Adopt AI — and quick! Dell Technologies CEO tells customers

“We want to inspire you to reimagine your organization for artificial intelligence, and we want to encourage you to act fast,” Dell Technologies CEO Michael Dell told attendees at the company’s customer event in Las Vegas on Monday.

Dell unveiled a number of new AI-related products at the event, including Dell AI Factory, with which the company aims to give its customers access to what it considers “the broadest AI portfolio in the industry.” This includes everything from devices to data centers and cloud, as well as an open ecosystem of technology partners to create AI applications through a traditional purchase or as a subscription to Dell Apex, its collection of multi-cloud services.

“AI is transforming business at an unprecedented rate. Data centers must be designed from the ground up to handle the speed and scale of AI, while new AI-powered PCs are transforming productivity and collaboration,” said Dell COO Jeff Clarke. “What’s needed is new IT infrastructure and devices designed specifically to meet the specific demands of AI.”

“The Dell AI Factory helps customers accelerate AI adoption with the world’s broadest AI portfolio and leading AI ecosystem partners, offering right-sized approaches and greater control over AI deployments on-premises, at the edge and across cloud environments,” Clarke said.

Dell’s end-to-end AI portfolio, spanning client devices, servers, storage, data protection and networking, forms the foundation of the Dell AI Factory.

Dell is expanding that portfolio with new offerings including Copilot+ PCs, PowerScale F910 all-flash file storage, an AI data protection solution, and the Dell PowerSwitch Z9864F-ON.

Speakers also addressed Dell’s partnerships with other vendors to provide integrated solutions to help customers get started with AI, including one with Nvidia to accelerate adoption of AI with full-stack solutions.

At the event, Dell also presented advancements in its PowerStore flash storage systems to improve the performance, efficiency, resiliency and mobility of multi-cloud data. In addition, Dell also announced the expansion of the Dell Apex portfolio with new advancements in AIOps and improved management of multi-cloud storage and Kubernetes.

“Our advancements in PowerStore and our new range of financial and operational benefits for customers and partners make a big impact and raise the bar for all-flash storage,” said Arthur Lewis, president of the firm’s Infrastructure Solutions group.

Dell PowerStore helps manage growing workload demands with more flexible four-tier cell storage (QLC) and significant performance improvements. Specifically, QLC-based storage delivers enterprise-class performance at a lower cost per terabyte compared to triple-tier cell (TLC) models. In addition, it boosts hardware performance by up to 66% through new upgrades of higher model devices.

“Our focus on innovation also extends to Dell Apex, where we are improving infrastructure and application reliability through the power of AI and automation, making it even easier to manage multicloud storage and Kubernetes,” Lewis said.

The company’s Apex AIOps software-as-a-service (SaaS) optimizes the health of Dell’s infrastructure and service availability with a significant expansion of AIOps tools that simplifies operations, improves IT agility, and offers greater control over applications and infrastructure through three integrated capabilities: infrastructure observability, application observability, and incident management. Dell Apex Navigator SaaS expands to include Kubernetes storage management and additional support for Dell Apex storage offerings for public cloud.