{"id":28790,"date":"2023-01-09T21:19:36","date_gmt":"2023-01-09T21:19:36","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/mailinvest.blog\/index.php\/2023\/01\/09\/how-infrastructure-growth-is-strengthening-dells-enterprise-hardware-story\/"},"modified":"2023-01-09T21:19:36","modified_gmt":"2023-01-09T21:19:36","slug":"how-infrastructure-growth-is-strengthening-dells-enterprise-hardware-story","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mailinvest.blog\/index.php\/2023\/01\/09\/how-infrastructure-growth-is-strengthening-dells-enterprise-hardware-story\/","title":{"rendered":"How infrastructure growth is strengthening Dell\u2019s enterprise hardware story"},"content":{"rendered":"

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Since 1984, Dell Technologies Inc. has crafted its public image as a provider of branded hardware<\/a>, such as laptops, desktops, monitors and even projectors. Yet observers of the company should keep a close eye on the rest of its business, as Dell pursues an ambitious agenda to reshape enterprise technology in several key areas.<\/p>\n

Nearly 60% of Dell\u2019s revenue<\/a> comes from its Client Solutions Group, or CSG. But most of the remainder is generated by the Infrastructure Solutions Group, or ISG, which also happens to be the most profitable<\/a> from a margin standpoint.\u00a0It encompasses traditional and next-gen storage solutions, networking products and attached software. ISG grew for the sixth consecutive quarter<\/a>, according to Dell\u2019s most recent financial report, with a revenue expansion of 12% year-over-year to over $9 billion.<\/p>\n

The growth of Dell\u2019s ISG operation highlights an important element in the company\u2019s overall enterprise product strategy. Software remains critically important, yet hardware isn\u2019t going away.<\/p>\n

\u201cHardware still matters; last time I checked, doesn\u2019t the software stuff work on the hardware?\u201d said Jeff Clarke<\/a>, vice chairman and co-chief operating officer at Dell, during an interview<\/a> earlier this year with theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media\u2019s livestreaming studio. \u201cClearly, being able to exploit the underlying hardware features and capabilities in your software in a differentiated way is important.\u201d<\/p>\n

Reshaping systems architecture<\/h3>\n

That importance has been highlighted by Dell\u2019s ISG initiatives over the past year. Foremost among these has been the company\u2019s drive to reshape systems architecture through a set of collaborative efforts with Broadcom Inc., VMware Inc. and Advanced Micro Devices Inc.<\/p>\n

Earlier this year, Dell published the results<\/a> of commissioned benchmark testing that measured Dell EMC\u2019s PowerEdge platforms for SQL Server over previous generations. The tests were conducted in partnership with Broadcom, a provider of networking adapters and storage controllers for Dell\u2019s PowerEdge portfolio.\u00a0The benchmark data showed significant progress in new order transaction processing on Dell servers. The Dell\/Broadcom collaboration also leveraged a RAID 5 solution to increase performance.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe trick here is to have the lowest latency, fastest disk for the log \u2014 and it\u2019s critical for consistency,\u201d said Kim Leyenaar<\/a>, principal performance architect at Broadcom, in an exclusive interview<\/a> with theCUBE. \u201cOur RAID 5 is fast enough and has low enough latency to handle database, and it also helps save money. We just figured out where the bottlenecks were; we cleared them out.\u201d<\/p>\n

Dell\u2019s initiative with Broadcom illustrates an important trend in IT systems. The architecture is transforming from CPU-centric to connectivity-centric as a multitude of data center components, such as memory, spinning media, flash storage and networking, need to become interconnected for optimal results.\u00a0IT infrastructure can occasionally struggle to keep pace with connectivity demands, which is why organizations are increasingly turning to a peripheral component interconnect express, or PCIe technology<\/a>, to manage heavier traffic volumes and speed query response.<\/p>\n

This reliance on PCIe is a central element in Dell\u2019s partnership with AMD<\/a>. In November, the chipmaker released<\/a> its 4th Gen EPYC Genoa central processing units and Dell announced<\/a> that its newest lineup of PowerEdge servers will include the chip.\u00a0The new EPYC Genoa CPUs are the first<\/a> to support PCIe 5.0 connectivity standards, an important consideration in linking with high-speed devices for maximum results.<\/p>\n

\u201cJust from a bus architecture perspective, you\u2019re doing a 4x or 8x leap in performance, and all of the peripherals that plug into that faster bus are faster,\u201d said David Nicholson<\/a>, industry analyst for SiliconANGLE, in a November interview<\/a>. \u201cIt\u2019s double what PCIe was before. You can consolidate massive amounts of work into a much smaller footprint, and that\u2019s critical because everything in that server is consuming power.\u201d<\/p>\n

Tools for the hybrid cloud<\/h3>\n

Processor architecture also plays an important role in Project Monterey<\/a>, VMware\u2019s custom silicon initiative launched in 2020. The project illustrates how Dell and VMware are working together after the virtual machine pioneer was acquired by Broadcom earlier this year.<\/p>\n

Project Monterey is designed to reimagine hybrid cloud architecture through the use of Smart NICs or network interface cards which can offload functions from the host. VMware executives have described<\/a> Project Monterey as a \u201cwhole server on the NIC,\u201d which can handle network or storage virtualization and expose remote devices from other hosts. The flexibility<\/a> provided by placing VMware\u2019s tailored infrastructure on Dell\u2019s hardware platform is seen as a key customer advantage, according to one Dell executive.<\/p>\n

\u201cProject Monterey is a great example of how we\u2019re innovating together,\u201d said Jon Siegal<\/a>, senior vice president of product marketing at Dell, during a recent interview<\/a> with theCUBE. \u201cIt\u2019s taking vSphere 8 and running it for the first time on an HCI system, directly on the data processing unit itself. It\u2019s game-changing in terms of laying the foundation for the future architectures that we plan on.\u201d<\/p>\n

Dell is also fine-tuning its technology for Container Storage Interface drivers to support a wide range of Kubernetes distributions. The company introduced<\/a> Container Storage Modules in 2021 to improve observability, usability and data mobility for stateful applications.\u00a0Dell has been focused on supporting containerized cloud-native workloads and ease of manageability across its entire product line. Its CSM technology, which is open source, has emerged as a key element in that strategy.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe came up with CSMs, which is an extension of CSI modules, but adding those enterprise capabilities \u2026 be it observability, be it replication, authorization, resiliency,\u201d said Magi Kapoor<\/a>, director of storage product management, Infrastructure Solutions Group, at Dell during an interview<\/a> with theCUBE. \u201cThese are the things that customers want to use for enterprise storage when it comes to containers.\u201d<\/p>\n

Telecom solutions<\/h3>\n

Dell\u2019s product strategy involving containers and processor architecture highlights ISG\u2019s expanding role in providing industry-specific solutions for delivering enterprise infrastructure. An example of this can be seen in the company\u2019s partnership with Wind River<\/a> to support the telecommunications space.<\/p>\n

In September, Dell announced<\/a> Telecom Infrastructure Blocks, pre-packaged cloud-native modules of hardware and software designed to support specific telco use cases. The goal is to allow communications service providers to build modern networks more efficiently by reducing the complexity of managing a distributed cloud platform.<\/p>\n

Wind River provides a container-as-a-service layer<\/a> for a distributed cloud, along with tools for automating operations at scale. Dell\u2019s Telecom Infrastructure Blocks brings ultra-low latency, cloud-native infrastructure for intelligent edge networks.<\/p>\n

Dell has been building a portfolio of telecom products and services over the past several years to support communications service providers in the buildout of open cloud-native networks. Just over a year ago, Dell introduced its Bare Metal Orchestrator<\/a> to assist telecom providers with management of hundreds of thousands of servers for Open RAN and 5G deployments.<\/p>\n

\u201cFor 5G, far edge sites, and services edge the scale is different for carriers than for enterprises,\u201d said Andrew Vaz<\/a>, vice president of product management in Dell\u2019s telecom systems business, in an interview<\/a> with SiliconANGLE. \u201cThe customization requirements are very high, and we can now take Dell\u2019s expertise and factory integration capabilities and deploy at scale in volume for a telco environment.\u201d<\/p>\n

Dell\u2019s telco initiative underscores a fundamental tenet of the company\u2019s product strategy within ISG. The company is structuring its underlying product development roadmap to meet customers where they are in a multicloud world. This point was amplified further by Dell\u2019s Clarke in his conversation<\/a> with theCUBE earlier this year.<\/p>\n

\u201cPeople want to drag in a conversation about public this and private that, and that\u2019s not how customers work today,\u201d Clarke said. \u201cThey want to use the best capabilities regardless of where they lie, and if that\u2019s keeping mission-critical data on-premises, taking advantage of analytic tools in the cloud, doing test dev in the public cloud, moving out to the edge, they want to be able to do that reasonably quickly. So if you think about our multicloud vision, it\u2019s about building an ecosystem across all of the public clouds. That\u2019s what I think customers want.\u201d<\/p>\n

Image: SiliconANGLE<\/h5>\n
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