Dell EMC Accelerates Artificial Intelligence Adoption for Digital Transformation

Story Highlights

• Dell EMC Ready Solutions for AI deliver up to 2x1 the performance of the competition
• Research shows Dell EMC Ready Solutions for AI can improve data scientist productivity by up to 30% and reduce time-to-operations by 6-12 months²
• New Data Science Provisioning Portal from Dell EMC reduces the steps to configure a data scientist’s workspace to just 5 clicks
• Dell EMC Consulting speeds time-to-value of complete AI solutions – customers can choose ProSupport Plus to keep them running 24x7 with a single-point-of-contact for hardware and software support

Dell EMC announces the availability of new Ready Solutions for AI, with specialized designs for Machine Learning with Hadoop and Deep Learning with NVIDIA. The Dell EMC Ready Solutions simplify AI environments, deliver faster, deeper insights than the competition¹, and leverage Dell EMC’s proven expertise to help organizations realize the full potential of AI.

”There’s no doubt that AI is the future, and our customers are preparing for it now,” said Tom Burns, senior vice president, Networking & Solutions, Dell EMC. “Our goal is to lead the industry with the most powerful and fully-integrated AI solutions. What we’re announcing today allows customers at any scale to start seeing better business outcomes and positions them for AI’s increasingly important role in the future.”

Emerging technologies such as AI will transform lives and how people work and conduct business over the next decade. According to Dell Technologies’ research with 3,800 business leaders around the globe, conducted in partnership with VansonBourne, nearly 80% of organizations will be investing in advanced AI technologies within the next five years.

Dell EMC Ready Solutions for AI

AI is increasingly a strategic priority for most organizations. However, deploying and managing AI workloads is complex, costly, and requires extensive integration and testing of the hardware and software.

The new Dell EMC Ready Solutions for AI were built to simplify AI, deliver faster, deeper insights, and leverage Dell EMC’s proven AI expertise. Organizations no longer have to individually source and piece together their own solutions. Instead, they can rely on a Dell EMC-designed and validated set of best-of-breed technologies for software – including AI frameworks and libraries - with compute, networking and storage. Dell EMC’s portfolio of services from consulting to deployment, support and education helps customers drive the rapid adoption and optimization of their AI environments.

Dell EMC Ready Solutions for AI were designed to help organizations:

Simplify AI                                                                       

• Improve overall data science productivity up to 30% and reduce time-to-operations by 6-12 months compared to do-it-yourself²
• Dell EMC’s Data Science Provisioning Portal offers an intuitive GUI that provides self-service access to hardware resources and a comprehensive set of AI libraries and frameworks such as Caffe and TensorFlow, reducing the steps it takes to configure a data scientist’s workspace to just five clicks  

Obtain Faster, Deeper AI Insights

• Experience up to 2x the performance of the competition with Ready Solutions for AI’s distributed, highly scalable architecture¹
• Improve model accuracy with fast access to larger data sets with Dell EMC Isilon’s All-Flash scale-out design delivering up to 21x the capacity and up to 18x  the throughput in a single cluster compared to the competitors³

Leverage Proven AI Expertise

• Bridge the gap between the data science, IT and lines of business with expert guidance from Dell EMC Consulting
• Optimize solution design by working with experts in Dell EMC’s HPC and AI Innovation Lab which helped one customer improve CheXNet by up to 46x using 32 Nodes by parallelizing the code, reducing training time from 5 hours per epoch to 7 minutes, a 98% improvement⁴

Ready Solutions for AI: Deep Learning with NVIDIA:

Dell EMC and NVIDIA engineered this deep learning design to be built around Dell EMC PowerEdge servers with NVIDIA® Tesla® V100 Tensor Core GPUs. Key features include:

• Dell EMC PowerEdge R740xd and C4140 servers with four NVIDIA Tesla V100‑SXM2 Tensor Core GPUs. With 640 tensor cores, the Tesla V100 was the first to break the 100 teraFLOPS barrier for deep learning performance⁵
• Dell EMC Isilon F800 All-Flash Scale-out NAS storage for a deep learning enables analyzing large datasets concurrently for faster results
• Bright Cluster Manager for Data Science in combination with the Dell EMC Data Science Provisioning Portal to set up, provision, monitor and manage the cluster

Dell EMC Ready Solutions for AI: Machine Learning with Hadoop: Dell EMC Ready Solutions for AI, Machine learning with Hadoop builds on the power of tested and proven Dell EMC Ready Solutions for Hadoop, created in partnership with Cloudera and Intel Corporation. This design includes an optimized solution stack, along with data science and framework optimization to get up and running quickly, and allows expansion of existing Hadoop environments for machine learning.
Key features include:

• Dell EMC PowerEdge R640 and R740xd servers
• Cloudera Data Science Workbench – for fast, easy and secure self-service data science for the enterprise.
• Apache Spark – the open source unified data analytics engine for Big Data and Machine Learning
• Dell EMC Data Science Provisioning Engine – provides pre-configured containers allowing data scientists access to the Intel® BigDL distributed deep learning library on the Spark framework,

Dell EMC Services for AI

New Dell EMC Consulting services are available to help customers implement and operationalize the Ready Solution technologies and AI libraries, and scale their Data Engineering and Data Science capabilities. Designed to accelerate the time-to-value for customers through strategic guidance, expert integration and knowledge transfer, the services also include providing architectural recommendations and advising on industry-proven best practices, tools, and processes.
Once deployed, highly-trained ProSupport experts provide comprehensive hardware and collaborative software support to help ensure optimal system performance and minimize downtime. Customers can also opt for ProSupport Plus to get a Technology Service Manager who provides a single point-of-contact for both hardware and software support. Dell EMC Education Services offers courses and certifications on Data Science and Advanced Analytics and workshops on Machine Learning in collaboration with NVIDIA.

Quotes

“One of the keys to Precision Medicine is being able to analyze the human genome, find abnormalities, then target them with specific treatments,” said James Lowey, CIO TGEN. “Data sets using multiple inputs are becoming so massive, we must rely on Artificial Intelligence (AI) to help make sense of it all.  Dell EMC is a critical partner as we push the science forward, as it gives us a simple scale-out solution to manage and consume petabytes of data and to expedite genome processing from weeks to hours.  When it comes to research that saves lives, where seconds matter, we rely on Dell EMC.”

“Interest and awareness of AI is at a fever pitch. Every industry and every organization should be evaluating AI to see how it will affect their business processes and go-to-market efficiencies,” said David Schubmehl, research director, Cognitive/Artificial Intelligence Systems at IDC. “IDC has estimated that by 2019, 40% of digital transformation initiatives will use AI services and by 2021, 75% of enterprise applications will use AI.”

“AI is being driven by leaps in GPU computing power that defy the slowdown in Moore’s Law,” said Ian Buck, vice president and general manager, Accelerated Computing Group, NVIDIA. “Dell EMC Ready Solutions for AI with Tensor Core GPUs empower AI developers to tackle some of the greatest challenges of our time.”

”Dell EMC and Cloudera have partnered to include Cloudera Data Science Workbench in their Ready Solutions for AI. This enables Dell EMC customers deploying Cloudera Data Science Workbench to accelerate machine learning with the ability to build, scale and deploy solutions with a secure, self-service enterprise data platform,“ said Hilary Mason, general manager of Machine Learning at Cloudera. ”This means IT organizations can bring data science to their data, while data scientists can access, collaborate and manage their data in a way that best suits them and their enterprise, resulting in an easier and faster path to production"

“Organizations spend precious and costly time gathering, configuring, testing and troubleshooting machine learning environments for data scientists, at the expense of time delivering business insights,” said Bill Wagner, CEO of Bright Computing. “Dell EMC Ready Solutions for AI, with Bright Cluster for Data Science, makes it easier to get  machine learning environments up and running in a cluster-ready environment to automatically scale as demand for deep learning capacity grows.” 

Availability:

The Dell EMC Ready Solutions are available now in the United States. Availability rolls out in Brazil, Canada, Mexico, France, Germany, UK, Australia, China, India and Japan within 60 days.

Dell EMC

Dell EMC, a part of Dell Technologies, enables organizations to modernize, automate and transform their data center using industry-leading converged infrastructure, servers, storage and data protection technologies. This provides a trusted foundation for businesses to transform IT, through the creation of a hybrid cloud, and transform their business through the creation of cloud-native applications and big data solutions.  Dell EMC services customers across 180 countries – including 98 percent of the Fortune 500 – with the industry’s most comprehensive and innovative portfolio from edge to core to cloud.

Copyright © 2018 Dell Inc. or its subsidiaries. All Rights Reserved. Dell, EMC and other trademarks are trademarks of Dell Inc. or its subsidiaries. Other trademarks may be trademarks of their respective owners.

¹ Based on an Enterprise Strategy Group Technical Review “Accelerating the Artificial Intelligence Journey with Dell EMC Ready Solutions for AI”, August 2018
² Based on a Forrester Total Economic Impact Study commissioned by Dell EMC, May 2018
³ Compared to closest competitor based on Dell EMC internal analysis, June 2018
⁴ Based on Dell EMC AI internal engineering testing on CheXNet, a model for identifying thoracic pathologies from the NIH ChestXray14 dataset developed at Stanford University. Results achieved using Horovod framework for parallelizing a Keras-based model on 32 Dell EMC Power Edge C6420 servers with 2 Intel Xeon Scalable Gold 6148 sockets each, June 2018.  Solution not intended to provide diagnoses. Actual results will vary
⁵ Based on NVIDIA public claim: https://www.nvidia.com/en-us/data-center/tesla-v100/