It’s fun to visualize the cloud as a nebulous haze filled with floating data, but as we all know, there is physical hardware behind the magic of cloud. Digitally transformed companies are using new technologies to extract insights from their data and applying them to gain an edge over their competitors, demanding ever increasing agility and speed from the underlying architecture.

“I don’t think there’s a single industry in any part of the world today that we talk to that’s not interested in artificial intelligence, machine learning … deep learning,” said Ravi Pendekanti (pictured), senior vice president, server solutions product management and marketing, at Dell Technologies Inc.

Pendekanti spoke with Lisa Martin (@LuccaZara), host of theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s mobile livestreaming studio, and guest host John Troyer (@jtroyer), chief reckoner at TechReckoning, during the Dell Technologies World event in Las Vegas. They discussed increasing customer demands for hardware and the announcement of innovations in Dell EMC’s PowerEdge server line. (* Disclosure below.)

Future proofing with flexible and scalable servers

Investing in hardware is no different to other long-term investments, such as a car or a house — planning is essential. “You really don’t want to acquire something and then decide later that you’ve run out of room,” Pendekanti said, emphasizing that customers need to be aware of their future needs, as well as what they require for right now. “Start looking at the workload … then start looking at growing and what your needs could be. And then start connecting the dots,” he advised. 

No matter how carefully you plan, it is not always possible to accurately predict future needs. This is especially true when it comes to artificial intelligence and machine learning where considerations include not only applications, but different neural network methodologies. “You hear of DNN, deep neural network, right? And then you hear of things called [recurrent neural network] RNN; there is something called [convolutional neural network] CNN. …. There [are] so many permutations and combinations in the mix that … we wanted to make sure that we provided flexibility and the scalability [in the architecture],” Pendekanti said.

Kinetic infrastructure, soon to be available with the release of Dell EMC’s PowerEdge MX, is a technology that enables full composability, bringing configuration flexibility all the way to the level of the individual storage device.

“Kinetic infrastructure … essentially enables our customers to go out and run multiple workloads on the same modular infrastructure,” Pendekanti stated. “So that’s how we, the PowerEdge team, are building servers today … provid[ing] our customers with the ability to have headroom and at the same time giv[ing] them the flexibility to change, whether it is [non-volatile memory express] drives or any kind of [solid state] drive, [graphics processing units], [field-programmable gate arrays], so there’s all the flexibility built into it along with ease of management,” Pendekanti concluded.

Watch the complete video interview below, and be sure to check out more of SiliconANGLE’s and theCUBE’s coverage of the Dell Technologies World 2018 event. (* Disclosure: Dell Technologies Inc. sponsored this segment of theCUBE. Neither Dell EMC nor other sponsors have editorial control over content on theCUBE or SiliconANGLE.)

Photo: SiliconANGLE