Throughout the COVID-19 pandemic, much of society’s stored historical data has not provided valuable insights and decisions. Nobody predicted a pandemic, not even an AI system. Data is not created equal.

Dell Technologies is addressing this issue with a set of tools to help organizations gain value from both types of data.

“What we see over and over again is that we get the video streams coming in, but there’s also all of these sensors in the world,” said John Shirley (pictured), vice president of unstructured storage product management at Dell Technologies. “So marrying up the video streams with the sensor information and keeping that in a repository so that you can [run] real-time analytics, but also being able to take that same data set and get the historical view … that’s the thing that really changes how the data is being used.”

Shirley spoke with Lisa Martin, host of theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s livestreaming studio, during the Dell Technologies World Digital Experience event. They discussed real-time vs. historical data, Dell’s PowerScale and ObjectScale solutions, and securing unstructured data. (* Disclosure below.)

So much access has to be now, because data from yesterday isn’t good enough. It’s not going to help solve some of these big use cases. What are some of the key use cases that you’re seeing accelerate in the last few months? 

Shirley: Of course data right away in the here-and-now is one of the times where it’s most valuable to have that data. But then if we take a look at that data as it ages, does it get less important? Well, some of it might, but the data has a big scale-like data repository, and to be able to extract value out of that, and holistically as a big set of data, is extremely important as well. And we have tools, everything from our Streaming Data Platform that talks about how we can extract value from that data right as it’s coming off the sensors and the video streams. We’ve got our PowerScale product that provides very high-performance storage so that customers can stream a bunch of data and get some AI and ML off of that data. And then we’ve got our ECS object storage-based product that customers want exabytes of data and they just want a really long-term robust storage repository.  

Talk to us about some of the things that you’re excited about that customers are going to learn in terms of how you’re helping them get more value out of the data faster in a time of such massive change. 

Shirley: Earlier this year we introduced a new product called PowerScale, which is taking our industry-leading OneFS software for Scale-Out file. And we have … taken the best server hardware with PowerEdge and taken the OneFS software and married them together to really extract the best value of the data. 

On top of that, we have announced our ObjectScale solution, an object storage solution that’s specifically targeted for customers running Kubernetes. We’ve partnered up with our friends over at VMware and developed an object store specifically for developers, on top of the Kubernetes environment, so that when customers want to go and start generating new applications, with object stores and new cloud-native apps, they can really quickly spin up new object stores, new buckets and start writing data.

Tell me a little bit about some of the things that you’re doing to facilitate this massive increase in unstructured data so it’s managed securely, so that if there’s any sort of breach or incident, your customers are in good shape. 

Shirley: We do a lot of things around encrypted drives to make sure that if the drives are ever pulled out of the system, there’s just no way to do that without the original keys. We also work very closely with the broader partner and ecosystem community to make sure that we provide things like ransomware protection; in case something does happen … you make sure that you have a good golden copy of that data that you can always go back to. 

What are the three things that you think really differentiate what Dell Technologies can deliver with respect to extracting value from massive amounts of unstructured data?  

Shirley: One, we have all of the deep knowledge that’s really going to give a lot of benefits to our customers. Two, we’ve got the breadth of the portfolio. So not only do we have very specific knowledge in one area, we’re actually covering all of the unstructured portfolios for our customer’s needs. So whether that’s file, or object, or streaming data, might even be the data management plan, where we have data IQ to help our customers understand that data. 

And we have the overall Dell Technologies family that we go forward with. So it’s not just about unstructured data; it’s everything that goes around that. It’s the servers, the computer, all the infrastructure, the software. There’s also our partners and that whole ecosystem that we built up across Dell Technologies. That’s what really makes us strong. 

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 Digital Experience event. (* Disclosure: TheCUBE is a paid media partner for Dell Technologies World. Neither Dell Technologies, the sponsor for theCUBE’s event coverage, nor other sponsors have editorial control over content on theCUBE or SiliconANGLE.)

Photo: SiliconANGLE