Dell Brings Order To Edge Chaos, Opens Testing Lab To Partners

“It’s in uncontrolled locations. You don’t have skilled staff to manage it, not even to troubleshoot. So if something goes wrong and you say, ‘Go inside and give me the log.’ There’s nobody there to do those things. Networking may be a challenge. Or it may be air-gapped for security ... So when we designed NativeEdge, we have taken into account all of those constraints,” says Gil Shneorson, senior vice president of edge solutions, with Dell Technologies.

With the rapid growth in edge solutions, Dell NativeEdge is giving partners leverage in overcoming the associated complexity and sprawl.

Available today, the software platform simplifies application orchestration and infrastructure management across thousands of edge devices, said Cheryl Cook, senior vice president of global partner marketing at Dell Technologies.

“Our customers are overwhelmed with edge complexity. And a lot of what Dell’s engineering team has done is develop a software platform that can offer consistency and high security,” Cook told CRN.

Dell NativeEdge automates routine and repetitive tasks such as updating applications, and onboarding devices.

Additionally, Dell developed the Dell Edge Partner Certification Program, which channel partners as well as ISVs can use to validate edge deployments. Cook said this will shrink the time it takes to bring those solutions to market by letting partners work directly with Dell engineers in a dedicated lab environment to test their designs before deployment.

“So they can come collaborate with us. They can certify that their software is interoperable with their own IP and their own software,” Cook said. “They can fine-tune so that the technology and their solution that they’re going to bring to market can integrate and leverage the capability of the software platform.”

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Gil Shneorson, senior vice president of edge solutions with Dell Technologies, said edge environments have multiple complications related to its size and sprawl.

“It’s in uncontrolled locations. You don’t have skilled staff to manage it, not even to troubleshoot. So if something goes wrong and you say, ‘Go inside and give me the log.’ There’s nobody there to do those things,” he said. “Networking may be a challenge. Or it may be air-gapped for security. You still want to sync your service levels and simplification. So when we designed NativeEdge we have taken into account all of those constraints.”

Shneorson said it is designed to add value to partners through opening their business to new conversations with customers, and to simplify their own operations, or solutions they run jointly with customers. He said NativeEdge reduces the cost of managment at the edge.

“People are buying solution by solution by solution because it’s too hard to do otherwise,” Shneorson said. “And then end up with many edge stacks, all of which need to be secured and managed and maintained. And so this is a vicious cycle that you just keep adding more and more complexity.”

Cook said NativeEdge brings order to that chaos, with a standard framework with which to address all of the customer’s common orchestration deployment challenges.

“The subtle advantages to partners with this is the standardization and repeatability and the fact that they can leverage this common platform across multiple deployments, multiple customers, multiple use cases,” Cook said. “It gives them leverage and scale of their expertise and their practitioners. So each of these can begin looking like a snowflake in a very custom deployment.”