Dell Technologies makes all the hardware cool again

Thanks to AI the headlines practically write themselves these days, and if they don't, interviewees are happy to help. "Hardware is cool again," declared a Dell Technologies executive, hot on the heels of Michael Dell saying 'the age of agentic AI is here'. "There's your headline right there!" AI didn't write this headline, but it's directly behind the resurgent interest in the infrastructure that makes software clever.

That executive is not wrong. Back in the 2000s, IBM sold off first its hard drive division (to Hitachi), then its Thinkpad laptop and x86 server divisions (to Lenovo). For a very long time, hardware has been the red headed stepchild of the technology industry, but when industry rockstar Jensen Huang declared 'Buy Dell', and signed a PowerRack server, there's a strong sense that things have changed.

And how. Huang is a celebrity in a large part thanks to Nvidia's hardware, and as long-time purveyors of enterprise hardware from desktop to datacentre, the good folks at Dell Technologies are riding a renewed wave of chic.

Senior Vice President of Dell's Data Centre Solutions Chris Kelly is there for it. "When you're thinking about generative AI, for most companies it is their chance to truly differentiate themselves from competitors, potentially new revenue sources, certainly new sources of internal efficiencies, and better customer experiences," he said.

Those advantages start with hardware. "You have to be going for trusted, secure, resilient, infrastructure that comes ready to operate. It's the ecosystem that makes it really cool. Jensen Huang and Michael Dell talk about ecosystems, and tested, certified platforms. You can't risk it on just any old hardware anymore. If it's truly the lifeblood of your business, it has to be on the top tier."

Dell Technologies combines and rationalises its extensive portfolio into the Dell AI Factory, a comprehensive framework of hardware, software, and services that it says expedites the journey to practical solutions. It functions on the concept of taking raw data and turning it into actionable intelligence, scaling from single workstations to the data centre. Key features of AI Factory include a partnership with Nvidia, combining Dell AI-optimised infrastructure like PowerEdge servers with Nvidia's accelerated computing and enterprise software stack.

AI Factory has proven a hit with since launch, with Dell reporting some 5,000+ using the framework.

Hardware has come full circle, then, from the IBM clones of the 1990s which ushered in the first era of mass commoditisation, through to x86 blade servers, and straight back to purpose-built systems (although there will always be a substantial place for commodity hardware).

"A lot of companies are making very significant investments, and spending tens to hundreds of billions of dollars. You want to know that you're putting your investment into something that is not only going to do what you bought it to do, but offer the flexibility to adapt to changing requirements. Absolutely, hardware is no longer commoditised, particularly not at the High Performance Computing level," Kelly added.

He said customers don't just see HPC as blinking lights in a data centre, but the foundation for human progress, and said Michael Dell is a direct example. "Michael is obviously very passionate about developing a platform to drive human progress. He's made a lot of personal contributions in, for example, the medical industry, where it's about clinical outcomes. That's what it becomes."

While he's responsible for the data centre side of things, Kelly nevertheless noted that the AI enterprise starts at the desktop. Dell therefore enjoys some advantage through its PC division, long abandoned by some other vendors (and the man who leads the global strategy and messaging for Dell's commercial PC solutions Isaac Piñon said 'What's the most practical technology I can purchase to bring AI into my environment? It's the PC'.) 

On that note, among the fruits of the Nvidia partnership is Deskside Agentic AI, enhancing AI Factory with local delivery of agentic AI workflows that eliminate cloud cost, latency and data sovereignty constraints, reinforcing Kelly's comments around complete platforms. That's clear in the Nvidia OpenShell runtime which is supported across the entire Dell AI Factory with a single security and policy enforcement layer reaching from the deskside directly to the heart of the data centre.

Picking up on this, Kelly said Dell Technologies "Looks at the IT landscape from soup to nuts, from the client device right the way through to the data centre. We've got the end-to-end spectrum covered when you're running AI in a data center, AI in the cloud, and AI out on your device."

And that, it must be said, is pretty cool.