Dell to Provide Sneak Peek into Open & Agile Rack-Level Infrastructure at Mobile World Congress

Ed. Note: This blog was authored by Stephen Rousset, Distinguished Engineer and Director of Architecture, Dell Extreme Scale Infrastructure

Emerging competitive pressures and customer demands mean that IT infrastructure must serve today’s needs while accelerating tomorrow’s ideas. Carriers and service providers, however, know that the status quo comes up short because conventional IT infrastructure can’t always measure up to new expectations. Many organizations are already struggling to keep up with data growth, maximize infrastructure utilization rates and accelerate new service delivery. To make matters worse, the emerging need for on-demand dynamic services, the Internet of Things (IoT), and 5G network rollouts will push legacy infrastructures to the breaking point.

Old ideas won’t work – it’s time for something new. In order to stay competitive, carriers and service providers are moving from legacy systems to next-generation infrastructure, and are being influenced by hyperscale architectures based on open designs. Dell understands this path given our long history of working with the largest cloud giants, and at Mobile World Congress we’re offering an early look into how Dell’s ESI (Extreme Scale Infrastructure) group is enabling this future for the telecommunications industry and cloud service providers.

A sneak peek into the DSS 9000

With the Dell DSS 9000, we have combined insights from hyperscale designs with the needs and expectations of carriers and service providers to deliver an open, agile and efficient infrastructure that serves organizations now and for years to come. This latest advancement demonstrates Dell’s continued commitment to our DSS strategy, outlined in August 2015, to address the needs of the sub-hyperscale market while leveraging a fast and flexible operating model.

Building on our hyperscale success with the rack-scale DCS “G5” hardware solution, the DSS 9000 is a flexible, modular rack-server infrastructure that will offer compute and storage sleds, built-in networking, shared power & cooling, as well as next-generation management via Intel Rack Scale Architecture (RSA) and Redfish. If you’re not familiar with Intel RSA and Redfish, these are new, open management APIs that allow users to create an agile, composable infrastructure at a rack-level.

We’ve built the DSS 9000 as a disaggregated solution that offers component level flexibility. At the same time, our design maximizes configuration options while enabling administrators and developers to address and manage the infrastructure as an integrated pool of capabilities and capacities – not as independent servers, arrays, and switches. Beyond our distinctive engineering approach, we’re also ensuring that global organizations who choose the DSS 9000 can rely on our worldwide manufacturing, deployment, and support organizations to deliver a seamless experience that accelerates time to value.

You’ll be hearing a lot more about the DSS 9000 throughout the year and how we will continue to give customers even more choice and flexibility with differentiated solutions within the rack, while maintaining a common and open management interface. Bottom line is we’ve invested heavily in this infrastructure. This customer segment has carrier cloud services at the top of the list of strategic interests, is moving from fixed appliances to NFVs running on x86 hardware, and is showing a preference for hyperscale hardware and rack-scale solutions. We believe Dell’s rack-scale infrastructure will meet the needs of customers today and into the future.

Check out ESI at Mobile World Congress

Be sure to check out Dell at Mobile World Congress in Hall 3, stand 3K 30. Dell will be showing some of the latest innovations from across our OEM Solutions, IoT, NFV and Client Solutions team. From ESI, we’ll also be showing a model of our Modular Data Centers (MDCs) such as the one below. Carriers and service providers are increasingly turning to Dell MDCs as they require datacenter capacity delivered around the globe with the speed, quality & efficiency of IT.

Look forward to seeing you at the show! (And we’ll be happy to share the backstory on the Barbie at that time).

About the Author: Perrin Cox