Exclusive: How Dell’s infrastructure promises simplified data centres

Dell Technologies is championing a brand new era of data centre architecture built on disaggregated infrastructure, a strategy designed to offer enterprises the best of both flexibility and simplicity as they navigate ever more complex IT environments.

For years, organisations have faced a trade-off between flexible, modular systems and the simplified management of consolidated, hyper-converged infrastructure.

Alyson Langon, Director of Product Marketing for Multicloud and as-a-Service at Dell, says the industry is now seeing "a convergence of the two approaches."

"Historically, three-tier architecture gave a lot of flexibility, you could mix and match storage, compute and networking, and scale resources independently. But it came with complexity, requiring different teams and lots of management overhead," she explained during an interview at Dell Technologies World in Las Vegas.

The alternative, hyper-converged infrastructure (HCI), bundled everything into a single platform. "There's a ton of simplicity in that, especially with lifecycle management and automation built in," Langon said. However, this simplicity comes at the cost of vendor lock-in and limited flexibility. "You can't scale resources independently and you're locked into a single software stack," she added.

A hybrid approach emerges

Now, spurred by the dual drivers of artificial intelligence workloads and shifts in the hypervisor market, disaggregated infrastructure has come to the fore. "Disaggregated infrastructure is about combining the best of both worlds - flexibility meets simplicity," Langon explained. "It allows you to scale resources independently, as in traditional three-tier, but with added automation and simplicity via software. We're building more automation and observability into infrastructure over time."

Dell's strategy is centred around its recently announced Dell Private Cloud and the Dell Automation Platform. These allow organisations to use Dell's flagship storage and compute technologies - such as PowerStore storage and PowerEdge servers,  while benefiting from advanced software automation.

"What differentiates us is the intrinsic security, deduplication, compression and software-driven automation built into both the hardware and software. The Dell Automation Platform takes this a step further, delivering full stack lifecycle management that traditionally wasn't available in a three-tier setup," Langon said.

The result is an infrastructure stack that is easier to manage and more efficient to deploy. "We're automating a lot of tasks, so managing the stack is much more simplified," she added.

Flexible procurement and customer choice

Crucially, Dell's private cloud offering is designed to be flexible not just in its architecture, but also in how it is consumed. Langon noted, "Apex is about flexible consumption, pay-as-you-go and managed services delivered as an OPEX model. With Dell Private Cloud, the underlying infrastructure can be consumed as a service through an Apex subscription, but it can also be purchased as CAPEX. You have that flexibility in how you procure the underlying hardware."

This flexibility extends to software choices as well. Enterprises are increasingly seeking a multi-hypervisor strategy, particularly in light of industry shifts and the need for investment protection. "One of the key benefits of Dell Private Cloud, in addition to the simplicity and automation, is the freedom to bring your own cloud OS licences and choose your software stack," Langon said.

"You're not locked in. We'll have blueprints for VMware, Red Hat OpenShift, Nutanix AHV and more, so customers can choose their preferred hypervisors."

That also means underlying hardware can be reused or repurposed as business needs change. "If you want to deploy VMs today and then move to containers with Red Hat tomorrow, you can use the same hardware. Decommission and redeploy a new software blueprint—it's investment protection for customers wanting the flexibility to change their virtualisation strategy," she said.

Automation and security at the core

The push towards software-driven automation is a key pillar of Dell's disaggregated infrastructure. The company claims that with its automation platform, provisioning a private cloud stack now takes 90% fewer steps than manual processes, with clusters deployable in just two and a half hours.

Alongside this, Dell is continuing to invest in cyber resilience and data protection, with enhancements to storage platforms and automated ransomware detection now featuring as part of its modern data centre portfolio.

Langon sees this as a response to a rapidly changing landscape. "There's an increase in customers looking for multi-hypervisor strategies, but also a need for modern automation and security. We're responding by making these capabilities intrinsic to our infrastructure, not just bolt-ons," she said.

A platform for innovation

While Langon does not directly oversee Dell's AI solutions, she recognises the role that disaggregated infrastructure plays in enabling next-generation workloads. "We are looking to extend the capabilities of our automation platform to be able to do more with AI solutions, to help organisations scale and simplify, and build more automation in how they stand up those types of things," she explained.

She is optimistic about what lies ahead, both for Dell and the broader industry. "We're at a really interesting time right now. There's so much opportunity with AI, and it's going to start permeating everything that we do. Looking forward, I'm excited to see how we continue to simplify things for customers and help them take on these new challenges," she said.