With today’s announcement, Dell unleashes new solutions for the edge, and that is a big deal. The company has been talking about edge computing and 5G infrastructure solutions for years, but we are starting to see more products and solutions for distributed infrastructure. Dell Technologies is doing that with new hardware and solutions in a release scheduled before the now canceled MWC 2020.
Dell Unleashes New PowerEdge Edge Solutions
When one has the opportunity to use “PowerEdge Edge” one must always take advantage of the opportunity. Here, Dell Technologies is taking full advantage. Two new products for this generation are the new PowerEdge XE2420 and Data Center Micro 415. We asked on a call with Dell EMC and the PowerEdge XE2420 is a dual-socket server designed with certain ruggedization for edge deployments.
We previously covered the Dell EMC PowerEdge XR2 rugged server release some time ago. Dell says that the XR2 has been updated this time around but did not get into specifics with us.
On the Data Center Micro 415, our Editor-in-Chief Patrick said:
“I saw an earlier prototype last year while at a Dell event in Austin. The company said it was designed largely based on input from customers such as those working on self-driving car AI. They are bringing compute closer to the test vehicles for ingesting and analytics. This has been in development for years. One of the more interesting use cases, since it includes features such as access control and cooling, is that you can put one of these on a trailer and park it behind the office of your AI startup.”
That is a different perspective. The new products fall into the continuum of the Dell Technologies portfolio.
Other applications are those such as intelligent factories and smart cities which generate large amounts of data. That is where the Dell EMC Streaming Data Platform is designed to play processing and doing analytics on the data that is being ingested at the edge.
For this role, there is a new Dell EMC HPC Ready Architecture for AI and Data Analytics. This new solution incorporates various storage, networking, and compute (CPU and GPU/ accelerator) from the Dell Technologies portfolio to run an edge AI and analytics stack. This is important since transmitting all data generated from the edge back to the cloud or a data center is a potentially costly proposition. Organizations can use this type of solution to perform a first analytics step before potentially doing larger-scale training on the most relevant data in a centralized location.
One of the other features that Dell EMC is pushing is that iDRAC 9 is getting an upgrade. Dell’s vision is that iDRAC becomes the lower-level management and telemetry platform for the edge compute infrastructure.
Final Words
Overall, Dell Technologies had a few new product announcements and a lot of packaging to leverage its portfolio for the edge. By virtually every account, the edge infrastructure is going to be an enormous build-out. All of the traditional technology players are rolling out their solutions to address this market.
