Every day, engineers, researchers and designers are using the power of AI to change our world. Organizations of all shapes and sizes are leveraging AI to help them answer bigger questions and make more amazing discoveries – faster than ever. There’s nothing artificial about making the world a better place with these discoveries, and there is nothing artificial about the real insights achieved through AI that can help both communities and businesses overcome some of their biggest challenges.
Dell Technologies is dedicated to getting AI into the hands of businesses and institutions of all sizes so that they can harness the power of their data to make the world a better place. As P.J. Camm, IT Director of OTTO Motors states, “As a leader in innovative technology, it was critical to find the right partner who provided a flexible, reliable, and scalable infrastructure to allow us to run our AI workloads. Our partnership with Dell and VMware enables our medium business to make artificial intelligence a reality.”
That’s why Dell Technologies is expanding its AI offerings to empower customers to make artificial intelligence real. We are announcing new Dell Ready Solutions for AI and HPC and improvements to our OpenManage portfolio to make AI easier to adopt and use. Dell Technologies provides infrastructure solutions that deliver AI anywhere, with continuous insights, and at real scale to enable customers to harness insights from the edge to the core to the cloud.
AI anywhere
Progressing AI use cases from proof-of-concept to production can highlight latency and portability challenges, especially when moving these workloads across hybrid clouds. In fact, industry insiders report that “hybrid latency prevents companies from running AI workloads in the cloud with data on-prem.” Moreover, there is a lack of skilled in-house resources to design, deploy and manage systems capable of running AI in production and across the hybrid cloud.
To address these issues, Dell Technologies has partnered with VMware on the recent announcement of VMware vSphere 7 to create the following Ready Solutions for AI and HPC:
The Dell Ready Solutions for AI: GPU-as-a-Service were designed for those who are just starting their AI journey or who already run smaller AI operations. VMware vSphere 7.0 incorporates Bitfusion technology that enables virtualizing accelerators located on-premises or in the cloud. Giving developers self-service access to elastic pools of accelerator resources increases utilization and efficiency for valuable accelerator resources. Using Kubernetes containers, AI can be deployed more rapidly across hybrid cloud environments with high accuracy, performance and efficiency.
The Dell Ready Solutions for vHPC were designed for those who want to advance their AI journey by virtualizing their high performance computing workloads easily using the latest version of vSphere. To optimize solution performance, engineering teams have created ready solutions for the two most common types of HPC workloads, Parallel Distributed Applications (MPI) and Throughput Workloads. MPI applications are used in things like weather forecasting and molecular modeling. Throughput workloads can be seen in Monte Carlo simulations in financial risk analysis, digital movie rendering, and genomics analysis. Both designs increase your agility and operational efficiency in data intense applications. Furthermore, complexity is reduced because they run on the familiar VMware virtualization platform.
While the latest version of VMware vSphere is already factory-installed with these Ready Solutions for AI and HPC, it will also soon be available factory-installed on Dell PowerEdge servers.
Finally, Dell Technologies, Intel, and the University of Cambridge collaborated to create the Data Accelerator (DAC) to enable the next generation of data‑intensive workflows. The DAC alleviates data intensive bottlenecks, enhancing customers’ ability to seamlessly achieve AI insights. It was so successful that it reached #1 in the June 2019 IO500 world HPC storage ranking.
Continuous insights
Modern IT infrastructures are often complex and challenging to manage. The Dell OpenManage systems management portfolio helps IT managers implement advanced computing solutions with the same tools they use for their traditional workloads. Using predefined scripts or management consoles, customers can improve operational uptime and deliver critical information to keep insights flowing using OpenManage Enterprise and OpenManage Mobile. While, enhancements to OpenManage Integration for VMware vCenter enables management of physical and virtual hosts from a single interface. These features along with recently announced streaming telemetry capabilities and enhancements to CloudIQ, prepare our customers for AI-guided operations across their infrastructure.
AI at real scale
Dell Technologies is already helping customers explore and reap the benefits of AI with scalable, flexible solutions designed to help solve complex problems faster than ever. As Robert Walden, CIO of Epsilon explains, “In order to provide our customers personalized marketing content, we needed a scalable infrastructure to run AI workloads. The partnership with Dell and VMware enables us to make artificial intelligence real.” Whether you are sampling data with Dell laptops or workstations, proving out your AI concepts with bare-metal PowerEdge servers, or taking these to production at full scale through virtualization, the Dell Technology portfolio makes AI real for customers every step of the way.
