At Dell World, Vendor Keeps Eyes on the Present and Future

In addition to looking to the future, Dell World focused on the present with new offerings–from hyperconverged data center systems to business PCs and servers.

During his keynote, Michael Dell told attendees that EMC will give his company more strength in large enterprises to go along with its existing expertise among small and midmarket businesses. “Dell and EMC are a dream combination,” he said. “We complement each other beautifully.”

There was a lot to look at from Dell and its broad array of tech industry partners on the showroom floor, but the company made sure there also were places for attendees to rest when they needed.

Dell eight years ago launched its Data Center Solutions business to create optimized systems for hyperscale vendors like Facebook and Microsoft. At the show, the company rolled out the first systems from its new DSS, which targets scale-out organizations that are only slightly smaller than the hyperscale folks. Among the new systems are the DSS 1500, 2500 and 7000.

Jim Ganthier, vice president and general manager of engineered solutions and cloud at Dell, does a TV interview while standing in front of a Dell Hybrid Cloud System for Microsoft converged system, which was introduced at the show and is aimed at taking the risk, cost and complexity for companies looking to embrace hybrid clouds.

Industry observers expect converged solutions, which offer tightly integrated compute, storage, networking and virtualization in a single architecture, to play key roles in the new data center. At the show, the company rolled out new converged systems, including the XC6320, which offers four compute nodes in a 2U form factor that support for more than 44TB of storage.

The vendor is not looking to get rid of its PC business, Michael Dell and other executives stressed throughout the show. If you want to be an end-to-end enterprise IT solutions provider, you need both ends, they said. During the show, the company announced a refresh of its OptiPlex commercial PC lineup.

Dell officials put some of their Latitude business notebooks on display, including the Latitude 14 7000 and 5000 Series and Latitude 12 7000 systems.

Dell showed off an Intel wireless docking station that enabled the Latitude E7250 Ultrabook (in the foreground) to wirelessly link with the display behind it via WiGig technology.

As the IoT grows, there will be tens of billions of devices generating massive amounts of data (44 zettabytes by 2020, according to Michael Dell). Dell introduced the Edge Gateway 5000 Series—which, combined with the latest version of the vendor’s Statistica data analytics software, will be able to gather, aggregate and analyze the data coming from the edge devices.

One of the more popular areas on the showroom floor belonged to New Belgium Brewing, which served up its Fat Tire beers to thirsty attendees. They also were featured during Michael Dell’s keynote for their use of Dell products in helping create a scalable, responsive and simple IT environment.

The “Back to the Future” movies were at the center of the cultural scene last week, given that in the second movie, Marty McFly (Michael J. Fox’s character) time-traveled from the 1980s to Oct. 21, 2015. Dell did its part to participate, bringing a replica of Doc Brown’s (Christopher Lloyd) DeLorean time machine to the show.