Day 2 of DTW is over, a very busy day of sessions, with a ton of information presented. But first, unfinished business from yesterday following the official announcement today.

Rob Saunders and Ash McCarty's session on the development of a new Dell Private Cloud solution, which I think is the flagship product of DTW. Officially not a replacement for VXRail, as it is different, though it has a lot of the same messaging.

The key challenges behind the concept, building on the automation customers loved with VXRail, bringing cost efficiency, and flexibility of infrastructure re-purposing. 

What is Dell Private Cloud?

• Combines dis-aggregated storage (initially PowerStore, then Powerflex and PowerMax to follow later this year), with PowerEdge servers.
• Like VXRail delivered as turnkey appliances.
• Licensed per node.
• Independent resource scaling for storage and compute.
• Automation to enhance resource efficiency and flexibility.
• Automate deployment day 0 and day 1 code upgrades.
• Built on the same technology as Native Edge (using Cloudify under the covers).
• Like Native Edge it has an Orchestrator (Dell Automation Platform) deployed as a contained app or as SaaS.
• Uses the same blueprints to automated deployment tasks.
• At GA will support VMware, Red Hat, Nutanix coming later in the year.
• Customer brings their own licensing.
• Idea is that a customer can easily redeploy nodes to different hypervisors.
• Helps avoid the Hypervisor lock in of HCI solutions.

Rob Saunders took us through a slick demo of the product running through a deployment, standing up 3 node cluster with PowerStore in 2.5 hours. Although it is still at version one of the product, there will be no time wasted in it being rapidly developed.

Top 10 PowerStore updates

Wei Chen and Jodey Hogeland delivered another great PowerStore update session. Technically 4.1 has already been out a couple of months but still great to get the detail and certain things only released now, I captured some key highlights, which are shared below :

1. APEX AIOPs features
2. Carbon Footprint Monitoring.
3. Performance Headroom forecasting.
4. AI Assistance now context aware.
5. Ransomware detection of change in reducible data
6. Greater resilience
7. 4 x faster Storage direct backups to PPDD
8. Note not supported yet for NAS.
9. Latest all flash PPDD appliances supported.
10. File System Enhancements.
11. Secure snapshots now for file.
12. Capacity accounting.
13. Lifecycle Extension now APOS, so after PowerStore already purchased.
14. Advanced Ransomware Detection.
15. Cyber Sense integration with snapshots.
16. Superna support for NAS.
17. Prolion support for NAS (already available).
18. Dell Private Cloud support.

Innovation in Action 

Jeff Clarke led a session highlighting Dell’s AI advancements, drawing from Hyperscaler deployments to bring AI Factories to Enterprises.

My key take-aways are:

• AI factories will function as token factories, with a projected increase three-order-of-magnitude token generation by 2028.
• Agentic tech: autonomous AI agents expected in 1/3 of interactions by 2028.
• Dell’s AI Data Platform (Data Lakehouse with PowerScale/ObjectScale) optimized for AI, now includes indexing of file data.
• Project Lightning: world’s fastest parallel file system for AI.
• Key partnerships with Nvidia, Intel, Google to boost AI capabilities.
• Dell Private Cloud: open, flexible infrastructure automation solution for disaggregated infrastructure.
• USAA’s Sam Berger praised AI PCs for battery and performance gains.
• Dell AI PCs run workloads on-prem, enhancing performance and future-proofing.
• Dell Pro Max workstation with Qualcomm AI 100 card supports large model inference.
• Dell AI Studio accelerates model deployment across AI PC fleets.
• Speaking to Coreweave’s Brian Venturo, shared their journey from crypto to AI, trusting Dell as a key partner.
• Speaking to Cohere, enables secure, on-prem AI agent deployment.
• Google Gemini to be deployed on-prem via partnership.
• New storage solutions: All-Flash PowerProtect, PowerFlex 5.0 (10 9s uptime, 80% efficiency), and PowerStore Prime 4.1.

Dell NativeEdge: Scalable, secure and cost-effective virtualization platform

Short session on Native Edge updates as a virtualisation platform:

• Now supports clusters.
• KVM based Hypervisor with support for DRS style functionality.
• Simple to manage.
• Clustering underpinned by Ceph storage.

From complexity to clarity: Simplify hybrid cloud with Dell and Nutanix

Session highlighting how Nutanix massively simplifies virtualised and hybrid cloud infrastructure. The real key for me with this was the integration between Dell and Nutanix developed over 14 years of cultivated back-channel relationships which other vendors can’t match.

Also confirmed Dell private Cloud is coming later this year with PowerFlex, maybe with in future with PowerStore. Was hoping to get more info but not much more than that yet.

LLM Chatbot to the rescue: Discover insights easily from your edge data.

This was a fascinating session where we discussed the challenges and solutions in data management, focusing on edge AI and data collection. The key points included:

• Manual, inefficient data collection processes, static dashboards, and disconnected data sources.
• The proposed solution involves a four-step process:
• Automated data ingestion (from edge using Dell Data collector).
• Federated queries with Data Lakehouse
• AI integration with AI Factory.

The demo illustrated how AI and LLMs can analyse and summarise data from edge devices, providing insights without prior knowledge of the data.

In the demo we saw:

• Data collector sends data from Edge device to Lakehouse.
• Data has no tags or labels.
• LLM in AI factory makes sense and enriches data.
• Data can be queried and made sense off.

Advancing patient care: A virtual journey through the modern hospital

Focused session on healthcare with my old friend Arshad Farhad.

We talked about the evolution of healthcare, focusing on the global healthcare landscape, challenges, and solutions. Five Dell global solution centres in Ireland, Singapore, North America, and New York were highlighted, emphasising AI, edge computing, and multi-cloud strategies.

Key metrics included the growth of healthcare data doubling every 73 days and the adoption of AI in healthcare, which has seen a significant increase. The session covered various solutions in partnership with ISVs, including:

• Digital assistants for patient check-in
• AI-driven radiology diagnostics
• Real-time patient monitoring

The importance of data consolidation, cybersecurity, and the role of AI in transforming reactive to proactive healthcare were also stressed.

It was great catching up with Arshad after and discussing Healthcare AI and how each application seems to have its own AI increasing shadow IT, how we could address that.

Superna

Nice to see Ben Conquest from Superna on their stand, I had a good conversation on the new Superna support for PowerStore.

Based on an acquisition, now licensing can be purchased through Dell, hence official support. Day 1 management is separate, later in the year management will go through Eyeglass.

Also big thank you to Olly Moorby from WestCoast for hosting us for dinner at Grimaldi’s for some lovely Pizza 😊.