{"id":38731,"date":"2019-04-29T09:54:03","date_gmt":"2019-04-29T09:54:03","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/icloud.pe\/blog\/?guid=eccac521f468897b1b173c273407594b"},"modified":"2019-04-29T09:54:03","modified_gmt":"2019-04-29T09:54:03","slug":"what-to-expect-from-dell-technologies-world-2019","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/icloud.pe\/blog\/what-to-expect-from-dell-technologies-world-2019\/","title":{"rendered":"What to expect from Dell Technologies World 2019"},"content":{"rendered":"


\n Adam Shepherd<\/a><\/span>
\n <\/span><\/p>\n

\n
\n
29 Apr, 2019<\/span><\/div>\n<\/p><\/div>\n<\/div>\n

\n<\/a><\/p>\n

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It\u2019s the end of April, and that can mean only one thing: Michael Dell is getting ready to emerge, bear-like, from his Winter slumber and ravenously tear into something; in this case, insufficiently transformed data centres.<\/p>\n

For the next week, Las Vegas\u2019 Sands expo centre will be swarming with Dell\u2019s customers, partners and technologists, all eager to hear what the company has in store over the next 12 months.<\/p>\n

The answer, I suspect, will not be a surprise. Dell has been beating the \u2018digital transformation\u2019 drum for several years, and it shows no signs of letting up.<\/p>\n

As such, we can expect to hear all about the company\u2019s favourite talking-points (sing along if you know the worlds), including the importance of multi-cloud architectures, the growing role of data analytics in business and how software-defined storage and networking can unlock \u2018the data centre of the future\u2019. All important topics, to be sure, but nothing that we haven\u2019t heard Dell talking about at its previous conferences.<\/p>\n

In the years since the arrival of cloud to the enterprise market, Dell has pivoted rather impressively to being a full-stack provider, broadening its focus from on-premise infrastructure to hybrid cloud, edge computing and IoT in a way that its rivals haven\u2019t been able to match quite as effectively. Realistically, there are very few parts of the modern data centre that Dell doesn\u2019t touch in some way, and the company will be making full use of this position.<\/p>\n

Edge computing and IoT, in particular, will almost certainly play a major role in this year\u2019s conference; both areas are a key part of the so-called \u20184th industrial revolution\u2019, and are supported by Dell\u2019s product portfolio.<\/p>\n

Analytics will likely be a major theme too \u2013 data-crunching is increasingly vital for companies, and by happy coincidence, the high performance and low-latency storage of Dell\u2019s equipment makes it well-suited to this task.<\/p>\n

Expect to hear the phrase \u2018multi-cloud\u2019 a lot, as well. Dell likes to emphasise how well the full suite of Dell Technologies brands (primarily VMware, Dell EMC and Pivotal) lend themselves to mixed estates, lest anyone think of it solely as a tin shop.<\/p>\n

What all of these areas mean for customers, in practical terms, is another matter. We\u2019d be surprised to see any major announcements from VMware \u2013 they\u2019re usually saved for VMware\u2019s own conference later in the year \u2013 but CEO Pat Gelsinger is all but certain to deliver his usual keynote. This will probably be where 5G, IoT and Edge receive the most airtime.<\/p>\n

VMware aside, any cloud announcements are likely to come from Pivotal Cloud Foundry, which is one of Dell Technologies\u2019 major entry-points to the cloud market.<\/p>\n

The meat of Dell\u2019s announcements is most likely to focus on new hardware. We\u2019re a little too early in the lifespan of Dell\u2019s latest range of 14G PowerEdge servers to expect a whole new generation. But what we could well see are some newer, more powerful products. Intel has recently announced a swathe of new Xeon server processors, so we\u2019re expecting Dell to show off some fancy new iron that actually makes use of them.<\/p>\n

These servers will, no doubt, be touted as an ideal way to accelerate your machine learning and\/or data analytics deployments; a position that neatly dovetails with Dell\u2019s preferred messaging.<\/p>\n

Equally, don\u2019t be shocked to see Dell unveiling some new servers running on AMD\u2019s EPYC architecture. It\u2019s less likely than new Xeon-powered models \u2013 Intel is a major Dell partner with a lot of behind-the-scenes pull, so the company will want to avoid antagonising Intel \u2013 but at the same time, Dell\u2019s run by smart people. It\u2019s no secret that Intel\u2019s 10nm development has hit a bit of a brick wall, while AMD has sailed merrily past it onto the 7nm process node.<\/p>\n

The results speak for themselves, too: Dell EMC servers fitted with AMD\u2019s EPYC processors can match the performance of Xeon-based equivalents for a considerably lower price point, and that can\u2019t have gone unnoticed. How much attention AMD gets (both on stage and in the halls) should give a good indication of whether the tide is starting to turn in its favour.<\/p>\n

Long story short, keep an eye out for more AMD servers than usual \u2013 although they won\u2019t be sporting the company\u2019s newest Rome architecture, as it\u2019s still too early for production servers to be ready.<\/p>\n

We wouldn\u2019t discount the possibility of Dell launching some new storage or networking hardware, either. We\u2019re not betting the farm on this as it\u2019s usually not a \u2018sexy\u2019 enough area to get much attention at the company\u2019s major league show, not to mention that both portfolios got a full refresh not long after the close of the EMC acquisition. That being said, both storage and networking are key areas of data centre transformation, and Dell has been impressing in both categories recently.<\/p>\n

Additionally, it\u2019s worth noting that this may well be a more cautious show than we\u2019ve seen in recent years, as it\u2019s the first annual conference since Michael Dell took the company back onto the public market last year. This means that, for the first time since 2013, he\u2019s once again answerable to shareholders. Dell is riding high on the successful execution of its roadmap, but tech investors are a notoriously skittish bunch, so the pressure will be focussed on not spooking them with any controversial announcements.<\/p>\n

Thematically-speaking, then, this year\u2019s Dell World is set to be more of the same. Regular attendees probably aren\u2019t going to find themselves surprised by the company\u2019s agenda, and although we may have some excitement on hand in the form of new hardware releases, the looming spectre of public investors makes any big shocks fairly unlikely.<\/p>\n

Still, for customers and partners, it\u2019s an opportunity to get a closer look at the latest products and services rolling out of Dell\u2019s development facilities; at the end of the day, that\u2019s what it\u2019s really all about. <\/p>\n<\/p><\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Adam Shepherd<\/p>\n

29 Apr, 2019 <\/p>\n

It\u2019s the end of April, and that can mean only one thing: Michael Dell is getting ready to emerge, bear-like, from his Winter slumber and ravenously tear into something; in this case, insuffici…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":410,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-38731","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/icloud.pe\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/38731","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/icloud.pe\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/icloud.pe\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/icloud.pe\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/410"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/icloud.pe\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=38731"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/icloud.pe\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/38731\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":38732,"href":"https:\/\/icloud.pe\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/38731\/revisions\/38732"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/icloud.pe\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=38731"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/icloud.pe\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=38731"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/icloud.pe\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=38731"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}