What’s inside Dell’s AI Factory

Dell Technologies has introduced its AI Factory packed with many new technologies and services during its annual conference in Las Vegas.

Built on services, ecosystem and infrastructure, the Dell AI Factory features the broadest AI solutions portfolio from the “desktop to data centre to cloud ” along with key technology partnerships that will help create AI applications through a traditional purchase or as a Dell APEX subscription.

The Factory’s portfolio spans client devices, servers, storage, data protection and networking, bringing together all the AI capabilities, infrastructure services and partnerships to make repeatable and scalable AI deployments.

“We build AI factories for you with your data, performance, services costs and security, under your control,” Dell chairman and CEO, Michael Dell told delegates. “It’s your data centre of the future, built and designed from the ground up with AI.”

Dell COO and vice president Jeff Clarke said new IT infrastructure and devices purpose-built are required to meet the specific demands of AI.

“The Dell AI Factory helps customers accelerate AI adoption with the world’s broadest AI portfolio and leading AI ecosystem partners, offering right-sized approaches and greater control over AI deployments on-premises, at the edge and across cloud environments,” Clarke said.

An open ecosystem for AI

Dell is building on its relationship with Nvidia, Hugging Face as well as Microsoft Azure.

Dell senior vice president of product marketing Varun Chhabra said the Hugging Face platform has quickly become the de-facto repository for open-source AI models, with Dell releasing the Enterprise Hub.

The Hub will offer simplified on-premises deployment of the most popular large language models or alliances that are available on the Hugging Face platform with these models curated and selected specifically to match with Dell infrastructure.

It will also include custom dedicated containers and scripts that will allow customers, users and developers to securely deploy open-source models available on Hugging Face on their Dell infrastructure on-premises.

“Dell is the first vendor in the industry to bring the Hugging Face portal experience for on-prem container and model deployments,” Chhabra said. “Dell will be a preferred on-premises infrastructure provider for Hugging Face to support enterprise adoption of tailored open source generative AI models.

Dell also continues its collaboration with Meta to simplify deployment of Meta Llama 3 models on-premises with Dell infrastructure, providing test results, performance data and deployment recipes.

While the Dell AI Solution for Microsoft Azure AI Services speeds deployment of AI services, such as speech transcription and translation capabilities, built on Dell APEX Cloud Platform for Microsoft Azure.

Expanded services portfolio

An extensive portfolio of AI Professional Services will aim drive improved business outcomes from AI initiatives.

This includes implementation services for Microsoft Copilot solutions providing expert guidance on embracing Copilot experiences across GitHub, Security, Windows and Sales.

“Our approach with Copilot and our professional services will deliver go far beyond the readiness of the technical environment and implementation, we will actually also ensure data preparation as well as preparation of knowledge workers to be able to fully take advantage of the Copilot capabilities,” he said.

Chhabra said it will do this through assessing the environment to identify requirements and how the data maps across the organisation and develop a comprehensive readiness and implementation plan for the organisation’s outcomes.

“Then we finally implement, configure, test and onboard users to the Copilot platform and once we have deployed these at scale, we conduct advisory sessions post implementation to help organisations get the most out of their Copilot experience.”

The Dell AI Factory with NVIDIA has also been expanded to incorporate new server, edge, workstation, solutions and services advancements.

Project Lightning

Project Lightning was revealed that will deliver a parallel file system for unstructured data through PowerScale.

Project Lightning aims to bring extreme performance and efficiency, saturating thousands of data hungry GPUs for the most performance intensive AI training or model creation workloads, Chhabra said.

Lightning will deliver up to 20 times greater performance than traditional all flash scale out NAS vendors, Chhabra said.

The new PowerScale F910 all-flash file storage, promises to address the needs of demanding AI workloads while the Dell solution for AI Data Protection helps customers protect critical AI applications and data with Dell data protection software, appliances and a reference design to streamline deployment.

Expanded networking portfolio

The new Dell PowerSwitch Z9864F-ON, powered by the Broadcom Tomahawk chipset, doubles network performance of AI applications through a modern network architecture that delivers high throughput, low latency and easy scalability, catering to the most demanding networking environments.

While the new Dell PowerEdge XE9680 supports Broadcom 400G PCIe Gen 5.0 Ethernet
adapters.

Enhancements were also made to the networking fabric software Sonic, which will help with simplified management, validated blueprints and deliver better resilience for AI fabrics to support AI network fabrics to support these AI workloads.

New AI PCs

Dell’s new range of AI PCs offer users the ability to “super charge every workflow” with its battery-life and AI performance using Qualcomm Snapdragon X series processors. Five new laptops were revealed including XPS13, Inspiron 14 and 14 Plus, and two Latitude devices – 7455 and 5455.

“The AI PC revolution is here now and it’s not just hype,” Dell Technologies vice president and general manager of Latitude and docking Kevin Terwilliger said.

“There’s excitement that we’re hearing directly from our customers and that’s really because of this transformative AI that’s going to be enhancing productivity and efficiency.

“We’re excited about unlocking this capability across our portfolio, working with silicon partners as well as Microsoft to offer the most complete AI PC portfolio.”

Terwillinger said it was also heavily investing in AI peripherals with the new Dell collaboration keyboard (KB525C) featuring a dedicated Copilot key.

“We’re going all in on the AI PC experience. We know this is going to play a critical role in the broader Dell technology strategy, really leading the industry with the world’s broadest AI portfolio from the data center to the cloud, all in one place,” Terwillinger said.

Julia Talevski travelled as a guest of Dell Technologies to Dell Technologies World 2024.