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Dell Technologies World 2020 from an M&E Perspective

Read our blog written by Joe D'Amato, senior field solutions architect at CDW Canada, on Dell Technologies World 2020 from a media and entertainment lens.

Dell Technologies World 2020 from an M&E Perspective

Auteur : Joe D'Amato, Senior Field Solutions Architect

In my role as a StudioCloud senior solutions architect at CDW, I work with clients in the media and entertainment industry. Due to the thousands of computers and massive amount of storage that it takes to make just one modern visual effects movie, the media and entertainment industry has become its own brand of high performance computing (HPC). For Dell Technologies World 2020, the focus of my attendance was on technologies that fuel today's content creation studios, which is what I will be outlining in this blog.

The Beginning of the Data Era

One ofthe major themes throughout the conference was the idea that 2020 is the beginningof the data era, and that the combination of 5G, artificial intelligenceand machine learning is leading to a massive need for computer and storage.Based on what I have seen in the industry, it is clear that 5G will be thenetwork fabric that ties all of this together and that media companies will be increasinglydriving content delivery to the edge over the next couple years. To furtherprove this point, it was highlighted that there was as much data created withinthe last two years as there was before then. AI will be not only one of the biggestproducers of data, but also the biggest consumer of data in the coming years,with its growth being exponential.

Anotherkey theme and topic that carried through many of the sessions is Dell'sannouncement of Project Apex, which is Michael Dell's vision that offeringswill be developed as solutions-as-a-service. The intent is to give customersthe flexibility of growth of their traditional on-premise solutions with pay-as-you-useor pay-as-you-grow models, or across cloud-based or private cloud-basedflexible consumable solutions. This allows businesses to grow quickly withoutlarge capital outlays and will be especially evident in the high-growth areas ofVMware, computer/render farms and HPC storage.

Dell realizes that the differencebetween real-time and non-real-time access to data, as well as how much it caninhibit traditional cloud, is causing businesses to build their own cloudlocally. This is especially true in post-production for film and television, whichis the reason our StudioCloud render farms and storage offerings dovetail sowell into Dell's solutions-as-a-service vision. For three years now, CDWhas partnered with Dell for StudioCloud solutions to offer flex-on-demand options,giving studios the ability to expand their storage needs as they grow and allowfor burst storage that they can hand back when things slow down. Offering clientsthe ability to host on premise, inside our private StudioCloud, or with otherbespoke options are just some of the ways Dell can deploy storage as anoperational expense. It is encouraging to see this approach spread to theentire stack of offerings, from the data centre, right on down to the end-userworkstation.

Product Announcements from Dell Technologies World 2020

Inaddition to Project Apex, the PowerScale family of storage hit loudly on the stageat the event. PowerScale uses the OneFS operating system and is the nextgeneration of the historic Isilon line of scale-out storage. AlthoughDell is moving the branding of Isilon over to PowerScale, the real power of theoffering is in the OneFS operating system. With these new PowerScale formfactors, Dell is offering additional flash options to leverage the powerhouseF800 flash storage systems within smaller footprints such as the F200 and F600.Another bonus is that these newer PowerScale models can be added to an existingIsilon cluster, since it is all OneFS!

One of the newer products that comes free with PowerScale is DataIQ. This year Dell offered a number of hands-on presentations that allowed participants to get the feel and sense of how this new versatile tool operates. If you are interested, you can still register and experience these hands-on demos even though the conference has concluded.

DataIQuses its own algorithms to efficiently scan the storage system, presenting aroadmap to the end-user community so they can find out where all their data is.Post-production film studios can generate a petabyte of unstructured dataacross many projects in a matter of months, and it can be very easy to losetrack of where all the data is. One of the benefits of DataIQ is that it allowsyou to see your PowerScale storage as well as other vendors' storage all in onepane of glass, and from there you can use the data mover to move data betweenyour disparate storage systems, into one unified storage ecosystem. Of interestto the visual effects and animation industries: Dell has since released an opensource plug-in for DataIQ to work with Autodesk's Shotgun Software, a wildlypopular production management software tool. This plug-in allows producers andmanagers to see what projects shots' and artists are generating the mostdata. I found it especially encouraging that Dell is making DataIQ free toits customers, as well as releasing an open source plug-in.

Dell hasbeen planning for remote work and learning for a while as part of their overallvision, and recent events have simply accelerated the inevitable move of dataand services to the edge. Starting with Michael Dells keynote and continuingthroughout the conference sessions there was the pervasive role of COVID-19 andthe need for all people and households to have access a digital device andconnectivity to succeed in a remote world.

To explore the sessions at 2020 Dell Technologies World, visit their conference website. You can also learn more about CDW's StudioCloud and our media and entertainment solutions here.