Dell goes full AI

A new suite of Dell Technologies products and services, in collaboration with chip-maker Nvidia, will help businesses gain real-time insights and enable innovation through artificial intelligence (AI),

The new offerings, under the banner of Dell Generative AI Solutions include, are designed to help customers quickly and securely build generative AI (GenAI) models on-premise.

The solutions cover IT infrastructure, PCs and professional services, allowing them to simplify the adoption of GenAI with large language models (LLM), which make text-based generative AI possible.

“Generative AI can help every enterprise transform its data into intelligent applications that enable them to solve complex business challenges,” says Manuvir Das, vice president of enterprise computing at Nvidia, which makes the most advanced processors for AI applications. “Dell Technologies and Nvidia are building on our long-standing relationship to enable organisations to harness this capability to better serve their customers, more fully support their employees and fuel innovation across their operations.”

The new solution set will cover much of Dell’s product portfolio, including Dell Precision workstations, Dell PowerEdge servers, Dell PowerScale scale-out storage, and Dell ECS enterprise object storage. In combination, these will provide tools to deliver GenAI solutions from desktops to core data centers, edge locations and public clouds.

Dell vice chairman and co-chief operating officer Jeff Clarke says: “Generative AI represents an inflection point that is driving fundamental change in the pace of innovation while improving the customer experience and enabling new ways to work. Customers, big and small, are using their own data and business context to train, fine-tune and inference on Dell infrastructure solutions to incorporate advanced AI into their core business processes effectively and efficiently.”

Dell Technologies provided the following informaton on its full-stack GenAI for enterprises:

The Dell Validated Design for Generative AI with NVIDIA is an inferencing blueprint, jointly engineered with NVIDIA, optimized to speed the deployment of a modular, secure and scalable platform for GenAI in the enterprise.

Until now, traditional inferencing approaches have been challenged to scale and support LLMs for real-time results and ensure data can be easily used by AI infrastructure. This solution helps customers generate higher quality, faster time-to-value predictions and decisions with their own data.

With a comprehensive verified inferencing approach, organizations can rapidly deploy GenAI projects and scale applications to transform processes in key areas, such as customer operations, content creation and management, software development and sales.

Dell Validated Designs are pre-tested, proven configurations to power GenAI inferencing efforts with Dell infrastructure, such as the Dell PowerEdge XE9680 or PowerEdge R760xa, with a choice of NVIDIA Tensor Core GPUs, NVIDIA AI Enterprise software, the NVIDIA NeMo end-to-end framework and Dell software at its core. Customers can combine this with resilient and scalable unstructured data storage, including Dell PowerScale and Dell ECS storage. The infrastructure is available via Dell APEX, offering customers an on-premises deployment with a cloud consumption and management experience.

Dell Professional Services deliver a broad spectrum of new capabilities to help customers accelerate GenAI adoption to improve their operational efficiency and advance innovation.

These services begin with creating a new GenAI strategy that identifies high value use cases and a roadmap to achieve them. Dell also offers full-stack implementation services, based on the Dell Validated Design for GenAI with NVIDIA, and adoption services that apply the platform to specific use cases, such as customer operations or content creation. Once integrated into the business, Dell’s scaling services help improve operations through managed services, training or resident experts.

“Dell’s AI solutions offers enterprises the potential to right-size their GenAI efforts and help streamline operations as customers look to quickly deliver products and services across industry-specific use cases,” said Ashish Nadkarni, group vice president and general manager, worldwide infrastructure and BuyerView research, IDC. “In the era of intelligent automation, Dell Technologies is meeting organisations wherever they are in their GenAI journey, helping them position themselves for success in an increasingly intelligent and technology-driven world.”

Precision workstations

As the global leader in workstations, Dell Precision workstations allow AI developers and data scientists to develop and fine-tune GenAI models locally before deploying at scale. Precision workstations provide the performance and reliability – with up to four NVIDIA RTX 6000 Ada Generation GPUs in a single workstation – to run AI software frameworks 80% faster than the previous generation.²

Built-in AI software, Dell Optimiser, learns and responds to the way people work, improving performance across applications, network connectivity and audio. The latest feature allows mobile workstation users leveraging GenAI models to improve performance for the application in-use while minimizing impact to battery runtime.

“Our customers are looking to use generative AI in every aspect of their business, from monitoring agent behavior to detecting fraud,” said James Laird, chief operating officer, Intelligent Voice. “Recent advances in AI combined with the power of Dell’s AI solutions allows us to quickly build, test and deploy high-quality models at the speed our customers require.”

Availability

• Dell Validated Design for Generative AI with NVIDIA is available globally now through traditional channels and Dell APEX .
• Dell Professional Services for Generative AI are available in select countries now.
• Dell Precision workstations (7960 Tower, 7865 Tower, 5860 Tower) with NVIDIA RTX 6000 Ada Generation GPUs will be available globally in early August.
• Dell Optimizer adaptive workload will be available globally on select Precision mobile workstations on August 30.