Dell Technologies Expands GenAI Lineup for Enterprises
Dell Technologies believes that expanding its Generative AI Solutions lineup will induce businesses to speed up their IT system updates — many of which are slow to roll as enterprises look for AI talent and ponder the best ways to build out their systems.
For example, there are major user-friendliness differences in dealing with a 2012-era sales bot that’s hamstrung by pre-programmed answers in lieu of a smart, 2023 “AI assistant” that can offer a potential customer thoughtful options in a sales situation. These IT differences can impact bottom lines very quickly.
Dell on Oct. 4 announced three new additions to its overall GenAI package: various-level blueprints for stocking and building a new GenAI component called Validated Design for Generative AI with NVIDIA for Model Customization; a new data lakehouse storage offering featuring Starburst, which provides an analytics engine for those capacious nodes; and a set of professional services to teach new users how to build and run all of these things.
Fueling AI with Data
“Really what we’re unveiling is how we fuel AI with data, and the announcement is about building out an open modern data lake house,” Greg Findlen, Dell SVP for data management, told reporters. “So this is what our vision of an open data lake house needs to be, in order to help support that broader set of analytics and AI workloads that our users have.”
There are a few key tenets to this. “First of all, it is multicloud by design,” Findlen said. “Users can’t continue to choose between on-premises and putting all of their data in the cloud. We need to help them reduce data movement so they can leverage the data gravity for where the data is and not have to consolidate all the data before they can use it.”
Secondly, they should use the latest high-performance engines to be able to handle the workloads they now have. “We have an open, scale-out architecture to help decouple compute storage data formats, etc. and really enable the scale that our users need,” Findlen said. “We need to ensure that it has a unified data stack so that they can handle any workload on top of this modern data lake house.”
Users should have security with government access-type control. “Data localization continues to be an increasing challenge that our users are faced with as well as day-to-day capabilities, such as masking, to enable data scientists to do their work,” Findlen said.
Finally, they need an integrated turnkey solution, Findlen said. “Many users are trying to deal with this challenge today by bringing together pieces of technology by themselves. Over time, our goal is to help build a more integrated set of capabilities that our users can rely on. This is really important as they continue to embrace AI, Gen AI as well as modern analytics in general. All of those things require much faster, much more open capabilities on the data layer side,” Findlen said.
Details on new solutions:
- Dell Validated Design for Generative AI with NVIDIA for Model Customization: A pre-validated solution helps users securely extract intelligence from their data by providing best practices for customizing and fine-tuning GenAI models based on specific use cases.
- Dell Professional Services for Generative AI: These services help users streamline their GenAI strategy development, data preparation, platform development and operational efficiencies.
- Dell Open, Modern Data Lakehouse Solution with Starburst: This solution integrates Starburst’s analytics software with Dell’s PowerEdge compute platform and storage to help users extract insights from data wherever it resides. It is built with open software principles and offers secure access to multicloud data, Findlen said.
GenAI models are trained on large, proprietary datasets, which can make it difficult and time-consuming to customize for specific use cases. The design blueprints provide a pre-validated shortcut that enables users to overcome this problem. GenAI models require clean, accurate data to be effective, so the professional services guide users as they prepare their data for GenAI projects.
A high number of enterprises have their data distributed across multiple clouds, so the lakehouse with Starburst analytics aims to help users access and analyze their data from anywhere, Findlen said.
Dell Validated Design for Generative AI is available globally through standard channels and Dell APEX starting in late October. Dell Professional Services for Generative AI are available in select countries starting in late October.
The Dell data lakehouse with Starburst has planned global availability in the first half of 2024, the company said.