5 top takeaways from Dell EMC World 2016
By Conner Forrest in Data Centers on October 21, 2016, 10:30 AM PST
At the inaugural conference of the newly-joined tech giants, a host of announcements were made around products and services. Here's what you need to know.
Image: iStockphoto/saicle
The first annual Dell EMC World kicked off on October 19, 2016 in Austin, TX, marking the first major event of the now-joined tech powerhouses. Company leaders took the stage throughout the conference to discuss new efforts and the direction of the company in the future.
A host of announcements were made and sessions hosted on software, hardware, and business strategy. Here are five major themes explored at the event.
SEE: Dell EMC updates, launches new systems, software as it integrates legacy products (ZDNet)
1. Hyper-converged infrastructure
One of the biggest announcements at the conference was that the Dell EMC PowerEdge servers would be integrated into the company's VxRail Appliances and VxRack System 1000. This allows Dell EMC to more fully address storage and compute, leading to new use cases and options for hyper-converged infrastructure (HCI) deployments.
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"Dell EMC owning both the compute and storage portions of the hyper-converged stack is a game-changer for the HCI portfolio," Terri McClure, senior analyst of the Enterprise Strategy Group, said in a press release. "It allows the company to deliver more value choices for customers via investment protection, faster innovation, supply chain advantages and savings it can pass on."
According to a press release, the VxRail Appliance integration will address use cases for big data, remote offices, and graphics-intensive workloads. The VxRack System 1000, on the other hand, will speed up applications, offer better configuration, and improve flash economics.
2. Cloud
Dell EMC's cloud focus was split between two components—updates to the Dell EMC Elastic Cloud Storage (ECS) 3.0 modern object-storage platform and an updated, software-defined version of Dell EMC Data Domain. ECS will now run on PowerEdge servers, and a new D-Series hardware offers higher density than other options for ECS. According to a press release, there will also be an ECS Dedicated Cloud Service, which will be hosted by Virtustream.
Data Domain, Dell EMC's cloud-enable data protection offering, will now be available as a service on PowerEdge servers. This news came in tandem with a host of other data protection updates, including Dell EMC's protection of Microsoft Azure applications.
At the 2016 Dell EMC World conference, the company announced their new Analytic Insights Module (AIM), which "delivers all of the software, hardware and services necessary to stand up an environment for both big data analytics and cloud native application development in days rather than weeks," a press release said.
A self-service experience allows data scientists to set up their own workspace, and AIM also offers highly defined permissions. It also has an integrated, scalable data lake and will be available later this year.
Flash storage continues to be at the top of mind for enterprise IT, and Dell EMC addressed this trend with the introduction of Isilon All-Flash scale-out NAS system. It is designed for greater density and to better handle unstructured data, making it a potential tool for modern big data deployments.
"Isilon All-Flash is specifically designed to address the need for extreme NAS performance, but also to provide the multi-protocol access, enterprise-grade data protection, security and ease of management capabilities that organizations expect from the industry's #1 scale-out NAS solution," Phil Bullinger, senior vice president of Isilon at Dell EMC, said in a press release.
Obviously, the combination of two corporations as large as Dell and EMC means that there is going to be some overlap in terms of product offers. Dell EMC leaders took to the stage at Dell EMC World to explain the company's security portfolio and focus moving forward.
For data protection, Dell Data Protection and Endpoint Security Suite Enterprise will handle authentication and file-based data encryption, while MozyEnterprise and MozyPro will deal with cloud data protection. RSA SecurID Access will be the core offering for identity assurance, RSA NetWitness Endpoint will deal with threat detection and response, and unified endpoint management will be primarily associated with VMware AirWatch.
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By Conner Forrest
Conner Forrest is an analyst for 451 Research. He was formerly a Senior Editor for TechRepublic.
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Conner Forrest has nothing to disclose. He doesn't hold investments in the technology companies he covers.
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