Despite the ascendance of cloud computing, information technology giant Dell Technologies Inc. is betting on the continued prevalence of on-premises data center systems.

At its Dell Technologies World 2018 conference today, the company unveiled a slew of new server and storage products. It’s also updating its portfolio of hyperconverged infrastructure offerings designed to make it easier to adopt private clouds based on technology from majority-owned VMware Inc.

The announcements come at a time when Dell is embarking on a new chapter in its own story in which it’s stepping up its hybrid cloud play in order to become a key enabler of “digital transformation” within enterprises.

As part of that wider strategy, Dell is also focused on cementing its dominance in the on-premises data center with its latest “edge-to-core-to-cloud” technology innovations. Dell said it’s laying the foundations of what it calls “the Modern Data Center,” with a view to helping enterprises adopt new technologies around artificial intelligence, big data and the cloud.

As Dell Chief Executive Michael Dell (pictured) put it in broader terms during his keynote at the conference Monday before the announcement: “Most customers are beginning to realize that the cloud is not a place, but rather a way of doing IT, where everything is software-defined and infrastructure is code,” he said. “IT is not a question of the public cloud versus the private cloud, but rather there’s a right answer for every workload.”

The new offerings include a revamped Dell EMC PowerMax storage system, which comes with a “built-in, real-time machine learning engine” that leverages predictive analytics and pattern recognition to provide automated, intelligent storage capabilities. Dell reckons the nonvolatile memory-based PowerMax is the “world’s fastest” storage array ever made at almost twice the speed of its nearest competitor.

“Dell EMC is No. 1 in all-flash arrays, twice the closest competitor and I think PowerMax will help the company in higher-end configurations for real-time workloads,” said Patrick Moorhead, president and principal analyst at Moor Insights & Strategy.

Dell also updated its XtremIO all-flash arrays. As well as a new entry-level model, Dell said the arrays gain new data replication capabilities that maximize efficiency by sending only unique or new data to a remote site, thereby minimizing bandwidth requirements by up to 75 percent. XtremIO’s data replication also requires 38 percent less storage space than previous generation systems, Dell said. Both storage systems are available immediately.

Souped-up servers for AI workloads

Dell is working to power modern workloads around artificial intelligence, machine learning and big data analytics with its latest generation of server gear. The headline here is a new breed of Dell EMC PowerEdge servers that were built under close cooperation with chipmaker Intel Corp. in order to provide the higher performance necessary for machine learning tasks.

Dell said its new PowerEdge R940xa and PowerEdge R840 four-socket servers, available May 22, are both powered by Intel’s latest-generation Xeon Scalable processors. The former is designed to accelerate databases for business-critical applications, while the latter is built for in-database analytics and aims to deliver insights to users faster. In addition, both servers support Intel’s new field-programmable gate arrays, which are specialized chips that act as hardware accelerators and can be optimized for specific workloads such as machine learning, then reprogrammed for different jobs later on.

“Dell gained an incredible 40 percent in server revenue share YoY last quarter and that came in part from a richer mix of GPU and memory configurations,” said Moorhead. “The R940xa takes acceleration a step farther by supporting four CPUs, four GPUs, eight FPGAs and 32 flash drives. It is a real beast of a configuration that will help in machine learning training and even SAP workloads.”

Dell is also touting a new “Dell EMC Ready Solution for HPC,” incorporating a new PowerEdge R740 server that’s also powered by Intel’s Xeon Scalable chips and FPGAs. It’s available now.

“Today’s enterprises are grappling with a constant deluge of data and evolving workloads that requires high-performance computing and advanced AI capabilities that can scale as needed,” said Lisa Spelman, vice president and general manager of Intel Xeon products and data center marketing at Intel. “Dell EMC’s Ready Bundle for HPC meets these needs through the combination of Intel Xeon Scalable processors and Intel FPGAs, which are part of Intel’s leading portfolio of AI solutions, and help provide a highly optimized  combination of power and flexibility required to manage the modern data center.”

To support machine learning operations further, Dell also said it is updating its Precision Optimizer with new AI-powered capabilities that allow it to configure systems on the fly to maximize the performance of specific software applications. Available now, the Dell Precision Optimizer 5.0 uses data from an application’s background behavior to train machine learning models that can then automatically adjust system configurations such as CPU, memory and storage to provide the most optimal settings. “This results in true custom-optimization of any workflow,” the company said.

Hyperconverged systems for hybrid clouds

Dell is also working hard on the hyper-converged systems front as it bids to spur the adoption of multi-clouds in VMware environments.

To that end the company is updating its Dell EMC VxRail product that integrates with VMware Inc.’s vSAN and vSphere virtualization software. VxRail is a hyper-converged infrastructure appliance that integrates compute and storage to simplify IT operations. The new version sports new NVMe cache drive options that deliver lower latency and higher performance.

The appliance is powered by Intel’s new Xeon chips, and is further backed by Nvidia’s Tesla P40 graphics processing units for more intensive workloads such as computer aided design. Last but not least, VxRail now boasts 25GbE networking in order to deliver the most aggregate bandwidth of any hyper-converged infrastructure appliance on the market, Dell claimed.

Dell also pitched its new Dell EMC VxRack SDDC appliance as the “foundation for realizing a multicloud vision.” The Dell EMC VxRack SDDC system is designed to help enterprises set up a VMware-based cloud infrastructure environment within their own data centers. The latest version is based on the company’s new PowerEdge servers and comes bundled with version 2.3 of VMware’s Cloud Foundation software, which integrates compute, storage and networking virtualization into a single software stack that can run on-premises as a private cloud, or as a service in public clouds. They’re available starting today.

“It’s good to see the Dell and EMC assets coming together to power the modern data center at last,” said Holger Mueller, vice president and principal analyst at Constellation Research Inc. “Efficiencies in storage and power are substantial, and it is likely Dell will be able to capture another round of on-premises server investment with these new systems.”

However, Mueller voiced concerns that Dell was maybe putting too much focus on its on-premises data center hardware business at a time when it’s being pressured by public cloud providers such as Amazon Web Services Inc. “In the long run Dell needs a way to participate from public cloud growth, and that strategy is yet to be defined – or shared. At the moment Dell is doubling down on more of the same, with improved products but still based on the on-premises business model.”

Dave Vellante and Stu Miniman, co-hosts of theCUBE, SiliconANGLE’s livestreaming video studio at Dell Technologies World, analyzed Dell’s strategic position and future directions following Michael Dell’s keynote:

Photo: Dell