Dell is targeting a massive VxRail refresh opportunity with a new Private Cloud and Automation Platform, promising hypervisor choice and up to 65 percent cost savings.
Dell Technologies Tuesday stepped up its bid to dominate the infrastructure market in the AI era with a wave of new technology breakthroughs, including a new version of its private cloud with the Dell Automation Platform.
The new Dell Private Cloud offering with the Dell Automation Platform is aimed at upgrading the massive Dell VMware VxRail installed base to the modern data center Dell Private Cloud platform with the choice of hypervisors and cloud stacks from companies including VMware by Broadcom, Microsoft and Red Hat.
The new Dell Private Cloud disaggregated platform with the Dell Automation Platform delivers up to 65 percent cost savings compared with a traditional five-node hyperconverged infrastructure cluster.
“The VxRail opportunity may be one of the largest opportunities that partners have,” said Dell Senior Director of Data Center Solutions Sales Alan Ashby. “Our VxRail product was almost exclusively sold by our partners. It is all of their customers they sold to. Those customers are at a pivotal point of having to make a choice.”
The Dell Private Cloud advancements include support for VMware Cloud Foundation 9.1, Microsoft Azure Local and Nutanix AHV with Dell PowerStore integration.
“This is a massive opportunity for partners to be consultative with their customers, helping customers on an individual-by-individual workload-by-workload basis, providing what may provide the best benefits,” said Ashby. “From a Dell perspective, we are not opinionated on what hypervisor customers run on. We just want to make sure our customers are happy, getting the right benefits out of it with a really great TCO value.”
Ashby said he expects most partners will move customers to the Dell Private Cloud with support for VMware, pairing it with “best-in-class” products from the PowerEdge servers and PowerStore servers.
“With Dell Private Cloud you get the incredible efficiencies of having server and storage infrastructure right-sized with consolidation in the server world, data reduction capabilities, new PowerStore capabilities and then we make it super seamless and easy for partners with our management console and an automation perspective and operational perspective with our Dell Automation software,” said Ashby.
Dell also unveiled the Dell PowerStore Elite storage platform, which triples the performance and density of its prior storage offerings. The new 18th generation of Dell PowerEdge servers, meanwhile, delivers up to 70 percent better performance than prior-generation Dell servers with 13-to-1 server cost savings consolidation benefits with energy and power savings.
The Dell infrastructure blitz comes with the Dell Infrastructure Solutions Group reporting sales for the year ended Jan. 30 up 40 percent to $60.8 billion compared with $43.59 billion in the prior year.
Here are the biggest Dell next-generation infrastructure announcements from day two of Dell Technologies World.
The new Dell Private Cloud with the Dell Automation Platform is aimed at upgrading the massive Dell VMware VxRail installed base to the modern data center Dell Private Cloud platform with the choice of hypervisors and cloud stacks from companies including VMware by Broadcom, Microsoft and Red Hat.
The Dell Private Cloud advancements include support for VMware Cloud Foundation 9.1, Microsoft Azure Local and Nutanix AHV with Dell PowerStore integration.
Dell Vice President of Product Management for Private Cloud and AI Solutions Caitlin Gordon said the support for VMware Cloud Foundation 9.1 has been “one of the biggest asks” from customers and partners.
Dell said its new Private Cloud disaggregated platform with the Dell Automation Platform delivers up to 65 percent cost savings compared with a traditional five-node hyperconverged infrastructure cluster.
“This is a game-changing conversation with customers because they are able to save not only on the acquisition costs because of the much more efficient disaggregated infrastructure and efficient storage, but also in this supply constrained world a very efficient compute [platform],” said Gordon. “You marry that with the Dell Private Cloud software [the Dell Automation Platform] and you get the operational simplicity. So you get the acquisition cost savings and the operational savings with Dell Private Cloud now supportive across a very broad ecosystem.”
Dell has also renamed its Native Edge cloud offering as Dell Distributed Private Cloud as it steps up its edge offensive with support for distributed data center sites with support for two-node clusters with high availability and support for the Dell Pro Micro Plus endpoint product.
The Dell Distributed Private Cloud is ideal for “distributed data centers, small sites, retail and manufacturing where we need to support a small footprint,” said Gordon.
Dell Automation Platform Powering Private Cloud With New Agentic AI Capabilities
Dell said its new AI-driven Automation Platform for Private Cloud provides an agentic AI layer that delivers 10X faster resolution of infrastructure issues.
“This is about how do we accelerate not just the time to value from an automated deployment but really accelerate overall day two operations and simplify things, saving time and money for our customers overall,” said Gordon. “This helps automate everything from infrastructure standup to application orchestration with Dell Distributed Private Cloud. This is really about bringing the entire Dell infrastructure portfolio to life for very specific solutions for our customers.”
The Dell Automation Platform includes a new agentic AI layer as a network of agents that makes “smart recommendations and even take action with user oversight over infrastructure,” said Gordon.
The agentic AI layer for the Dell Automation Platform benefits from the massive wealth of telemetry insight from Dell infrastructure that inspects the full Dell infrastructure stack across servers, storage and networking.
“When you marry the insight and intelligence and the correlation engine with the new agentic layer, we really have created a whole new layer of intelligence in this platform,” said Gordon.
Dell has also added a new chat-style generative UI that gives the customer the ability to talk to the automation platform, instantly generating a customized dashboard answer or control based on the prompt. “It is very much a customized experience per user,” she said.
Dell is also integrating the Dell Automation Platform into leading IT service management platforms and tying it directly into Dell support.
Finally, Dell is releasing Dell Automation Studio, a full customization center where customers can build custom workflows. “This is ideal for DevOps and platform engineering teams to support custom applications, custom OS, customer hardware with the ability to use the same orchestration platform they are using with Dell Private Cloud.”
Dell PowerStore Elite: Up To 3X Performance Increase, 6:1 Data Reduction Capability
Dell unveiled a new release of its flagship storage array, the Dell PowerStore Elite, with up to a 3X increase in performance and what it is touting as an “industry-best” 6:1 data reduction guarantee.
“PowerStore Elite represents the biggest leap forward in the platform’s history,” said Dell Senior Vice President of Infrastructure and Telecom Marketing Varun Chhabra. “It is a full refresh of hardware and software and builds on the success of PowerStore Prime [storage platform] from two years ago. It is designed for what customers are facing next.”
With the economics of “flash and supply chain constraints shifting in real time,” Dell PowerStore Elite provides customers not only big performance gains but investment protection as their “needs evolve” in the AI era, said Chhabra.
“PowerStore Elite features a unified scale-out design that supports both file and block workloads with seamless mobility across clusters,” said Chhabra. “Everything in the system is modular. We have built incredible head room into the platform for multiple data-in-place upgrades across performance, IO capacity and software.”
To get the 3X increase in performance, Dell has added next- generation CPUs, faster memory, faster networking and major software enhancements.
The result is up to 3X more IOPS (input/output operations per second), 3X more throughput and 3X greater density compared with previous-generation systems, said Chhabra.
The 6:1 data reduction guarantee is up from 5:1 with enhanced data compression and deduplication capabilities that change the “economics” of consolidation, he said.
The PowerStore Elite with 40 drive slots in a single chassis can now store up to 5.8 petabytes into a single 3U system. It also features twice the number of network ports compared with the current generation and twice the speed with 64-Gigabit-per- second Fibre Channel network speed and 100 Gigabit Ethernet, with future speeds up to 400 Gigabits per second.
PowerStore contains AI-driven intelligence that “continuously optimizes performance and efficiency, reducing manual effort” for storage operators by up to 95 percent, said Chhabra.
“PowerStore Elite is not just a faster array, it is a brand-new class of the modern data platform that is built to help customers lead through change not just react to it,” he said.
The New 18th Generation Dell PowerEdge Servers With Up To 70 Percent Better Performance
Dell said its new 18th generation of Dell’s PowerEdge server delivers up to 70 percent better performance than prior generations and 13-to-1 server cost savings consolidation benefits with energy and power savings.
“The new generation of PowerEdge servers is its most significant refresh in years,” said Chhabra. “It is the broadest single-socket lineup that Dell has ever shipped with AI readiness designed into every server, ready for AI workloads wherever customers need them, regardless of what they are running on these systems today.
The 18th generation of PowerEdge servers is the “first wave” of releases with more PowerEdge servers set to be announced throughout this year and into 2027, said Chhabra.
The new PowerEdge servers include the XE-Series purpose-built accelerated compute system for AI training and the most demanding GPU workloads; the M-Series, which are dense compute systems at rack scale with the M9825 designed for the Dell Integrated PowerRack 7000, which supports rack densities up to 480 kilowatts for AI Factory and high-performance compute deployments; and finally the R-Series for mainstream compute workloads, spanning single-socket and dual-socket configurations.
The PowerEdge servers ship with quantum safe firmware and boot capabilities, which position PowerEdge ahead of post- quantum cryptography requirements federal and regulated industry buyers face in 2027, said Chhabra.
Dell PowerProtect One: A Unified Cyber Resilience Platform
Dell launched PowerProtect One, a unified cyber resilience platform built to secure and rapidly recover business-critical data across any environment.
Dell said the product is built from the combined strengths of Dell Data Manager and Dell Data Domain, delivering a single control plane with an open architecture, providing flexibility without lock-in.
“With PowerProtect One, customers can protect critical data across any environment with speed, scale and consistency,” said Chhabra. He said the new offering simplifies and automates storage operations on a “secure unbreakable” foundation.
“We expect that customers deploying PowerProtect One will reduce their deployment time by up to 75 percent and will see up to a 50 percent reduction in management overhead,” Chhabra said.
Dell Cyber Detect AI-Powered Ransomware Protection
Dell launched Cyber Detect, which provides AI power ransomware protection directly into Dell PowerStore and PowerMax enterprise storage environments.
“Dell Cyber Detect is a major advancement in cyber resilience that closes one of the biggest gaps customers face after a ransomware attack, which is to know what data is actually clean and which data is infected,” said Chhabra. “Cyber Detect helps with that. It uses AI-powered full-content-based analytics to identify ransomware-induced corruption across both primary storage as well as backup environments.”
Unlike traditional tools that rely on metadata or signatures, Cyber Detect “deeply inspects data at the byte level,” said Chhabra. “It analyzes hundreds of content-based indicators to validate the integrity with 99.99 percent accuracy, which results in faster, more confident recovery and far less guesswork during an incident,” he said.
The integrated end-to-end ransomware detection capability allows customers to validate the “most recent clean snapshots” directly on their Dell PowerStore and PowerMax systems for “rapid localized recovery, while also validating isolated immutable backups in the cyber recovery vault for short recovery in worst- case scenarios,” said Chhabra.
“Cyber Detect helps organization recover not just faster, but more correctly using proven, clean data the first time,” he said.
