Dell unveils disaggregated infrastructure strategy

Dell Technologies has unveiled its disaggregated infrastructure strategy, aiming to provide enterprises with a “best of both worlds” that combines the flexibility of the traditional three-tier architecture with the simplicity of hyperconverged infrastructure (HCI).

Speaking at a media briefing ahead of Dell Technologies World in Las Vegas this week, Varun Chhabra, senior vice-president of infrastructure group at Dell Technologies, outlined how the company is evolving its core datacentre portfolio to meet modern workload demands, from artificial intelligence (AI) to traditional enterprise applications.

The move addresses a key customer pain point: the evolving mix of workloads, including traditional virtual machines (VMs) and databases, as well as newer workloads such as containers, bare metal AI and edge computing, often strains existing infrastructure models.

For example, while the three-tier architecture offers flexibility with independent scaling of compute, networking and storage, it is usually a multi-supplier environment which can be complex to maintain, leading to technical debt, along with lengthy provisioning processes and time-intensive upgrades.

HCI, on the other side, can help operations by unifying compute, storage and networking. However, it also locks enterprises into a single hypervisor, which limits their flexibility as they look to make changes in response to evolving business needs.

“What we hear from customers is that what they’re looking for is a disaggregated infrastructure model, which really brings the simplicity of HCI and the flexibility of three-tier together into one model,” Chhabra said.

Central to Dell’s disaggregated model is the new Dell Private Cloud, designed to deliver an appliance-like experience while offering flexibility through an open ecosystem and simplified infrastructure lifecycle management.

“Dell Private Cloud is built for a disaggregated world, giving customers the flexibility of being able to pick and choose the latest Dell compute, networking and storage solutions that meet their needs,” Chhabra said. “At the same time, it also gives them the flexibility of an open ecosystem so that they can choose the right virtualisation or cloud ecosystem.”

Powered by the Dell Automation Platform, Dell Private Cloud will offer validated infrastructure blueprints for major cloud and hypervisor providers. The company estimates this can reduce the steps to deploy a private cloud by up to 90% compared to manual deployment, delivering workload-ready clusters in approximately 2.5 hours.

On the data protection front, Dell is also launching the PowerProtect Data Domain all-flash appliance. Chhabra noted its significant performance and efficiency gains, such as restoring data up to four times faster with two times faster replication.

“All of this at 80% lower power and 40% lower rack space utilisation [makes] this the perfect addition for our customers’ datacentres to ensure cyber resilience in a high performance and efficient manner,” Chhabra claimed.

Complementing this, the PowerScale cyber security suite is being enhanced with AI-driven ransomware detection, an air-gapped vault and improved disaster recovery capabilities, integrating with existing incident response applications such as ServiceNow.

Dell’s NativeEdge platform for edge environments also received updates, including support for third-party hardware, VM import capabilities and improved security features such as proactive security drift control. These advancements aim to save up to 79% in edge infrastructure deployment and management time, according to the company.

Additionally, Dell has enhanced its AI Data Platform for Nvidia environments to ease AI adoption for customers. It offers a single integrated rack that combines Dell’s infrastructure and data engines with Nvidia’s agent intelligence toolkit, among other capabilities.

“The Dell AI Data Platform isn’t a one-size-fits-all solution,” Chhabra said. “It’s built on a disaggregated architecture which allows businesses to scale compute, storage and networking, and process those independently, empowering customers to adapt the platform as they need and helping them to adopt AI faster than they have ever before.”