Dell Tech World kicked off in Vegas this week, capturing the attention of 15,000 attendees from over 122 different countries.
The big announcements in the day one keynote were focused on Hybrid Cloud, the Microsoft Azure partnership, and unified workspace, but the underlying theme was clear. Dell Technologies is continuing to embrace its “Better Together” philosophy creating solutions from its family of companies. This is evidenced by its solutions that leverage technology from VMware, Dell EMC, SecureWorks etc., wrapped into a single bundle.
From a network perspective, it was great to hear Dell Executives Michael Dell and Pat Gelsinger acknowledge the increasingly important role the network will play in hybrid/multi cloud and edge environments. Dell Technologies is looking to address this space with its holistic networking portfolio that includes VMware NSX-T and SD-WAN, the Dell EMC Open Networking portfolio, Edge Appliances, and Smart Fabric solutions. Indeed, the day two keynote included a number of network announcements demonstrating tighter alignment across the Dell Technologies family.
This year, Dell EMC formally welcomed the Open Networking Portfolio to the Dell family of “Power” branded products, joining the PowerEdge server line and PowerMax storage line. The complete family of Z, N, and S series switches will now be branded as PowerSwitch. (The company also brought its data protection solutions into the fold with PowerProtect.) This will help to drive awareness to the field sales teams and channels when presenting the “Power” branded portfolio and drive tighter alignment of networking to the server and storage line. The PowerSwitch line will continue to embrace the concept of open networking and leverage both Dell EMC OS10 and solutions from other providers like Pica8, Cumulus, and Big Switch, with the latter announcing a Dell Select OEM deal.
In addition, a new PowerSwitch was announced, the S5200 line, a new 25GbE switch intended to serve mission-critical HCI and software-defined storage environments. Available in both 12 (half width) and 24 port 25GbE with 3 or 4 100GbE uplinks respectively, these switches will be leveraged in VX Rail environments and they are also the first switch certified for Smart Fabric Services.
To better enable the Edge, Dell EMC announced it was entering the SD-WAN business with the availability of the Dell EMC SD-WAN Edge powered by VMware, again demonstrating the “better together” theme by combining WMware SD-WAN with Dell EMC hardware in an integrated platform. This solution will be supported by Dell EMC for both the hardware and software. in addition, this solution will be geared for both enterprise and service providers, as evidenced by the Orange announcement, with the key being that Dell EMC is looking to leverage this as an Edge platform to enable not only networking, but Edge computing.
Overall, it was great to see the Dell Technologies family delivering on the “Better Together” solutions. Looking at the overall Dell Technologies networking portfolio, the announcements this week are a good starting point and opens the door for additional “Better Together” networking solutions and innovation.
