Dell goes all in on IoT with a new division and new technologies
October 12, 2017
Yesterday, the company announced the formation of a new division surrounding IoT, with a strategy that includes Artificial Intelligence (AI), Edge, Cloud, and everything in between.
Pretty big news from Dell yesterday. They’ve been creeping more and more into the IoT space (although “creeping” by Dell standards differs from how others might view it). But yesterday, the company announced the formation of a new division surrounding IoT, with a strategy that includes Artificial Intelligence (AI), Edge, Cloud, and everything in between.
The new division, aptly named the Dell Technologies IoT Division, will be led by Ray O’Farrell, the CEO of VMware, a Dell subsidiary that provides cloud computing and platform virtualization software and services. This comes on the heels of a recent announcement detailing the company’s role in the 60-member EdgeX Foundry, an open-source project that aims to build a common interoperability framework for edge computing
According to the company, the strategy revolves around a distributed core computing model. It also includes a $1 billion investment over three years to support the initiative, including a newly designed IoT lab. Here, Dell will develop AI and machine learning technology to work with its IoT infrastructure.
A series of new product initiatives were announced. They include Projects Nautilus, Fire, Iris, and Worldwide Herd. Nautilus consists of software that enables the ingestion and querying of data streams from IoT gateways in real time. That data can subsequently be archived to file or object storage for deeper advanced analytics. Fire is a set of tools that includes simplified management, local compute, storage, and IoT applications such as real-time analytics. With the toolset, IoT use cases can be deployed faster with a consistent infrastructure from edge to core to cloud.
The goal of Project Iris is to extend the current analytics capability to provide threat visibility and monitoring right out to the edge. Finally, Worldwide Herd is being developed to perform analytics on geographically dispersed data. To make these technologies all work cohesively, Dell will be working on a series of technologies, including processor accelerators.
