Today’s increasingly connected, data-driven world has forced entities in every sector to navigate unchartered digital waters. Yesterday’s cumbersome, legacy infrastructure cannot begin to keep up with rapidly evolving digital demands, particularly in an era marked by a rapid pace of change and one where major shifts can happen overnight.

So says Ricky Pereira, Dell EMC brand manager at Pinnacle, South Africa’s leading ICT distributor, adding that for all companies wishing not only to survive but thrive, digital transformation is a business imperative.

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“To future-proof themselves, organisations need to be agile, adaptable, scalable and secure, with an IT foundation that is able to withstand anything that is thrown at it.”

According to Pereira, Dell Technologies’ new PowerEdge range of servers, brought to the industry by Pinnacle, was purpose-built to address today’s most challenging workloads, working autonomously and collaboratively across every type of IT environment. Moreover, there is a solution in the range for every environment – from the largest data centre to the most rugged and remote industrial environment.

Three pillars of innovation

Yvonne Maluleke, Dell Enterprise business unit manager at Pinnacle, says Dell Technologies’ new portfolio is built on three pillars, namely adaptive compute, autonomous compute infrastructure and proactive resilience.

“Firstly, adaptive compute helps businesses to address ever-shifting compute demands with a platform that was engineered to optimise the latest technology advancements to ensure predictable profitable outcomes while easily scaling to address data at the point of need, from edge to hybrid cloud.”

Next, Maluleke cites autonomous compute infrastructure, that was designed to enable entities to respond quickly to any business opportunities by harnessing the power of intelligent systems that work together and independently. “This facilitates rapid digital transformation and productivity to deliver outcomes that are aligned with business priorities, enabling IT to spend their time innovating instead of managing.”

Finally, proactive resilience allows companies to embed trust into their digital transformation via an infrastructure and IT environment that was designed with secure interactions in mind, as well as the capability to anticipate potential threats before they become a problem. “With PowerEdge, security begins at the design phase and continues through the supply chain and full lifecycle, all the way to decommissioning,” she adds.

Intrinsic security

In today’s highly connected and digital environments, Pereira says complexity becomes an inevitability, and cybercriminals know this. This is why Dell ensured proactive resilience is built in via an immutable, silicon-based root of trust.

In addition, firmware is protected by employing National Institute of Standards and Technology (Nist) guidelines such as signed firmware updates. Also, certificate management is made simple thanks to the automatic renewal feature.

“Furthermore, Dell’s PowerEdge servers provide data-at-rest protection by using Secure Enterprise Key Manager (SEKM) and data-in-use protection with Confidential Compute CPU technologies,” explains Pereira.

To secure against threats such as counterfeit components, malware and firmware tampering, Dell’s extensive approach to supply chain security makes use of tools for counterfeit avoidance, manufacture chain of custody, code signing, chassis intrusion and tamper-evident packaging.

Superior cooling

To allow for the increasing density needed to empower innovation, Pereira says Dell has built new designs to address the cooling needs of the denser data centres we find today.

“For starters, Dell’s Multi-Vector Cooling 2.0 brings an advanced thermal design that streamlines airflow pathways for improved cooling. A new feature, Dell Direct Liquid Cooling (DLC), leverages the superior thermal capacity of water to remove heat more efficiently.”

Next, Dell Leak Sense detection capability protects liquid-cooled servers and is fully managed via Dell’s Integrated Remote Access Controller (iDRAC).

Acceleration is key

Another important benefit is that the new PowerEdge portfolio supports a full stack of GPUs to optimise performance across a full spectrum of workloads. These include:

High-performance computing
Training and inferencing for artificial intelligence, machine learning and deep learning
Data analytics
Virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI) and dense virtualisation

Lowering TCO

Dell, adds Pereira, believes in ongoing innovation, and is continually enhancing its server portfolio to improve performance and efficiency and to bring down the total cost of ownership (TCO). It does this in several ways.

“Flexible payment solutions enable a host of options to help customers align and scale the cost of IT solutions with technology consumption and budget availability. Whether a customer is wanting to pay for technology as they use it, rotate their technology every few years, manage cash flow or finance their software, Dell has a solution to suit their needs.”

One example is Apex Flex on Demand, a pay-per-use consumption model that enables customers to scale capacity up or down, with payments that rise and fall accordingly, so they only pay for strictly what they use.

Innovate, adapt and grow

Together with Dell EMC Open Manage and systems management solutions, PowerEdge servers deliver the productivity and performance that today’s organisations need to fuel their innovation, adds Maluleke.

Allow Dell PowerEdge servers to become the engine used to drive customers’ businesses forward. “This latest generation of powerful solutions is ready to meet all the needs of today’s connected environments, today and into the future,” Pereira concludes.

To find out more about how Dell’s PowerEdge is delivering the productivity and performance needed to fuel innovation, download the product feature guide here.