Leader Recognition in Distributed File Systems and Object Storage

Thanks to you, our valued customers, partners and employees, we did it again! For the sixth consecutive year, Gartner® named Dell Technologies a Leader in its 2021 Magic Quadrant™ for Distributed File Systems and Object Storage¹ – a Leader every year since the commencement of this report.

We couldn’t have earned this recognition without our customers, channel and technology partners, and our engineers, sales and product management teams – a sincere thank you to all of you for helping us to deliver incredible results year after year in the distributed file and object storage category!

According to the Gartner research, Dell Technologies received the highest overall position for its ability to execute in the Leaders’ quadrant of the report.¹ Dell EMC PowerScale, the world’s most flexible scale-out NAS solution², and ECS, our industry leading object storage platform, were evaluated for the Gartner report.

We here at Dell Technologies are honored to once again be recognized as a Leader in the Gartner® Magic Quadrant™ for Distributed File Systems and Object Storage. We believe this recognition is a testament of our commitment to provide cost-effective, scalable, flexible storage platforms that allow our customers to drive more innovation from their data to deliver better business outcomes, solve some of the world’s biggest challenges and improve lives.

According to the Gartner research, “By 2026, large enterprises will triple their unstructured data capacity stored as file or object storage on-premises, at the edge or in the public cloud, compared to 2021.¹” To address the evolving challenges concerning data storage and extracting value from data, enterprises need storage infrastructure that provides a supporting management and protection strategy that can handle the most demanding and critical data-rich file and object workloads of today and tomorrow.

Our powerful scale-out file storage and object storage solutions, PowerScale and ECS, provide simplified management, improved performance and flexibility – at the edge, the core or the cloud – to empower your organization to truly innovate with your data. Whether your goals are managing demanding GPU or public cloud workloads, retaining critical data at the lowest cost, or protecting data from cyberattacks, PowerScale and ECS make it easy to keep your data connected, managed, protected and secure, without creating storage silos – no matter where your data lives.

We continue to aim high in creating additional value for our valued customers. Recent enhancements to PowerScale and ECS that can help you be ready for any file or object-based data workload that comes next include:

Global Home Design Leader Revs Up Its SAP Environment

The home accessories design market is driven by constant and rapid change. Successful companies respond nimbly to changing customer tastes, dynamic market conditions and supply chain variations. This is the case at Umbra, one of the world’s most innovative home design companies, based in Toronto, Canada. Umbra reimagines everyday items from furniture, decor, accessories, organizers and more for the entire home, selling its products in 75,000 stores in 125 countries. Vertically integrated, Umbra manufactures the majority of its original designs in its own facilities worldwide. To succeed, the company has always ensured that its IT infrastructure is in lockstep with its business strategy, with a focus on addressing timely business opportunities. But faced with aging infrastructure, Umbra was concerned that is could be limiting growth. “The growing number of orders is significantly increasing the amount of data our SAP environment has to ingest,” says Tariq Jamal, vice president of analytics and CIO at Umbra. With this in mind, Umbra’s IT leaders made the decision to upgrade the company’s business-critical SAP environment to a solution based on Dell EMC PowerEdge R840 servers and Dell EMC PowerMax storage with end-to-end NVMe and SCM drives powered by Intel® Optane™ technology.

Dramatic performance improvements

In the past, Umbra had some SAP processes that took hours to run. Following the rollout of its new PowerMax storage array on PowerEdge R840 servers, all that changed. In a Dell Technologies case study, the company reports that it has experienced a 400% improvement in its SAP processes, completing them in 30 minutes rather than up to two hours. Users no longer wait for screens to refresh or reports to run, allowing them to work faster and more efficiently.

PowerMax and its Intel Optane-powered storage class memory (SCM) drives are also making a big difference in the performance of SAP InfoCubes within Umbra’s SAP Business Warehouse (BW) application. Umbra has seen improvement of as much as 500% with PowerMax and SCM Optane technology when updating data within SAP BW. This gives users the extreme performance and responsiveness they need without a lot of extra IT effort to manage things.

In addition, Umbra’s improved data reduction ratio is 3.4 to 1 — better than the company was expecting when it selected PowerMax — which helps reduce the need for additional storage.

“Our technology stack is the foundation of successful order fulfillment, right down to the experience an end consumer receives,” explains Tariq Jamal. “Our most critical workloads benefit from PowerMax with its end-to-end NVMe and SCM drives powered by Intel Optane technology.”

Making the Cloud of Dreams Real

The transition to consuming IT as a service is accelerating rapidly across all industries. Paying for the services and infrastructure you need when you need it is a game changer for organizations that want to reduce upfront expenditures and ongoing maintenance for the infrastructure they need to run their business. APEX Cloud Services with VMware Cloud delivers this and more, addressing customer’s challenges and helping them achieve their business objectives. This exciting release changes the game for adopting a powerful on-premises cloud platform.

We have a lot of experience working with customers who are adopting their cloud strategy and realizing the benefits as they mature. We’ve learned many lessons on what works, what doesn’t work, and what organizations need to do to be successful in operationalizing their cloud and using it to achieve outcomes.

APEX Cloud Services with VMware Cloud makes it simple for an IT organization to order additional compute, similar to how they would consume public cloud resources. So, how do we bring that simplicity to the business stakeholder?

Cloud of Dreams

If there is one truism about cloud we’ve found over the years it’s that “if you build it, they will come” is simply not true. Many organizations have spent countless hours of effort to create brand new greenfield, sparkling, artisanal cloud platforms and they expect this hard work will be rewarded by consumption. While this is a great start towards cloud adoption, there are other areas organizations need to focus on to drive adoption.

Developers and other business stakeholders of the cloud need their data in the cloud before they’re willing to use it. We help organizations drive consumption of their cloud platforms by migrating data and workloads first. Once these workloads are moved to the cloud, net-new workloads will be deployed there as well.

Batteries Included

Of course, migrating workloads into the cloud on its own is not enough to drive consumption of your shiny new cloud. A cloud is only as successful as the services and functionality that if offers.

Remember as a kid when you unwrapped that toy you had been wanting so badly only to discover the dreaded “batteries not included” message printed on the box? Cloud platforms are not that different. When you unwrap your cloud and take it out of the box, it needs to come with those batteries.

In this case, those batteries include the automations and integrations that your organization needs. It needs to be integrated together such that it meshes seamlessly with the organization’s IT workflow and lifecycle. It needs to have automated services that provide a seamless experience that helps developers and other stakeholders get what they need when they need it. Finally, it needs to have a populated service catalog to enable end-users to start consuming the cloud on day one.

A shiny cloud with blinking lights in the data center and a login prompt to an empty service catalog just won’t cut it.