing and it couldn’t come at a better time because God knows we need it.

    Brad Maltz: We do. I’m with you, AI is going to be the next… It’s not even going to be, it is the next thing. And one last note on that for me, when we talk about in product management and Dell Technologies land, like our end users are people? Not anymore… The end users of our technology might actually be the AI, so we have to figure out what is the personality of an AI in the future? There’s a lot of things to think about.

    Alan Shimel: What is the AI wanting and looking for?

    Brad Maltz: That’s it.

    Alan Shimel: Nuts. All right. Hey Brad, you know what we didn’t mention? Hey, people who want to go visit the website, what’s the url?

    Brad Maltz: Obviously at dell.com, we have developer.dell.com now, so please focus on developer.dell.com. Go there, you can get all the latest events, newsletters sign up, hands-on labs, you name it. And you can reach out to me on LinkedIn, and if you have any questions, we’ll help you out.

    Alan Shimel: Fantastic. All right, we are live here in Chicago. We’re going to be back with our next guest in a second in KubeCon. Go check out developer.dell.com, and many thanks to Dell Technologies for sponsoring us here at KubeCon. We’ll be back in a minute.

  • Dell Taps Microsoft to Simplify Hybrid Cloud Computing

    Dell Taps Microsoft to Simplify Hybrid Cloud Computing

    Dell Technologies, in collaboration with Microsoft, today unveiled a platform that tightly integrates an on-premises IT environment with the Azure cloud.

    Caitlin Gordon, vice president of multi-cloud product management for Dell Technologies, said the Dell APEX Cloud Platform for Microsoft Azure is the first instance of a hybrid cloud computing platform designed specifically to address that requirement using a Premier Solution of the Microsoft Azure Stack hyperconverged infrastructure (HCI) platform that Microsoft added to its portfolio today.

    The Premier Edition of Microsoft Azure Stack HCI makes available an instance of that platform that provides a more turnkey management experience than the existing editions, said Gordon.

    In the face of increased economic headwinds, more organizations are looking to lower the total cost of managing IT by reducing the number of control planes that need to be managed. Each platform that an IT team typically supports today has its own control plane that requires IT staff to manage it. Reducing the number of control planes creates an opportunity to reduce the total headcount currently required to manage multiple IT platforms.

    It also serves to streamline workflows in a way that enables DevOps teams to reduce the current level of friction encountered when managing multiple IT platforms, noted Gordon.

    At the core of Microsoft’s approach to hybrid cloud computing that Dell is embracing is Arc, a management framework that makes it possible to manage Azure cloud instances alongside on-premises IT environments. In terms of the ability to manage hybrid cloud computing environments, Microsoft is significantly more advanced than any other cloud service provider, said Gordon.

    It’s not clear whether IT organizations are embracing HCI platforms running an instance of the same core stack of software that Microsoft relies on to provide Azure services. If IT organizations expect to lower the cost of managing IT, there is no doubt they will need to modernize on-premises IT infrastructure. The older the platform, the more expensive it becomes to automate using various third-party frameworks.

    Regardless of the approach, IT teams need to reconcile the need to invest in automating workflows that span multiple IT platforms. Over time, those investments will reduce the total cost of IT, but getting the required funding to start that process will require IT teams to make a strong case for increasing the return on investment (ROI).

    In the meantime, the number of workloads running both in the cloud and at the network edge is only going to increase. At the same time, the bulk of existing workloads continue to run in local data center environments. Most IT teams will be required to find additional ways to automate the management of all those environments simply because the cost of adding additional IT staff to manage highly distributed computing environments as scale will otherwise be prohibitive.

    As such, the issues that IT teams are facing today may be a matter of not if the management of IT will become more automated but how soon.

  • Dell Looks to Expand Pool of Available DevOps Expertise

    Dell Looks to Expand Pool of Available DevOps Expertise

    Dell Technologies has quietly launched a training and education initiative to significantly expand the number of IT professionals that have DevOps skills.

    Brad Maltz, senior director for DevOps and developer relations ecosystems for Dell, said the next era of IT will require IT professionals that understand how to automate the management of application development and deployment. Given its long infrastructure history, Dell is especially interested in helping IT teams to use a mix of graphical tools and command line interfaces (CLIs) to programmatically deploy software at much faster rates and at scale, he added.

    Dell has already hired more than 200 specialists to provide that training as part of a DevOps Transformation Services consulting services engagement, said Maltz. The primary area of focus will be working with IT organizations that are embracing platform engineering to centralize the management of DevOps and GitOps workflows, he noted. Many of those teams are now relying on declarative automation tools that ultimately make DevOps more accessible to a wider range of IT professionals, added Maltz.

    The number of IT professionals that employ graphical tools based on IT management frameworks such as ITIL still far outnumber the number of IT professionals that have DevOps skills. The ongoing debate between these two camps essentially comes down to the need to be able to consistently manage IT at scale versus being able to adroitly keep pace with the needs of organizations that are increasingly dependent on software. In the digital transformation era, it’s become clear that more of the organizations that hire IT professionals are placing a higher value on agility, said Maltz.

    Bridging the divide between ITIL and DevOps to address that requirement is largely a psychological challenge that requires IT teams to address a range of cultural issues in addition to mastering different types of tooling, he added.

    Regardless of whether organizations continue to manage IT infrastructure internally or rely more heavily on managed services provided by Dell, the need to continuously deliver secure software faster has become a business issue. The trouble is the level of DevOps expertise within organizations tends to vary widely. A recent survey published by the Continuous Delivery (CD) Foundation found only 22% of respondents are using both continuous integration (CI) and continuous delivery (CD) to automate all building, testing and deployment of code in a production environment. Most organizations that have adopted DevOps make extensive use of CI to build applications, but CD has proven to be more challenging to master. In fact, the CD Foundation survey found only 7% of respondents described themselves as DevOps engineers or specialists.

    The bulk of the managed services that Dell provides are focused on managing infrastructure rather than deploying software, but the company does have a managed DevOps offering based on the application development and deployment platform that an internal Dell DevOps team built to construct and deploy applications. Naturally, Dell has a vested interest in accelerating the rate at which software can be deployed on IT infrastructure it provides and manages.

    It may be a while before the overall size of the DevOps community expands, but the training initiatives such as the one launched by Dell will help. However, it may become a lot easier to find and retain that talent in the months and years ahead. In the meantime, organizations would be well-advised to invest in upskilling their own IT teams. After all, it’s less expensive to train someone that already works within an IT organization than it is to compete against thousands of other organizations willing to pay top dollar for the best DevOps expertise money can buy.

  • Dell Extends Reach of Managed IT Infrastructure Service Portfolio

    Dell Extends Reach of Managed IT Infrastructure Service Portfolio

    Dell Technologies today expanded the scope of its APEX managed cloud offerings to include integration with the Microsoft Arc hybrid cloud computing framework. In addition, Dell is fulfilling a commitment to deliver block and file storage services on the Microsoft Azure and Amazon Web Services (AWS) cloud platforms.

    The announcements were made at the Dell Technologies World conference where Dell also announced it is extending existing support for managed APEX instances of VMware that include storage services.

    Dell is also making available a bare metal edition of the service, dubbed Dell APEX Compute, that provides IT teams with the option to deploy any virtual machine or Kubernetes cluster of their choice.

    Finally, Dell is also making available an instance of an APEX managed service that supports Red Hat OpenShift, an application development and deployment platform based on Kubernetes.

    Overall, Dell is promising that IT teams will soon be able to move data seamlessly between on-premises environments and Dell APEX Block Storage for Public Cloud. This capability will first be available for AWS and, later this year, Microsoft Azure. As part of that effort, Dell is also launching Dell Navigator, a software-as-a-service (SaaS) platform for managing services such as data replication that includes an edition for Kubernetes clusters. In addition, Dell announced a partnership with Databricks to integrate on-premises storage systems from Dell with the Databricks Lakehouse Platform cloud service.

    Caitlyn Gordon, vice president of multi-cloud product management for Dell Technologies, also claimed that file services running on public clouds using Dell software will be four times faster processing writes than any rival offering.

    The Dell APEX portfolio, at its core, is based on a suite of fully integrated turnkey servers, storage systems, and now, PCs, all managed by Dell on behalf of organizations that subscribe to the APEX service. Dell is now extending the reach of those services into cloud computing environments to make it simpler to deploy workloads everywhere from the network edge to the cloud, said Gordon.

    Most IT organizations today are managing multiple clouds by default. The Dell APEX services simplify the management of those environments by employing the same type of operating model to manage on-premises IT environments, she added.

    Dell is betting that as organizations deploy more complex cloud-native applications, many of them will opt to rely more on external services to manage the underlying infrastructure those applications depend upon. That approach is intended to enable IT organizations to devote more resources to building and deploying applications.

    It’s not clear whether organizations will prefer to rely on Dell to manage their IT, continue to manage it themselves or rely on a third-party IT services provider. Of course, many internal IT organizations are not inclined to cede control over IT infrastructure and applications to a single IT vendor, especially if they use IT infrastructure that has been provided by multiple vendors.

    Regardless of approach, there are now more organizations that prefer to treat IT as an operational expense. In effect, Dell is enabling a cloud operating model to be applied to all IT infrastructure, regardless of where applications are deployed.

  • Five Tips for Moving IT Ops to DevOps

    Five Tips for Moving IT Ops to DevOps

    The era of siloed development and operations functions is rapidly coming to an end. The concept of DevOps has already closed the gap between IT and developers, but as I speak with customers around the globe, one theme continues to arise. Many systems administrators are ill-equipped to handle the shift from IT Ops to DevOps and, in some cases, don’t even know the right questions to ask to ensure they are planning accordingly.

    Having the appropriate equipment and software in place means nothing without people trained and ready to implement the shift from IT Ops to DevOps. As IT strives to support and protect developers continuing to innovate with wild-west-style creativity, how can we empower them with the tools and knowledge to ease the transition? This starts with asking the right questions, but requires IT to think about new things: Automating processes, revamping config management, building efficiencies in data orchestration and standardizing a set of APIs with enterprise-level protections.

    Asking the Right Questions About DevOps and Infrastructure-as-Code

    Enterprises need to look holistically at how infrastructure services are created, delivered and managed. Continuing current practices, such as manual provisioning complicated by different interpretations of imprecise instructions, will continue to lead to snowflake architectures and brittle systems. Organizations must modernize or replace this existing infrastructure to exploit cloud architectures and implement true platforms, actualizing the promise of the cloud.

    Infrastructure-as-code is an underlying framework that removes the manual process of managing and provisioning resources and opens doors to enabling DevOps. Using code to define the infrastructure configuration means that there is greater consistency between platforms. That consistency allows IT to seed the agile processes, methods and technical approaches needed to evolve a DevOps culture.

    To get to a point where infrastructure-as-code is facilitating a DevOps culture, it’s important for IT Ops to understand how to develop an early-stage continuous delivery and deployment pipeline. They also need to begin to seed practices and values native to DevOps for software engineering principles and practices with IT Ops. It’s also important to define success criteria–referred to as the “definition of done” in agile and begin to think about how to implement the infrastructure-as-code using DevOps best practices.

    Don’t Expect Developers to Become Expert Sysadmins

    Developers don’t want or need an extra layer of oversight or management, nor do they want to ask for permission before doing what they do best: Innovating. DevOps can more rapidly provision compute and storage resources and provide infrastructure-as-code while automating DevOps processes, empowering developers to become an innovation engine for their businesses.

    So much of what we’ve seen puts pressure on IT to be proactive when protecting developer cycles in containers and beyond. The NSA, as well as other industry data protection companies, offer tips for IT to stay ahead of these threats, but manual patching and scanning is not only handcuffing IT but stifling innovation in DevOps. The challenge is that IT can’t move as fast as developer cycles and often lose sight of what developers are putting into containers or other IT environments.

    While global data protection restrictions might have an impact on things like machine learning and AI from a consumer experience standpoint, it does not affect how IT might use these technologies to automate protection. It’s also not about extending protection to developer workloads, it’s about having an environment that recognizes and automates protection against threats in all environments. This way, developers and IT don’t have to become system admins or data protection experts. They can focus on the innovation at hand.

    Config Management is Critical to Empowering Developers

    As we continue to prioritize the automation of processes in the developer environment, it’s also important to consider how to move beyond just automating protection and infrastructure while allowing IT Ops to still have an eye on identifying, documenting and tracking changes in the DevOps stack. To do this, DevOps should look to configuration management tools to help manage and automate the architecture through strong community support, customization, scalability and the simplification of complex configurations.

    These tools, such as Ansible, Terraform, etc., can be deployed to meet specific needs and preferences. The point is, once you create infrastructure-as-code, you need a way to configure and manage it that fits the model that’s appropriate for your business. While you can use IaC to configure and manage, you still need to determine how to best implement automation and configuration in the most appropriate environment.

    Data Orchestration Eliminates Repetitive Cycles

    Data orchestration tools bring all data together regardless of where it originates or its format. An ecosystem that can collect data efficiently and convert it to a format that is easily understood by any and all endpoints is critical to the app development process. There’s no need to iterate at multiple levels, on multiple platforms or in different environments. IT can enable developers to innovate and learn from any environment, data warehouse or platform and build applications that can do the same.

    In the same way data orchestration can drive efficiency, there are additional benefits. Automating the collection, analysis and formatting of data saves IT countless hours of doing these processes manually. While there are obvious cost benefits, there are also a few other important benefits.

    To allow developers to continually innovate at a wild west pace, IT/DevOps must also ensure they can meet data privacy compliance and governance policies. Data orchestration allows businesses to delete or store data based on policies preset in the environment. It also allows businesses to ensure that internal policy is upheld throughout the development process. Orchestration then takes that data and makes it workable so that any iterative process can be applied without fear of bottlenecks or additional cycles.

    Standardized APIs Trump Those Created by Unaffiliated Coders

    Today’s developer profile expands far beyond the enterprise. In fact, according to Developer Nation, we can expect a whopping 45 million developers in the world by 2030. These numbers don’t include the unaffiliated coders working out of their basements or garages. That’s not to say that creativity isn’t appreciated or eventually adopted by industry leaders. But the code and software created don’t necessarily abide by enterprise governance and privacy standards. Yet we continue to see wild west developers pulling in anything and any kind of API to ensure it meets the needs of the next business application they are developing. How does IT police this?

    They don’t have to. For IT/DevOps to identify a set of APIs that meet business imperatives and certify them for use within the organization is imperative. Think about a scenario in which a developer has not only a comfortable environment to sit in without learning new skills but also an environment that automates protection, orchestration and gives them a preset library of helpful and open APIs. Businesses can begin to focus on delivery rather than policing and upskilling developers to work within the confines of the business ecosystem.

    As data continues to flow in and out of organizations and more data is being created and stored at the edge, a DevOps culture built for tomorrow’s developers is critical. These tips are a great starting point to ensure you’re installing a future-proof culture of innovation. What are some of the obstacles you’ve faced and overcome during the transition to DevOps?

  • Dell Launches Project Frontier Initiative to Advance Edge Computing

    Dell Launches Project Frontier Initiative to Advance Edge Computing

    Dell Technologies this week launched Project Frontier initiative that promises to make deploying software at the edge simpler using integrated platforms that will be available in 2023.

    Announced at a Dell Technologies Summit event, Project Frontier will create an integrated edge computing platform for vertical industry segments such as manufacturing and retail.

    Dell CEO Michael Dell told conference attendees these platforms will help customers simplify, optimize and scale their edge applications in a secure way.

    The offerings can be centrally managed either by an internal IT operations team or via managed services that Dell provides to simplify onboarding and ensure zero-trust security. The overall goal is to reduce the number of instances that might require IT personnel in the field to configure and update them.

    According to a 2022 IDC survey, 42% of businesses say the most challenging aspect of edge deployments is putting together an entire edge solution. To address that challenge, Dell is also launching a Dell Edge Design Program through which it will collaborate with customers to further advance edge computing solutions.

    Through its Dell Validated Design program, the company is already building edge computing platforms for specific customers, but the goal now is to make it simpler to deploy edge computing platforms at scale.

    The number of application workloads being deployed on edge computing platforms is rising sharply as organizations seek to process and analyze data closer to the point where it is created and consumed. In fact, that shift is at the core of many digital business transformation initiatives that depend on edge computing platforms and devices running, for example, internet of things (IoT) applications to process data in near-real-time.

    A major issue—and one that remains largely unsolved, in many cases—is that organizations lack the ability to consistently deploy software on edge computing platforms. That results in a hodgepodge of homegrown tools deploying software on a wide range of edge computing platforms using manual processes that don’t scale well.

    It’s too early to say just how much software will ultimately be deployed on the edge, but there may come a day when there is more software at the edge than there is in the cloud. Of course, the real challenge will be unifying the management of DevOps processes, regardless of where any given piece of software might be deployed. In fact, Dell is betting that as edge computing continues to evolve, the line between edge computing and cloud computing will continue to blur until they are little more than natural extensions of each other.

    Dell, of course, is not the only IT vendor that views edge computing as the next trillion-dollar IT opportunity. There is already no shortage of options. The issue will be determining which IT vendor has the most robust edge computing ecosystem. In the meantime, DevOps teams would be well-advised to revisit DevOps workflows now with an eye toward making sure they can truly scale. After all, as edge computing platforms continue to proliferate, their ability to build, deploy, update and secure software is about to be put to the ultimate test.

  • Dell Technologies Advances Hybrid Cloud Strategy

    Dell Technologies, in collaboration with VMware and Google, today advanced its hybrid cloud strategy by making its CloudFS storage system available on Google Cloud Platform (GCP) and adding support for VMware Tanzu Kubernetes Grid and VMware Cloud Foundation 4 to its VxRail hyperconverged infrastructure (HCI) platforms for on-premises IT environments.

    Varun Chhabra, vice president of product marketing for Dell Technologies, said both moves are part of Dell’s ongoing effort to provide IT organizations with a consistent cloud operating model spanning both on-premises IT environments and public clouds.

    In the wake of the economic downturn brought on by the COVID-19 pandemic, Dell is more aggressively making a case for reducing IT costs by consolidating the management of multiple clouds.

    Kit Colbert, vice president and CTO for the Cloud Platform Business Unit at VMware, said current spending levels on multiple cloud platforms are unsustainable. However, that doesn’t mean IT organizations should consolidate clouds. Rather, he said, organizations need to streamline the management of multiple clouds to reduce costs.

    VMware has been making a case for deploying its VMware vSphere platform both on-premises and on public clouds from Google, Amazon Web Services (AWS) and others to make it easier to build and deploy application workloads as organizations best see fit. Just because an application workload was created on a specific public cloud, for example, it doesn’t follow that workload needs to be deployed on that platform, Colbert said.

    At the same time, VMware has been making a case for deploying cloud-native workloads based on Kubernetes on top of VMware vSphere as well. VMware Cloud Foundation 4 provides access to a complete stack of infrastructure software that includes a distribution of Kubernetes that has been embedded in the latest update to VMware vSphere. VMware also provides a VMware Tanzu cloud service that can be employed to build, manage and deploy containerized applications across multiple distributions of Kubernetes.

    In effect, VMware and Dell are pushing to extend a management plane that is already widely deployed in on-premises IT environments to encompass both monolithic and microservices-based applications running in the cloud. There may be more workloads moving into the cloud than ever, but Colbert noted the bulk of application workloads and data still reside in on-premises IT environments.

    While Dell and VMware may have an advantage because of the number of IT organizations that already rely on its platforms to manage IT, every provider of a rival platform is making a similar hybrid cloud computing case. AWS, for example, is enabling VMware vSphere to run on its cloud while simultaneously pushing adoption of its infrastructure in on-premises IT environments as an alternative to platforms from Dell and Hewlett-Packard Enterprise (HPE).

    It may be a while before IT organizations define their hybrid cloud computing strategies. Most IT organizations today continue to manage IT environments in isolation from one another. However, the pressure to reduce the number of specialists required to manage each IT platform is mounting. Most IT organizations are being directed to do more with less regardless of how complex the IT environment becomes. The challenge now is figuring out how best to automate the management of what by any measure is now a confusing mix of platforms and workloads.

  • Dell Advances Convergence of Compute and Storage

    Dell Advances Convergence of Compute and Storage

    Dell Technologies today launched a revamped midrange storage platform that takes advantage of NVMe interfaces and solid-state drives (SSDs) to deliver 7x the performance of previous Dell EMC PowerStore platforms, in addition to allowing applications to run locally on an instance of a VMware virtual machine.

    Ben Jastrab, senior manager for storage product marketing at Dell Technologies, said the inclusion of a virtual machine in form of an AppsON capability means that rather than having to deploy applications on a server, for example, a data analytics application could be deployed directly on top of the data it needs to access on a storage system. In addition, the latest version of Dell EMC PowerStore adds support for instances of Kubernetes from VMware running on top of a virtual machine. Dell storage systems already provide support for the Container Storage Interface (CSI) needed to provide Kubernetes clusters access to external storage systems.

    Dell has also added support for Ansible and VMware vRealize Orchestrator frameworks to automate the deployment and ongoing maintenance of Dell EMC PowerStore systems. As part of that effort to automate the management of storage systems, Dell added built-in machine learning algorithms to automate labor-intensive tasks such as initial volume placement, migrations, load balancing and issue resolution. Dell EMC CloudIQ storage monitoring and analytics software makes it possible to combine machine learning and human intelligence for real-time and historical performance and capacity analysis.

    Jastrab noted that many of these innovations are made possible because the storage operating system employed within Dell EMC PowerStore has been completely revamped using microservices based on containers. That approach not only makes the operating system more flexible and resilient, but it also will afford Dell the opportunity to experiment with how it might present storage services in the future, he said.

    Automation coupled with technologies such as deduplication and compression will play a critical role in driving the total cost of storage lower in the months ahead, Jastrab said. In the wake of the economic downturn brought on by the COVID-19 pandemic, IT organizations will be under increased pressure to reduce costs at a time when both the amount and types of data that need to be analyzed and stored continue to increase, he noted, adding the Dell PowerStore system can provide access to 2.8PB of data when configured in a scale-up architecture and more than 11PB when configured using a scale-out architecture.

    IT teams will need to determine to what degree they want to rely on proprietary frameworks such as VMware vRealize to automate IT infrastructure versus an open source Ansible framework that can be applied more broadly to multiple platforms. Dell owns VMware, but Jastrab said the company is committed to providing support for multiple IT automation frameworks.

    It’s not clear to what degree applications will shift from being deployed on traditional servers to a storage system. Many next-generation applications are clearly more latency-sensitive than their predecessors, so providing more direct access to data over an NVMe interface may present IT teams with a compelling alternative. Regardless of the approach taken, the line between compute and storage continues to blur.

  • Dell Boomi Enhances its Enterprise iPaaS Portfolio

    Dell Boomi Announces New API Gateway and Developer Portal, Self-Service Offering, Blockchain Integration, Data Services for Pivotal Cloud Foundry, Enterprise Innovation Services and Bot SDK 

    https://boomi.com/press_release/dell-boomi-enhances-its-enterprise-ipaas/

    LAS VEGAS – BOOMI WORLD 18 – November 6, 2018 – Dell Boomi™ (Boomi), the leading transformation provider of cloud integration and workflow automation software to build The Connected Business, announced, at Boomi World 18, the company’s latest additions to its integration Platform as a Service (iPaaS) for today’s enterprise. The only vendor to offer a unified platform with built-in data quality and connectivity across the enterprise —from people, applications and databases to devices and things—Boomi defines the iPaaS industry today.

    With its latest capabilities for The Connected Enterprise —Boomi Connect Now, Boomi Data Services for Pivotal, Boomi API Gateway and Developer Portal, Bot SDK and new Professional Services offerings —Boomi provides the tools organizations need to support a breadth of use cases across all personas, ensuring both high productivity and IT control. Boomi democratizes integration, making it accessible to all users regardless of their level of technical expertise or role in the organization from citizen developers, business analysts and integration experts.

    “Sky’s mission is to connect customers to more of what they love. Dell Boomi’s ability to connect data, processes and people has an extremely positive impact on the experience Sky provides its 12 million UK customers,” said Olive Perrins, Service Strategy Manager at Sky. “Our people are critical to our success and being able to bring together our rich talent along with critical applications and data will be key to our continued success.”

    New highlights of Dell Boomi’s capabilities geared toward the enterprise include:

    • Boomi Connect Now – Allows partners and select customers to provide a centralized self-service offering for users who don’t have integration expertise. Boomi Connect Now increases productivity for the business user, customer, vendor or supplier by assisting in accomplishing quick, foolproof integrations, while IT still maintains total control.
    • Boomi API Gateway and Developer Portal – As we look to redefine the definition of integration to evolve beyond data and applications to include people, it’s increasingly important to facilitate secure and scalable interactions with external parties. By leveraging the gateway functionality, our customers will have increased confidence in the security and scalability of the services that they provide. Furthermore, with the developer portal, our customers will greatly enhance the discoverability and be able to engage at scale with their broader API consumers.
    • Data Services for Pivotal – Boomi and Pivotal now offer customers even faster deployment of the Boomi iPaaS, with deployment options available for Pivotal Kubernetes and Pivotal Application Services environments (PKS/PAS) from the Pivotal Cloud Foundry marketplace. This allows joint customers to rapidly respond to changing customer needs and provides a modernized IT infrastructure to help organizations become agile and cloud-first. Deep integration and seamless runtimes allow Boomi integration to fit seamlessly into Pivotal’s Continuous Integration and Continuous Delivery (CI/CD) framework.
    • Boomi Enterprise Innovation Services – The latest professional services offering from Boomi allows enterprise customers to collaborate with Boomi experts to achieve innovation and excellence at scale and fully capitalize on Boomi’s industry-leading integration cloud to build a connected business. Available as a subscription, Dell Boomi Enterprise Innovation Services provides a package of integration services, support and resources, with the flexibility to customize to specific customer needs.
    • Architectural Services – Allows customers to harness the full power of evolving IT architectures by partnering with Dell Boomi’s architectural experts. With this service, customers can collaborate with Boomi technical, solutions, business and enterprise architects who offer unmatched industry experience.
    • Blockchain – The evolution of business will require the ability to integrate with blockchain smart contracts. Boomi’s world-class platform offers support for the industry-leading blockchain platforms Ethereum and Hyperledger Fabric, so customers will now be ready to quickly and easily incorporate smart contracts into their business processes.
    • Bot SDK – an accelerator toolkit that packages everything a Boomi developer needs to build a bot. Customers can now achieve faster time to market with bots that are highly integrated into their existing infrastructure and optimized for lead generation and ROI in as little as 15 minutes.

    Additional Leadership Quotes

    “Just as is the case today with most businesses requiring an integration platform solution like Dell Boomi that helps them solve their integration challenges of a hybrid landscape, business will need to solve challenges that now require integration of their hybrid landscape and blockchain smart contracts,” said Michael J. Morton, CTO, Boomi.

     “We are seeing Boomi developers build their presence at every enterprise organization, extending their reach within a line of business and influencing business decisions,” said Steve Wood, Chief Product Officer, Boomi. “With the continued growth of our enterprise offerings, we are committed to improving organizational productivity and helping developers lead their organizations—whether that’s doing their own custom work in the Boomi environment, supplementing it with outside sources and expertise or providing their organization the tools it needs to enable its own citizen integrators.”

    “Perficient has strong, strategic partnerships and implementation experience with Dell Boomi and Pivotal, key technologies which support IT modernization,” said Vishal Rajpal, general manager of Perficient’s cloud platform solutions group. “The depth and breadth of our experience and expertise positions us to expertly deliver these platforms, accelerating digital transformation for our clients. Together, these technologies unleash powerful application development and cloud integration capabilities that our customers need.”

    About Dell Boomi

    Dell Boomi (Boomi), an independent business unit of Dell, is the leading provider of a unified platform to build The Connected Business, from cloud integration to workflow automation. Boomi helps organizations accelerate business agility by connecting data, applications and people to run faster and smarter. Visit http://www.boomi.com for more information.

    © 2018 Boomi Inc. Dell, Boomi, and Dell Boomi are trademarks of Dell Inc. or its subsidiaries. Other names or marks may be the trademarks of their respective owners.