Dell Technologies Forum talks up 'ground to cloud' in Sydney

Dell Technologies laid out its view of “unsolved” IT infrastructure challenges in front of hundreds of customers and partners at the Dell Technologies Forum in Sydney yesterday.

Speakers talked up demand for Dell Technologies’ enterprise IT storage tools to tame multi-cloud “chaos” and costs.

Giving this ‘ground to cloud’ pitch was Dell Technologies APJ VP of Presales Danny Elmarji, who argued that multi-cloud wasn’t “stitched together” properly.

“We have data silos; we have different tools. We have different operating teams trying to figure out how to navigate through this multi cloud by chaos,” he said.

Elmarji talked about driving multi-cloud efficiency and lowering costs by using Dell Technologies’ enterprise software on public cloud infrastructure.

“If you look at public cloud storage today, they don't have these enterprise grade capabilities,” Elmarji argued. “They're not very efficient, the resiliency and availability of them they cost a lot of money. Yes, they can scale, but you have to stitch it together and the infrastructure costs are starting to balloon, especially when you look at AI work.”

“So as a result of that we're seeing customers that want to adopt this journey of deploying block and file technologies, our enterprise grade software and IP, on the public cloud infrastructure,” Elmarji said.

“We're seeing net cost improvements of close to 50 percent, where you can drive down your elastic block storage costs today and run them on our Dell software block capabilities – our APEX block service on AWS and on Azure.”

“We have a lot of customers asking questions. How do we do this? How do we bring this to life?”

Dell Technologies’ SVP of Global Field Marketing, Geraldine Tunnell, pointed out the prevalence of multi-cloud environments.

“This is the first year that IDC is predicting a decline in year over year growth in the public cloud in Australia. It's a sign that organisations are now optimising for a multi-cloud approach with larger growth of things like platform as a service,” Tunnell said.

“Putting the right workloads in the right places means you have clouds everywhere; on-prem across multiple public clouds, clouds at the edge, in co-location facilities, and then the challenge becomes extracting value from the explosion of data across your multi-cloud estate. You need someone to help make it work all together, and better multi-cloud by design, not by default.”

AI capability gap

Unsurprisingly, AI was also on the Dell Technologies Forum agenda. Speakers highlighted the challenges of operationalising AI.

“Right now, we are seeing a tonne of enthusiasm, but real challenges in the execution. There's a real opportunity…to reimagine your organisation as an AI powerhouse. But it means moving fast, applying generative AI to your private data set and driving competitive advantage, but in a way that is secure, cost-effective and keeps all of you in control,” said Tunnell.

Elmarji talked about which data sources businesses might use for AI, and the infrastructure implications.

“I'm sure many of you today are sitting in your business trying to figure out how to apply Gen AI into your organisation. And it's a very different approach. It's effectively taking your existing datasets, learning and training those datasets to apply new content; and that new content can come from text-based data rich media, it can come from all sorts of data sources,” Elmarji said.

“But what's important is every organisation that we're talking to right now is trying to figure out these use cases.”

He talked about cloud cost considerations for Dell Technologies' AI experiments.

"Yes, we can go and experiment in the public cloud, but the costs are too significant. And this is where we thought this is the best approach, which is to do it on our private cloud data sets – and we run a multi-cloud environment today. So as many of you go exploring around the use case of gen AI, we think this is a critical workload that's going to change the way you think about where to deploy these private data sets into these models.””

Edge bottleneck

Tunnell talked up the need for technology solutions to help organisations securely scale their capabilities at the edge.

“There's a perfect storm of data, technology and competition accelerating innovations at the edge. It's in retail stores, factory floors, fields, farms; it's in remote and difficult locations and dense urban areas,” she said.

“Businesses are struggling to deal with the scale and how to manage it all securely. The last thing you want is a data-centric model acting as a bottleneck. Nor do you want to simply push cloud technologies to the edge,” said Tunnell.

“This is especially the case here in Australia, where you have sparse populations over a wide area. In 2023, we shouldn't have a challenge where a regional hospital has a patient who arrives on site before their medical records. But here like many other places, it's often the reality. You need someone to help simplify the edge so you can securely scale yours.”

Cybersecurity industry “broken”

Tunnell said organisations are overwhelmed by the amount of cybersecurity solutions on the market.

“…the security industry has never been more fragmented or broken. Our customers have been clear: Don't give us more security products. Embed greater security and resiliency into Dell’s solutions,” said Tunnell.

APEX portfolio grows

Elmarji touched on some of the products and solutions Dell Technologies has been bringing to market, including the APEX PC as a Service to simplify PC lifecycle management.

Dell has also built a subscription-based server capability available to customer through its Dell Apex Console.

“So, you can go and deploy your VMs bare metal workloads or containerised workloads of your choice. This gives you control, but in a consumption experience that you wish,” said Elmarji.