Dell Technologies announces new solutions to help customers adjust to the changing nature of data and help capture the time-sensitive value of the billions of devices at the edge, outside of a traditional data centre.

With a host of new offerings – including new edge server designs, smaller modular data centers, enhanced telemetry management and a streaming analytics engine – customers are better positioned to realize the value of their data wherever it resides.

According to research from Gartner: “By 2022, as a result of digital business projects, 75% of enterprise-generated data will be created and processed outside the traditional, centralised data centre or cloud – an increase from the less than 10% generated today.”

“As we enter the next Data Decade, the challenge moves from keeping pace with volumes of data to gaining valuable insights from the many types of data and touchpoints across various edge locations to core data centers and public clouds,” says Jeff Boudreau, president: infrastructure solutions group at Dell Technologies. “We offer a portfolio that’s engineered to help customers address the constraints of edge operations and deliver analytics for greater business insights wherever their edge may be.”

While numerous definitions of “edge” abound, many miss the bigger picture: the edge is not a single place, rather it is defined by a set of characteristics and constraints including bandwidth, IT skills, security, operating environment, space and power.

Successful technology leaders are rethinking the placement of applications and infrastructure, distributing them as close to the point of data creation as possible to reduce latency and increase response time. This enables real-time insights at the edge to inform decision-making and improve competitiveness.

The new Dell EMC PowerEdge XE2420 is a compact, “short depth,” high-performance server designed for space-constrained and challenging operating conditions often encountered in edge deployments. As an example, the system delivers the performance, availability and security required for telecommunications customers building out edge networks critical for the implementation of 5G.

The Dell EMC PowerEdge XE2420 provides a low-latency, two-socket system with the flexibility to add up to four accelerators and 92TB of storage per server to handle growing business application demands as well as analytics. Designed for tough environments, it has Network Equipment-Building System certification with extended operating temperature tolerance and an optional filtered bezel for dusty locations. Front-accessible input/output and power provide easy access for field serviceability.

Designed to customers’ specific requirements, the new, smaller Dell EMC Modular Data Center Micro 415 (MDC Micro) offers pre-integrated, enterprise-level data centre IT, power, cooling and remote management in a size shorter and narrower than a parking spot. This helps enable customers to deploy a complete data center to what would otherwise be considered non-data center locations, such as the base of a telecommunications cell tower.

The MDC Micro provides enhanced physical protection for IT equipment at the edge with extreme temperature-resistant enclosures, key lock doors and option for smoke detection and fire suppression.

The new Dell Remote Access Controller, iDRAC 9 Datacenter, embedded management technology adds streaming data analytics capabilities critical for understanding edge operations to all Dell EMC PowerEdge servers. iDRAC 9 Datacenter helps customers meet the requirements for deploying, securing and operating edge environments.

Its remote deployment capability can reduce administrator-attended time by up to 99.1% per server after initial setup compared to manual deployment. With streaming telemetry on iDRAC9, customers can discover trends, fine tune operations, and create predictive analytics to help ensure peak performance, reduce downtime and prevent risk.

New, simplified automated certificate enablement is designed to provide zero-touch security at the edge and in central locations. With up to 20 new metric reports providing nearly 2.9 million data points per server, customers’ IT departments can leverage AI operations to develop custom routines based on the specific data they want to analyze for one, or all, iDRAC9 enabled systems wherever they’re deployed.

The new Dell EMC Streaming Data Platform allows for ingestion and analysis of streaming data from the edge. Customers may now simplify infrastructure management to help harvest critical business insights and focus on new opportunities to improve their data infrastructure.

This enterprise-ready platform delivers a single solution for all customers’ data (whether streaming or not) that provides auto-scaling ingestion, tiered storage with historical recall on-demand and unified analytics for both real-time and historical business insights.