DEE-1721 guide - Dell EMC SC Series Expert Updated: 2024

With support from Dell EMC, and in association with Intel and Microsoft, Dippy's Naturenauts offers a mobile-friendly interactive experience for children aged seven to eleven.

A fun activity that supports Dippy on Tour, Dippy and Fern the fox lead kids through a series of exploratory games that encourage them to venture outdoors and interact with the nature in their area while learning about science.

Through their generous support of Dippy on Tour and Dippy's Naturenauts, Dell EMC helped the Museum to help the next generation of scientists engage with the natural world through a leading a digital experience, guiding and engage them in scientific thinking. 

Dell EMC is ratcheting up its networking technology offensive with a strategy to push its X Series network switch products exclusively through distribution.

This is the first time Dell EMC has offered a product line through distribution exclusively. The program is beginning in North America, EMEA and Asia-Pacific/Japan, and will be global by the end of the year, according to Jim DeFoe, Dell EMC senior vice president of worldwide distribution. Dell EMC works with Tech Data, Arrow and Ingram, among other distributors.

The arrangement is aimed at helping partners tap into cross-selling opportunities in the Dell Technologies portfolio. Mike Heintzelman, vice president of global vendors at Tech Data, said that fits neatly with the distributor's own strategies.

Related: CRN Exclusive: Tech Data Gives SMB-Focused Partners A Leg Up With New Pre-Configured Microsoft Azure-Based Cloud Server

"A lot of IT vendors bring their products through distribution. This demonstrates and reinforces Dell EMC's commitment to the channel," said Tech Data's Heintzelman. "We view them as a strategic vendor, and we see continued growth for us as a distributor with Dell EMC. This is one more piece to that puzzle and allows us to expand that relationship."

For Dell EMC, the strategy helps "give [distributors] the opportunity to make a splash with a much larger audience of partners than they might be able to themselves," Heintzelman said, adding that Tech Data has about 50 salespeople dedicated to Dell EMC.

Dell EMC's "open" approach to networking has been building momentum, and pushing the X Series switches through distribution is intended to capitalize on that momentum, DeFoe said. "Distribution is the fastest-growing part of our business, and we're looking to distribution to onboard all new partners," he said. "

Dell EMC Networking boss Tom Burns said even though the X Series is aimed squarely at the SMB or "small enterprise" market, the company is timing its acceleration through distribution at a time when the networking market is at "an inflection point" at which customers are looking for alternatives to legacy networking vendors like Cisco or HPE.

"We continue to have a relationship with Cisco, but it's also true that we know customers at times will want an alternative, and our real focus is on those disruptive areas around software-defined, around hyper-converged and converged, and around simplifying the campus," Burns said. "You'll see more and more investment in the portfolio and more and more investment in the channel to accelerate our growth above market. It's going to take time, but we feel good about our customer traction. The switch can't be the hold-up of all these new capabilities anymore."

Last year Dell EMC's switching business grew 7 percent while the market as a whole grew about 4 percent, Burns said. "Our data center business grew double digits, our campus business was low single digit. We see growth above market. In Q1, we grew 2.5 times the market. We grew close to 16 percent in our global solution portfolio," Burns said.

"We're seeing double-digit growth from our distribution business worldwide," DeFoe said. "We're seeing our distributors today being able to expand lines of business for us. If you look at EMC and their partners who had never done business with Dell, we're seeing very high penetration and increase of EMC storage tied to Dell servers where historically that partner had not sold Dell."

Dell EMC Networking's X Series switches have been shipping for about a year. The idea behind the series is simplicity. They use a simple GUI user interface and can be pre-configured via a USB port. To date, they've been most successful in SMB, education and retail markets, Burns said. The X Series also provides power to wireless access points, phones, cameras and other network devices with Power over Ethernet switches, and come in models from eight ports to 48 ports.

The new distribution strategy for the X Series comes barely more than a month after Dell EMC put pressure on networking competitors with a raft of new products introduced at the annual Dell EMC World conference in Las Vegas.

Those products include a 25-Gigabit Ethernet top-of-rack platform enabled for open networking, as well as a new 10/100-Gigabit Ethernet open networking top-of-rack switch, 100-Gigabit Ethernet fabric uplinks, and a 10/100-Gigabit Ethernet switching platform for campus environments.

The 10-Gigabit Ethernet and 25-Gigabit Ethernet platforms will run on a new version of Dell EMC's Linux-based OS10 operating system, which will be released as OS10 Enterprise Edition.

Dell EMC's aggressive storage charge is pushing forward as the company unveils its new entry-level PowerVault ME4 storage arrays on Wednesday enabling channel partners to better attack the SMB market.

The PowerVault ME4 series is Dell EMC's next-generation of entry-level storage arrays purpose built for simplicity with a starting list price of under $13,000. The ME4 provides significant enhancements compared to previous Dell EMC entry level systems in performance, features and capacity, such as 75 percent more drives to increase raw storage capacity by 122 percent.

"We're seeing huge Dell EMC growth in the higher end market, so we're excited about the new PowerVault because there hasn't been a lot of easy solutions in the low-end market," said Bill Smeltzer, executive vice president and CTO of Focus Technology Solutions, a Burlington, Mass.-based Dell EMC partner. "We've been sort of forcing an upsell in the lower end market to get them to look at hyper-converged because there really wasn't a great story. This is now going to fill the gap. … It's a lot less complicated than the legacy EMC product."

[Related: Dell EMC Storage Dominating Over HPE And NetApp Worldwide]

The PowerVault ME4 offers three models – the ME4012, ME4024 and ME4084 -- with flexible array configuration from 12 to 84 storage drives which can be configured to support any mix of SSDs and HDDs. The arrays contain all-inclusive software for management as well as built-in data protection. Other features include thin provisioning, remote replication, snapshots, volume cloning and integration with VMware vCenter and SRM.

The PowerVault ME4 is optimized for SAN and direct-attach storage to Dell EMC PowerEdge servers to support a wide range of business applications. "For niche applications, the fact that they can do direct-attach off of that is huge," said Smeltzer. "A lot of people might have a single standalone application with unique needs and they're still using direct attach storage for that."

The arrays can be configured and ready for data center operations in 15 minutes and be managed from anywhere thanks to a new HTML5 user interface, according to Dell. The ME4 is ideal for a wide range of block-based storage use cases such as video surveillance, virtualization, NoSQL databased, direct attach and high-performance computing. It can expand up to 4PB and drive up to 320,000 IOPs.

Craig Bernero, senior vice president and general manager for Dell EMC Midrange & Entry Solutions, said the ME4 is the company's "most affordable SAN/DAS storage array."

"This new storage family has been developed with a 'set-it up and forget-it' approach, flexible scale and connectivity options, cloud-like management simplicity, and a very impressive price-performance ratio," said Bernero. "The PowerVault ME4 represents the quintessential entry-level storage product that accelerates and supports business growth."

Last week, the Round Rock, Texas-based infrastructure giant reported second fiscal quarter storage sales of $4.2 billion, up 13 percent year over year as the company's "refuse to lose" and product simplification strategy is paying off big time. Additionally, Dell EMC has widen its worldwide storage market share gap over competitors like Hewlett Packard Enterprise and NetApp by capturing 19.1 percent of the global storage market in the second quarter of 2018, according to new data from IDC.

Smeltzer said his Dell EMC storage sales are up nearly 25 percent in 2018 compared to last year thanks to large enterprise wins around Dell's PowerMax, VxRail and VxRack solutions.

"Definitely in the higher-end market we're seeing the efficiencies of Dell and now we can streamline it down market," said Smeltzer. "Simplifying the storage portfolio is working very well in the high end, so I'm optimistic that this strategy will play out well in the entry level."

One of the things that made the original Asus Eee PC such a big success was the ability to add almost anything you wanted to it. While this might not have anything to do with Dell releasing a service manual showing you how to disassemble your brand new Mini 9, we’re not gonna fault them for making one available.

The service manuals show the proper way to gain access to the various parts of the Mini 9 right down to the motherboard itself. It’s nice to know that the Mini 9 isn’t locked down where simple things like replacing the RAM or upgrading to a larger SSD won’t void your warranty.

[via jkkmobile]

I filled several pages of a memo book while reviewing the Dell G15 ($699), and many of those notes did not shine a positive light on this laptop. The combination of a middling display, below-average battery life, and a bulky design didn't make a great impression. 

In fact, there is little of the G15 that is innovative, game-changing, or unexpected. It's another run-of-the-mill gaming laptop with a funny name and large cooling vents. But the more time I spent gaming with the G15, I found that it had more going on than I initially expected.