Dell Technologies said enterprise data centers, which will increasingly support AI workloads, will become disaggregated as IT buyers look for maximum flexibility.
According to the company, the modern data center will be disaggregated and more turnkey courtesy of software automation. Private clouds will also take architecture cues from AI factories and Nvidia's designs. Current data centers typically have three tiers, multiple vendors and hyperconverged infrastructure. The data center stew gets complicated.
"What we're doing here with our software driven automation and support for open ecosystem is we are architecting outcomes for our customers, turnkey outcomes for our customers that want to take advantage of our disaggregated infrastructure and have that open flexibility for their most critical workloads. We're doing this across private cloud and edge," said Varun Chhabra, Senior Vice President of Infrastructure Solutions Group (ISG) at Dell Technologies.
The big themes in this disaggregated approach are:
- Enterprises are figuring out how to support AI workloads via private clouds and on-premises.
- Customers are very wary of lock-in and Broadcom's purchase of VMware has made enterprises wary. Enterprises want validated blueprints for stacks like VMware, Red Hat and Nutanix.
- Business infrastructure incorporates hyperconverged infrastructure, which reduces flexibility but gains simplicity.
- Companies also want automation on top of Dell servers, storage and networking gear.
Ultimately, Dell's pitch for modern data centers are automated architectures that enable enterprises to swap out private cloud vendors in components. Dell executives said that Dell's disaggregated data center offerings are separate from its previous Apex private cloud efforts, which have been touted at Dell Technologies World in 2023 and 2024.
To build out the parts of this disaggregated data center, Dell launched the following components.
- Dell Private Cloud, a system that can run VMware, Red Hat or Nutanix.
- An all-flash Data Domain appliance that will feature 4x faster backup and 2x faster restores with lower power consumption.
- Advanced ransomware protection in PowerStore systems. AI ransomware detection will be built into the appliance.
- PowerFlex Software Defined Platform updates.
- Native Edge updates and support for Nvidia and its latest software development kits. Native Edge will also have support for third party software vendors such as GE Digital.
- Native Edge support for third party and existing hardware in addition to Dell endpoints.
