Accelerating AI Innovation with Dell AI Factory Advancements

Welcome to the Dell AI Factory, the industry's one-stop-shop to accelerate your path to AI outcomes.

There’s no doubt AI is revolutionizing industries, with the ability to drive unprecedented efficiency and a competitive edge. However, navigating the AI opportunity poses challenges—from addressing skills gaps to data sovereignty and the costs of supporting and scaling AI across an enterprise.

At Dell Technologies World this week, we are sharing how the Dell AI Factory addresses these most pressing challenges with a collection of AI technologies, an open ecosystem of partners, validated and integrated solutions and expert services to help you achieve AI outcomes faster. Expanding the capabilities of the Dell AI Factory, today we are announcing several additions to the world’s broadest AI solutions portfolio1 with new infrastructure, ecosystem collaborations and services. Our goal is to help you accelerate your time to business outcomes, maximize your budget and resources, maintain greater control and reduce risk with your valuable data and IP.

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Dell AI Factory is Dell’s approach to help accelerate AI innovation with organizations of all sizes.

AI Infrastructure Offers a Flexible IT Foundation

Organizations are realizing today’s data centers were not built to capture the full potential of AI. The AI factory is the new paradigm, and infrastructure is the foundation that makes AI possible. We’re expanding our AI infrastructure portfolio across data center components and client devices to give you even more options for the computational power, scalability, data accessibility and reliability you need for AI success.

Additions to our AI infrastructure portfolio offer you enhanced ways to store, protect and accelerate access to data. The Dell PowerScale F910, our highest capacity all-flash NAS system, is the latest in our next-generation file storage line up, purpose-built for AI. It accelerates all phases of the AI pipeline with this latest system, offering up to 127% improved performance to deliver AI insights faster.2 With PowerScale, we’re also announcing Project Lightning that will offer a parallel file system and scale-out NAS to help you keep pace with the demands of AI factories. It will catapult Dell PowerScale performance up to 20x over flash-only scale-out file competitors.3

With data protection, the Dell Solution for AI Data Protection offers a blueprint to guide organizations in integrating robust data protection measures seamlessly into your AI frameworks. We also are expanding our networking offerings with Dell SmartFabric Manager for SONiC, a new management tool that simplifies deployment, orchestration and lifecycle management with a single view of SONiC fabrics, along with new features for Dell’s Enterprise SONiC distribution that together will enable secure and feature rich fabrics with scalability and optimized traffic flows for demanding workloads like GenAI.And the new Dell PowerSwitch Z9864F-ON benefits AI applications by handling massive data volume and offers 2x the switching capacity and bandwidth with leading Ethernet technology.

Harnessing the potential of AI extends beyond the data center—it also can entail equipping your team members with powerful tools and devices, so they can innovate and operate with speed. Today, we’re announcing Dell’s first-ever fleet of Copilot+ PCs powered by Qualcomm Snapdragon X Elite and X Plus, supporting essential AI use cases, including the ability to run Windows 11 AI experiences locally on these devices. New on-device AI capabilities offer game-changing performance and efficiency, unlocking unprecedented worker productivity. These PCs include a dedicated AI engine that can run generative AI (GenAI) large language models (LLMs) with over 13 billion parameters on-device with blazing-fast speeds and all-day battery life.

AI Ecosystem Partnerships Make It Easier to Adopt Trusted, Integrated Solutions

AI factories benefit from advanced technologies from a wide array of technology providers. With a history of nurturing industry collaborations, our broad AI ecosystem is designed to give you greater access to innovation and flexibility of options. We collaborate with our industry-leading AI ecosystem partners to provide seamless integration and compatibility across the AI infrastructure stack. For example, our pre-tested and validated AI solutions remove guesswork and significantly speed time to deployment with trusted, full-stack configurations, optimized for specific GenAI software and use cases.

Building on our Dell AI Factory with NVIDIA announcement in March, several new advancements incorporate the latest Dell and NVIDIA solutions and services to accelerate AI adoption and innovation. Portfolio additions support a wide range of uses cases, from digital assistants to industrial automation and personalized retail experiences. See the substantial Dell AI Factory with NVIDIA updates, resulting from our deep collaboration with NVIDIA.

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With the Dell Enterprise Hub, Dell is the first infrastructure provider to partner with Hugging Face to offer optimized on-premises deployment of generative AI models.

We recognize the importance of supporting an open ecosystem of AI technology partners, and our work with Hugging Face enhances the experience for data scientists and the developer community. With availability of the Dell Enterprise Hub on the Hugging Face platform, Dell becomes the first infrastructure provider to partner with Hugging Face to offer optimized on-premises deployment of generative AI models.4 Ultimately, this new portal offers Dell customers a streamlined approach to deploy and customize popular LLMs on Dell infrastructure.

Additionally, the release of Meta Llama 3 models marks a significant advancement in the open-source AI foundation model space. Dell and Meta are continuing their collaboration to showcase benchmarking results, performance data and deployment recipes to demonstrate how easy it is to deploy Meta Llama 3 models on Dell’s robust infrastructure. These LLMs are also available on the Dell Enterprise Hub though custom dedicated containers and scripts.

Working with other ecosystem partners, we’re adding to our pre-tested and validated Dell Generative AI Solutions to make integration and compatibility seamless across different components of the AI infrastructure stack. For example, a new Dell AI Solution for Microsoft Azure AI Services integrates Microsoft Azure AI with Dell APEX Cloud Platform for Microsoft Azure to simplify delivery of AI services, such as speech transcription and translation. Healthcare is one potential use case where the solution can help doctors and patients speaking different languages to communicate easily and more effectively. 

AI Services Accelerate IT Outcomes with Expert Guidance and Hands-on Support

GenAI is expected to be the top area for technology investment in 2024; however, CEOs rank AI skills and talent strategy as the top challenge to enterprise adoption.5 This is where Dell’s expert services fill the gap to help define strategies and accelerate GenAI adoption with a comprehensive suite of professional services for AI.

We are expanding our services with several new offers, including Implementation Services for Microsoft Copilot Solutions, comprised of Microsoft Copilot for Security, Microsoft Copilot for Sales, Microsoft Copilot in Windows and GitHub Copilot. These services help you prepare for, implement and drive adoption of new GenAI copilots to increase productivity and efficiency across the organization and maximize the value of these investments. Our broad services capabilities also add new Accelerator Services for Dell Enterprise Hub on Hugging Face and Accelerator Services for RAG on Precision AI workstations, providing an enhanced developer experience for rapid GenAI prototyping.

Learn More about the Dell AI Factory

Through our continued innovation, we are ready to help you strategically and quickly deploy AI with a broad set of industry-leading solutions and partnerships, empowering you to achieve successful outcomes and a competitive edge as you bring diverse AI models to your data across PCs, on-premises IT, multiple clouds and edge locations.

To find out more, tune to our keynotes at 10:00 a.m. PT on May 20 and 21 at Dell Technologies World, or watch on demand, and learn how we’re helping organizations bring AI to their data.

1 Based on Dell analysis, March 2024. Dell Technologies offers hardware solutions engineered to support AI workloads from workstations PCs (mobile and fixed) to servers for high-performance computing, data storage, cloud native software-defined infrastructure, networking switches, data protection, HCI and services.
2 Based on internal testing, comparing streaming write of F910 on OneFS 9.8 to streaming write of F900 on OneFS 9.5. Actual results may vary. April 2024.
3 Based on Dell preliminary testing comparing IOPS performance per node, May 2024. Performance rates based on FIO over a remote file system. Actual performance may vary.
4 Based on internal analysis and using Dell Enterprise Hub, May 2024.
5 IDC Report: From Breakthrough Innovation to Impact: Monetizing the AI Moment (Philip Carter, Directions 2024).

Sam Grocott

About the Author: Sam Grocott

Sam Grocott is the Senior Vice President of Product Marketing at Dell Technologies. He leads the marketing activities for all infrastructure and client solutions and the services portfolio, including critical GTM activities across the portfolio, such as AI, APEX & Multicloud, Edge, Telecom, portfolio marketing and competitive intelligence. Sam began his career at Isilon Systems in 2001, where he led product management and helped launch Isilon's first products in 2003. After EMC acquired Isilon in 2010, Sam headed the marketing and product management team that delivered the market-leading scale-out NAS offering. When Dell acquired EMC in 2016, Sam's role expanded to cover the Dell Infrastructure Solutions portfolio for Marketing. The organization evolved to represent the entire Dell Technologies portfolio a few years later.