IoT, AI and the Virtual Cloud Network at Dell Technologies World — Virtualization Review
Last week (April 30-May 3) I attended Dell Technologies World 2018 at The Venetian Hotel in Las Vegas, and although I didn’t get to attend all the sessions or talk to all the people I had wished to (the conference was a whirlwind of activity), I did leave the conference with a heightened appreciation for where Dell Technologies (composed of Dell, EMC, Pivotal, RSA, SecureWorks, Virtustream and VMware) is headed. Here are my somewhat random notes on the conference.
The event kicked off on Monday morning with a keynote session by Michael Dell, chairman & CEO of Dell Technologies, and Karen Quintos, chief customer officer of Dell. They talked about the future of computing and how we’re entering an era of limitless possibilities. They also discussed how artificial intelligence, machine learning (AI), and the Internet of Things (IoT) will radically reshape the world in which we live for the better. This reshaping will require a lot of IT resources, and they spoke about how we need resources close to the source of the data in order to efficiently process the signal from the noise.
On Monday afternoon Pat Gelsinger, CEO of VMware, delivered a talk titled “Innovate in Everything & Anything: Any Device, Any App, Any Cloud.” During this talk, Pat told how VMware technology is currently delivering the applications that we need to use to the devices that we have. He stressed how the network needs to be virtualized in order to connect the world using VMware’s new NSX-based Virtual Cloud Network. Gelsinger stressed that VMware is going to revolutionize the corporate network by taking its software-defined networking technology across every public and private cloud. Due to Gelsinger’s delivery style, he took what was a mundane title for a speech and made it into one of the most interesting and engaging keynotes of the event.
Whereas Monday’s keynote was focused on strategic messages, Tuesday morning’s keynote focused on a more tactical approach by looking at the day-to-day view of technological development. Dell announced a new entry to its VMAX line (PowerMax), an entry-level XtremIO appliance, two new big four-socket PowerEdge servers (R840 and R940xa) and a new member of its PowerEdge line (MX) aimed at the software-defined datacenter.