We all live on the edge — or at least close to it. Whether it’s the smart thermostat in your living room, the desktop computer in your home office, or the GPS in your car, most devices we rely on our in daily lives answer back to the cloud.
With so many devices on the edge, however, managing each separate device, as well as the general infrastructure, can become a challenge.
“What we see is not only the need of processing [artificial intelligence and machine learning] at the edge, but also the need of a new type of compute at the edge,” said Gil Shneorson (pictured, left), senior vice president of edge computing offers, strategy and execution at Dell Technologies Inc. “So in the past you would just send the data to the cloud. Now it’s a form of a new computer with [graphics processing unit] capability and other things to process the data.”
Shneorson and Pierluca Chiodelli (pictured, right), vice president of engineering technology at Dell, spoke with Dave Vallente, host of theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s mobile livestreaming studio, during Dell Technologies World. They discussed edge computing, simplifying the edge, PTC’s partnership with APEX and more. (* Disclosure below.)
Simplifying complexity
Having done business at the edge for years and boasting a generous market share of edge devices, Dell decided to take a closer look at the areas customers struggled with the most. Dell is attacking the main three pitfalls of managing edge edge: complexity, security and choice.
“At the end of the day, we’re an IT company,” Shneorson said. “Customers need to connect the edge to the network, and they need security. And so those worlds of IT and [operations technology] are coming together, and they’re coming together applying best practices, which is exactly what we know how to do.”
Dell plans to help simplify doing business on the edge by pushing customers to focus on architecture rather than unique solutions. With architecture, customers can support multiple use cases and consolidate even more cases as they grow.
“We know that a lot of applications are growing and developing on a hyper scale or in public clouds. We would like to connect to those,” Shneorson stated. “We would like to allow them to keep working as they have except when they run into at the edge. Think about environments that could consolidate multiple workloads and not solve for each one at the same time.”
PTC partners with APEX
PTC Inc., a Boston-based software and services company specializing in design and manufacturing, is joining forces with Dell on APEX, which is Dell’s plan to deliver all its products as a service.
“The customer can go to the portal order, order APEX Private Cloud and deploy PTC on top of that,” Chiodelli said.
Another announcement Dell shared was a streaming platform that works with multiple gateways. With it, customers can process data in real time and make dealing with the edge less daunting. This new streaming data platform will only deploy a single note, making it ideal for the edge and freeing up notes.