Dell Technologies Broadens Edge Computing Effort

Dell Technologies today revealed upgrades to the Dell EMC Streaming Data Platform (SDP) and a reference architecture designed to improve edge computing in manufacturing environments.

“We really believe that the edge is the next frontier for digital transformation for organizations around the world,” Varun Chhabra, VP of cloud and edge marketing at Dell Technologies, said during a briefing. “More resources are being moved out to the edge, and we’re seeing this in all of our customer conversations, regardless of whatever vertical we’re talking about.”

An updated version of Dell EMC SDP will help organizations store and process data generated by edge devices with the addition of real-time analytics, he explained. “The data that’s generated at the edge has some very different characteristics relative to traditional enterprise data, and for this reason new kinds of solutions are required to help organizations manage and process this data.”

Dell’s platform can ingest all data types, regardless of source or type, and transform that information into a unified platform that delivers faster insights, which allows enterprises to react in real time to changes in the edge environment, according to Chhabra.

“The streaming data platform is really built to handle the massive scale that we believe we are going to see with edge infrastructure in the future,” he said, adding that this also removes concerns about applications writing data from multiple locations.

The company also released what Chhabra described as the vendor’s first edge offering specifically designed for manufacturing, an industry that’s seen one of the largest investments in the edge space overall, he said. The Dell Technologies Manufacturing Architecturing, designed in partnership with software maker PTC, was created to simply edge deployments in manufacturing.

The companies intend to accomplish this “through application consolidation and real-time edge insights,” all of which are being built on Dell Technologies’ Apex Private Cloud, which was also released today as part of the company’s shift to cloud-delivered IT services.

Dell Envisions Industry-Centric Edge Platforms

“The process of running and managing this infrastructure all the way up to the application is going to be simplified drastically,” Chhabra said, adding that Dell intends to expand the ecosystem of partners for industry-specific edge platforms.

“There are countless examples of industries that we would define as traditional industries that are being transformed using technology at the edge,” he said.

One of those examples highlighted by Dell Technologies comes from Duos Technologies, which partnered with Dell to improve railcar inspection with artificial intelligence (AI) running at the edge. “Some of these trains are a mile long, they have 120 different cars,” and a manual inspection process conducted by an expert can take up to eight minutes per car, Chhabra said.

Duos Technologies, relying on Dell infrastructure and services at the edge, developed a program with the aid of computer vision and AI that dramatically reduces the amount of time required to inspect railcars, the companies claim.

“What used to take 16 hours now takes eight minutes. It’s a huge improvement on productivity, and an increase in the inspection accuracy as well. This requires very sophisticated infrastructure out at the edge,” Chhabra said, adding that data generated by these cameras is massive, up to 1.3 terabytes of data per day, and has to be processed in real time.

“There are countless stories like this across verticals where industries are being transformed by the insights and data that’s being generated at the edge,” he said.