It’s taken a while, but Dell Technologies is rapidly moving away from its reputation as a box company as it undergoes a significant transformation into a comprehensive AI solutions provider. AI is complicated, and Dell’s pivot is driven by the need to integrate advanced AI capabilities across its product and service portfolio. This is what’s required to deliver AI to the enterprise, and Dell’s doing a good job.
Over the past two years, Dell has made a significant leap in its AI offerings as it deepened its relationship with companies like Nvidia while also embracing less obvious partners such as Meta (whose open LLMs and associated open-source toolchains are widely embraced across the industry).
Dell continues its journey, unveiling new AI-focused infrastructure, services, and partnerships at the recent SC24 and Microsoft Ignite 2024 events. The announcements show Dell expanding its AI Factory portfolio, emphasizing simplified AI adoption, scalability, and sustainability for enterprise customers.
New AI Infrastructure Solutions
The additions to Dell’s PowerEdge server lineup are central to the announcements and designed to handle demanding AI and HPC workloads. The new PowerEdge XE7740 is an air-cooled server equipped with dual 6th Gen Intel Xeon CPUs and supports up to 16 GPUs, including Nvidia H200 NVL Tensor Core GPUs and Intel Gaudi 3 PCIe accelerators. This server is optimized for generative AI tasks such as fine-tuning models and inferencing, offering flexible configurations for diverse enterprise needs.
Complementing this is the PowerEdge XE9685L, a liquid-cooled server featuring dual AMD EPYC 9005 CPUs and up to 96 GPUs per rack. This delivers exceptional density for large-scale AI workloads like LLM training. These servers are available as part of the Integrated Rack Scalable Systems, which now include the new IR5000 series. The IR5000 racks support air and liquid cooling options, offering enterprises energy-efficient solutions tailored to their operational requirements.
Data and Cloud Solutions for AI
Dell also announced improvements to its enterprise AI-focused data and cloud offerings. The Dell Data Lakehouse now includes fully embedded Apache Spark, enabling unified structured, semi-structured, and unstructured data processing. This should simplify data management and analysis, making extracting value from diverse datasets easier for enterprises.
Additionally, Dell introduced APEX File Storage for Microsoft Azure, combining Dell’s PowerScale scale-out file storage with Azure AI services. This solution supports hybrid environments by integrating on-premises and cloud data storage, allowing enterprises to scale AI workloads flexibly.
AI Ecosystem and Services Expansion
Strategic collaborations remain a critical focus for Dell’s AI strategy. The company strengthened its partnership with Nvidia by supporting Nvidia’s latest GPUs and launching Dell Agentic RAG, a solution designed to scale AI workflows across multiple enterprise use cases. Dell also introduced open-source Validated Designs for AI PCs, streamlining AI application development on Dell hardware with NPU technology.
On the services front, Dell addresses common barriers to AI adoption, such as skill gaps and data challenges, through tailored professional services. New offerings include data cataloging, pipeline optimization services, and sustainability-focused services to reduce energy and resource consumption in data centers.
Analyst’s Take
Dell is working hard to show that it can enable enterprise AI at scale. Its most recent announcements rally around the key themes of infrastructure flexibility, ecosystem integration, and sustainability. These themes address common enterprise barriers such as skill gaps, data challenges, and deployment complexity.
They also reflect several broader trends in the technology industry:
- Shift to Scalable AI Solutions: Enterprises are demanding solutions that simplify scaling AI workloads without sacrificing performance or energy efficiency. Dell’s high-density GPU racks and modular systems respond directly to this trend.
- Hybrid Cloud Optimization: Dell aligns with the growing demand for flexible AI deployment models by integrating seamlessly with Microsoft Azure and supporting hybrid environments.
- Focus on Operational Efficiency: Dell’s pre-integrated solutions, professional services, and reduced deployment timelines resonate with organizations aiming to minimize complexity and risk in their AI initiatives.
Dell’s moves in AI are intensifying competition with peers such as HPE, Lenovo, and Supermicro. Dell’s early support for the latest GPUs from Nvidia and AMD, along with its partnerships with industry leaders like Microsoft and Meta make it a key contender in the AI and hybrid cloud markets.
However, the company’s work delivering targeted solution stacks doesn’t always get the respect it deserves. Many people still perceive the company as a transactional box business. That’s an unfair characterization, as Dell’s expanding portfolio of AI products and services and the growing list of industry partnerships show its deep ability to deliver full-stack solutions for hybrid- and multi-cloud environments.
Dell’s strategy is paying off. In its most recent earnings, the company announced that its AI initiatives positively impact the bottom line. Dell said it sold $2.9 billion of “AI servers” in the most recent quarter and still has a backlog of $4.5 billion for the products. Its AI server demand pipeline grew by over 50% sequentially, belying the common wisdom that AI is a cloud-first play.
Dell has been the industry’s number one server vendor for as many years as most followers remember. Evolving from a server and storage provider to a full-stack AI solutions player isn’t easy, but there’s no OEM better positioned than Dell to do so.
The company continues to capitalize on the accelerating adoption of enterprise AI across while also managing to differentiate itself in the market. Dell has always been a critical partner for enterprise IT, something that continues as enterprise customers bring AI capabilities on-prem.
Disclosure: Steve McDowell is an industry analyst, and NAND Research is an industry analyst firm, that engages in, or has engaged in, research, analysis and advisory services with many technology companies; the author has provided paid services to every company named in this article in the past and may again in the future. No company mentioned in this article contributed to its creation. Mr. McDowell does not hold any equity positions with any company mentioned.
