Dell offers infrastructure blueprint for AI era

Dell is seeking to close the gap between artificial intelligence needs and infrastructural restrictions by setting new architectural standards.

Speaking at the 2025 Dell Technologies Forum in Sydney, Dell general manager of compute and storage Jamie Humphrey pointed out that as yet, there were no international standards for AI-specific infrastructure architecture.

“The future is exciting, but it's also daunting, because there's nothing being set like this before," he told the audience.

"There's been no precedent for this. As I said before, when we moved from mainframe to client server, client server to virtual, virtual to cloud, and now we're in the true AI era, there is no defined blueprint that said what this was going to be.”

Humphrey said that Dell had attempted to fill that gap with the AI factory product that was announced earlier this year.

The AI factory is a portfolio of products, solutions, and services tailored for AI workloads that Humphry claimed took 340,000 joint engineering hours across multiple organisations to create.

Humphrey explained that while AI essentially operates on the same hardware as usual workloads, the scale of AI workloads and how they are distributed is different, yet organisations will have to meet the needs of both.

“We're into this era where we have to cater for previous generation workloads, and we've got to really start thinking about how the future is going to look," he said.

"To us, that is really where the disaggregated world really starts to come in.”

He said disaggregated is not referring to traditional three tier architecture, but how to operate high-performance workloads at the edge.

“75% of the world's datacentre will be created at the edge, or even the far edge, and if you listen to Michael Dell right now, he's calling it the inference edge," he explained.

"Because the industry is now saying is at that point where that data is being created, that’s where you want to maximise the return and the productivity, and get access and speed to a result,” he said.

Humphrey added that this necessitates new ways of thinking about control, security, compliance and governance.

“Besides cloud by default or cloud by design, how do we look at cloud by autonomy and think about how we get the mixture of a true multicloud world that allows you to embrace and cater for every workload that's coming that's going to come down your way?”