Dell’s ObjectScale Update ‘Huge’ For AI In Enterprise, Partner Says

‘For partners with enterprise clients leveraging large learning models on their AI journey, this is a huge announcement. The new rollout is another step in the evolution of enabling fast and efficient access to large data structures,’ says Gary McConnell, CEO of Dell Platinum Partner VirtuIT.

Geeta Vaghela, lead product manager for Dell’s unstructured storage business

Dell’s latest version of ObjectScale pairs the company’s most advanced software developments in object storage with Dell’s PowerEdge 16G servers running Intel’s Xeon scalable processors. The result is made for massive storage needs, such as those that accompany large AI models.

“We’ve coupled the two together to really bring together that full turnkey experience for our customers,” Geeta Vaghela, lead product manager for Dell’s unstructured storage business, told CRN.

“So under the stack, there’s all that there’s Kubernetes and OpenShift environment and the object store,” she said. “What we do is we wrap it up in a nice box that is all flash, that is really optimized to start to play to that performance market.”

[RELATED: Dell PowerMaxOS 10.1 Boosts Data Compression, Performance, Adds AI To Cybersecurity ]

Gary McConnell, CEO of Dell Platinum Partner VirtuIT, said the latest version of ObjectScale is another example of Dell developing and delivering its AI roadmap.

“For partners with enterprise clients leveraging large learning models on their AI journey, this is a huge announcement,” he told CRN. “The new rollout is another step in the evolution of enabling fast and efficient access to large data structures.”

Vaghela said object storage is being adopted more often for a wider range of capabilities, some of them beyond what it intended to support. Dell’s efforts to expand what partners and customers can do with object storage are on display with ObjectScale 1.3, the software portion of the product.

“Our tag line over here was increasingly primary storage,” Vaghela said.

Some of Dell’s largest partners are using this for enterprise customers to build private cloud, Vaghela said. Dell is helping partners meet the opportunity whether they act as a reseller and leverage Dell’s internal services, or deploy it using their own expertise.

“If you choose to say well, I want to become more of a tech house and I want to do my own cluster management or Kubernetes environment, there’s nothing stopping you from doing that,” Vaghela said. “The benefit you’ll get the application that was sitting on top of that whether it’s sitting on the appliance, or the software-only version, the interface will be the same. So it’s non-disruptive for how the application will interface with the storage.”

She said Dell’s thought process in the flexibility of the deployment was to help partners and customers modernize and transform enterprise systems.

“Many of them are struggling being able to make the shift, they have a desire to become more cloud-native, they have a desire to become more modern in their architectures. And they’ve often struggled to make that a reality so that the flexibility in this building so that this Lego block idea, which is you can start with one piece and if you start to tear it apart, it’s the same Lego pieces,” she said.

Dell’s latest version of ObjectScale is one of the products that falls under Dell’s new Partner First For Storage go-to-market which gives the company’s core sellers more money to move deals through channel partners.