Updates from Dell Technologies World: 2018
CTO Brian Dougherty attended Dell Technologies World from April 30 – May 2 and brought back some emerging trends from this premier technology conference to discuss with CMA.
Conference attendees were challenged to think and move beyond infrastructure and toward business applications, management, cloud, mobility, and security, and to become a leader and enable better business results in the digital era.
Emerging Trends
- Pervasive Devices: We are coming up on 15 billion devices in the world.
- Internet of Things: Adoption and acceleration of this trend continues, with more and more things becoming instrumented.
- Data Explosion: There is about 17 Zettabytes/year of data pouring forth from all these devices.
- AI: Fueled by the data and powered by Moore’s Law +
- Cloud “Bleeding:” On-prem/off-prem/any prem
- HCI: Human/computer interface is radically changing
- AR/VR: Seeing growth in augmented reality and virtual reality
- Fabric Revolution: NVMEoF and GenZ
- Data Center Trends: Agility via full composability (virtual racks); Rack scale fabric unites polled resources into disaggregated server
- Emerging as De Facto: Lightweight packaging and dynamic orchestration
- Delivery: Delivered in a semi-packaged offering
Hardware Facts
- You can now pack over 125TB of Flash storage in a single 2U server and deliver up to the cores 100+GB/sec, at microsecond latency.
- A “small/inexpensive” 4 node cluster could deliver 500TB Flash and deliver 400+ GB/sec, I/O with microsecond latency.
“We’ve been writing software for 30 years based on limitations. That’s all changing,” Dougherty said, noting that software will need to be re-evaluated and re-imagined.
Meeting of the Minds
Dougherty was also one of a small group of people selected to meet with Dell founder and CEO, Michael Dell. During this small group forum, Dougherty spoke with Dell regarding technical products.
Going Forward
Bringing it all together, Dougherty offered a few observations.
- Moving data, especially complex data, at scale, is becoming an increasingly valuable skill.
- Building powerful, cost-effective platforms to host data at scale is very important, and utilizing NVMe and the latest fabrics is key.
- Building software platforms that provide self-provisioning of data and analytics, at scale, at speed, and in flexible packaging, will be mandatory
