Management

Dell Tech World 2021: Tools for Building a Strong Infrastructure

On-premises solutions such as data centers can borrow some of the cloud’s best tricks, presenters highlighted at Dell Technologies World.

Ernie Smith

Ernie Smith is a former contributor to BizTech, an old-school blogger who specializes in side projects, and a tech history nut who researches vintage operating systems for fun.

The cloud has many advantages for scalability and infrastructure management through approaches such as automation and containerization. However, these can be applied to the data center as well — with the right tools.

During a Wednesday session at the 2021 edition of Dell Technologies World, Saleem Muhammad, the director of product management at Dell EMC, made the case for network deployment through a cloud-style approach to system management in the data center, referred to as Dell Technologies Interconnect.

Muhammad noted that data center networks can often fall behind due to poor management or outdated tools, with 79 percent of network changes still being done manually, a far cry from the optimizations of Infrastructure as Code.

“Operators must leverage the power of automation within and across their departmental functions to become a critical part of an agile and responsive enterprise,” Muhammad said.

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Dell Technologies Interconnect, which is built around Dell EMC’s SmartFabric, is intended to help simplify the complexities of traffic engineering within the data center, so there’s more room for automating using DevOps disciplines and other similar approaches.

“With prearchitected and validated designs from Dell, the burden of this validation shifts to Dell engineering,” he added. “As a result, customers simply have to buy the fabric.”

Muhammad says that technology alone won’t do the job, however; he recommends teaching networking teams the necessary skills to modernize, as well as potentially adding new teams.

Strong On-Premises App Delivery Through Containerization

If your organization has been thinking about containerization but has an on-premises model, your organization may actually be ahead of the curve, according to Himanshu Singh, group manager of product marketing for VMware’s vSphere.

He explained that container deployment, while traditionally associated with the cloud, is becoming increasingly popular in on-premises settings. “Kubernetes has basically become the default platform of choice,” he said, partly out of interest in trying to build modern infrastructure without the costs of public cloud platforms.

VMware’s Tanzu, which works with the virtualization platform vSphere, is one way to build out such an approach, allowing for more flexibility rolling out applications as needed.

“vSphere gives you a Kubernetes workload environment that I can stand up within an hour using existing infrastructure. So, that's extremely powerful to be able to get these solutions up,” added Rick Walsworth, group manager of product marketing for VMware Cloud Foundation.

Walsworth added that using Cloud Foundation creates an additional layer of abstraction that can help with a more operationalized approach for production use cases.

“It provides that full-stack infrastructure that can now be scaled up and scaled down based on the needs of the business,” he said.

Get all the highlights from Dell Technologies World on our event page.

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