Dell EMC has announced the availability of new Ready Solutions for AI, with specialised 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 organisations realise 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.”

“Interest and awareness of AI is at a fever pitch. Every industry and every organisation should be evaluating AI to see how it will affect their business processes and go-to-market efficiencies," added 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,” he added.

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 organisations 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 organisations. 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. Organisations 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 optimisation of their AI environments.

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

Simplify AI                                                                                        

• Improve overall data science productivity up to 30% and reduce time-to-operations by 6-12 months compared to do-it-yourself
• 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 architecture
• 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 competitors

Leverage Proven AI Expertise

• Bridge the gap between the data science, IT and lines of business with expert guidance from Dell EMC Consulting
• Optimise 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 parallelising the code, reducing training time from five hours per epoch to seven minutes, a 98% improvement

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 performance
• Dell EMC Isilon F800 All-Flash Scale-out NAS storage for a deep learning enables analysing 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 optimisation 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 operationalise 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 minimise 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.

Giving some real world gravitas to the new announcement was James Lowey, CIO TGEN.  “One of the keys to Precision Medicine is being able to analyse the human genome, find abnormalities, then target them with specific treatments, he explained. 

“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,” concluded Lowey