71: GreyBeards talk DP appliances with Sharad Rastogi, Sr. VP & Ranga Rajagopalan, Sr. Dir., Dell EMC DPD

In this episode of the Greybeards on Storage podcast, Ray Lucchesi and Howard Marks spoke to Sharad Rastogi & Ranga Rajagopalan from Dell EMC’s Data Protection division. They discuss the company’s new IDPA DP4400, which was also detailed at their Tech Field Day Extra presentation from VMworld US 2018. This provides up to 96TB of usable capacity for secondary storage and backups, while also providing up to 192TB of a native Cloud Tier.


What Differentiates Servers in a Commodity x86 World?

Dell and servers have been on Stephen Foskett’s mind after visiting Dell’s Austin headquarters with Tech Field Day 16 and Dell EMC in Hopkinton for Storage Field Day 16. The newest generation of Dell servers have just about every feature you could ask for, but after testing out a PowerEdge R7415, Stephen says what really differentiates them from the competition is the management platform. Dell EMC’s Quick Sync 2 technology as the integrated iDRAC management platform is a huge upgrade from previous versions and easily beats out the competition.


HCI Isn’t the Only Simplified Management

In this piece, Alastair Cooke looks at why Hyperconverged Infrastructure doesn’t deliver the comprehensive simplified management it often is associated with. He then looks at how since HCI first hit the market, simplification is now offered for a variety of modern products that may better service IT operations.


Redfish support for DellEMC PowerEdge

Andrea Mauro got to hear from Dell EMC’s automation and configuration team at Tech Field Day earlier this year. They outlined their new iDRAC9 version, but also support for iDRAC9 version on the newest generation of PowerEdge servers. Andrea thinks for organizations in a heterogenous vendor environment this support is vital for implementing automation.


Managing Servers in a Serverless World

In this piece, Gabe Maentz uses the popularity of serverless models to introduce Dell EMC’s OpenManage, which he saw at Tech Field Day last month. Serverless essentially lets you focus on functions and not worry about the underlying servers. As a high volume seller of servers, Dell EMC is using OpenManage Essentials and Enterprise to simplify, automate and unify their server life cycle management functions. Gabe found the solution impressive, with a focus on practicality and ease of use for admins.


Adding More (Red)Fish to Your Diet

In this piece, Jon Hildebrand outlines how differing interpretations of the Intelligent Platform Management Interface standard led to a surfeit of tools for multi-vendor data center administrators. At Tech Field Day last month, Dell EMC outlined how they are incorporating the new Redfish standard to provide standardized APIs that will work better across a variety of hardware.


#TFD16 Wrap Up: How the OpenManage Team Met 12 IT Bloggers…

Dell EMC’s OpenManage team presented at Tech Field Day a few weeks ago. In this piece, Dell EMC’s Jeremy Erwin shares some of the video segments from their session, as well as highlights some of the great conversation between our delegates and the company.


Converged Infrastructure died a long time ago, right?

Should converged infrastructure have died a long time ago? Keith Townsend discusses on this CTO Advisor video, in light of the release of the Dell EMC VxBlock 1000. He argues that while CI might not be the hot new trend in IT, lots of customers still want and need it, especially in cases where applications aren’t certified to run on HCI. Keith is excited to hear more from Dell EMC on this at Tech Field Day next week.