Dell PowerEdge Servers Deliver Smart, Secure Computing

Whether workloads are on-premises, in the cloud or a combination of the two, servers are the engines driving innovation today. That’s especially true when essential workloads are involved. Dell has designed its PowerEdge rack servers for organizations’ most challenging needs, with emphasis on modernizing, automating and transforming the data center.

In hybrid cloud environments, the trend is to place low-value or less storage-intensive data in public clouds while keeping critical and high-performance workloads on-premises. As organizations look to reduce on-premises costs and figure out placement, PowerEdge servers align with three types of workloads:

• High-performing applications, such as data analytics and artificial intelligence: These are some the fastest-growing areas of the market because many organizations handle a lot of data and want to get value from it.
• Traditional business applications: Unless organizations are moving to a Software as a Service framework, they’re typically not putting mission-critical apps in the public cloud. Predominantly, those remain on-premises, along with the databases that underpin them.
• Workloads requiring agility and mobility: These are the workloads that organizations scale up and down in public clouds (for example, retailers that need to expand capacity rapidly to meet high demand in busy seasons but want a single control plane to move workloads easily).

Optimizing a server for a specific workload is key to the modern data center. Organizations need a diverse portfolio of server solutions that are optimized for applications and workloads so they can, in turn, deliver business outcomes in the best fashion and quickly adapt to changing market conditions. 

Consider all the components that go into computing: graphics processing units; flexible, multipurpose, reconfigurable acceleration devices; and network adapters. Being able to deploy these elements quickly and adaptively — then test and qualify them in the portfolio — is extremely important. To achieve this objective, Dell customizes configurations to order in our factory. A customer can purchase and optimize a customized server for every workload, ensuring that it delivers the desired performance at the right price.

The ultimate objective of the PowerEdge server is to simplify the experience. Organizations need to focus on their business, not the infrastructure. Autonomous computing drives that capability forward. 

Within the Dell ecosystem, autonomous infrastructure — which includes not only servers but also storage and networking components — enables organizations to address cross-technology aspects to quickly remediate issues. CloudIQ, our cloud-based application, monitors infrastructure health across all three domains to provide insights and predictive analytics that support troubleshooting. This visibility helps IT teams understand how data center components are functioning before problems arise.

Security affects the entire portfolio and the organization’s entire data center. One factor that differentiates Dell is that we own the intellectual property of our servers and storage hardware. That means we can fully integrate security components in our hardware and throughout DevOps processes. While other providers might source a computing layer or storage controllers from elsewhere, we control the complete lifecycle.

Security also plays a part in PowerEdge’s autonomous computing. The hardware can alert IT teams to potential faults and even detect zero-day exploits, while CloudIQ alerts administrators to suspicious changes. Many organizations use these security features to create baselines of firmware across their server farms so they can then watch for variants in those environments. 

Story by Allen Clingerman, the chief technology strategist for server and workloads in North American channels at Dell Technologies.