In The Arena by TechArena - Accelerating Private 5G on the Edge with Dell

Episode Date: February 23, 2023

TechArena host Allyson Klein sits down with Dell VP Aaron Chaisson to discuss the company’s strategy for edge, current deployment trends, and a reveal of their new program for private 5G deployment.

Welcome to the Tech Arena, featuring authentic discussions between tech's leading innovators and our host, Alison Klein. Now let's step into the arena. Welcome to the Tech Arena. My name is Alison Klein, and today I'm delighted to be joined by Aaron Chason, VP of Telecom and Edge Solutions Marketing at Dell. Welcome to the program. Yeah, great. Thanks, Allison. I'm happy to be here. Very excited to do the conversation. So, Aaron, Dell is associated primarily enterprise technology from the data center to clients and everything in between.

Today, we're talking about things within the service provider space. So why don't you just back up and tell me a little bit about your role in Telecom and Edge and how Dell has a history in this space? Sure, absolutely. So yeah, I mean, my background, I've been in the industry now for 25 plus years. You know, I've been at Dell since its acquisition of EMC five, six years ago. And with EMC, I was there since the late 90s. So, you know, from that perspective, I've really been involved with, you know, from the last big shift from mainframes into the open architectures world of core IT. You know, that's something that EMC and Dell were leaders in throughout that old timeframe. So what's happening in the telecom space right now is broadly very similar to what we saw in the last big disaggregation shift in core IT, which is, you know, we're seeing telecom networks start to open up. They were in the past, they were really focused on three, four, you know, five NEPs that really delivered fully integrated solutions and systems.

And now as companies are looking to transform their networks, as they move into 5G and beyond, there's really an industry shift towards more industry, but architectural design principles. And that's of course, an area that, that Dell has been a leader in for decades. So we're looking to take a lot of the experience that we've done in other industries as they've disaggregated, as they've virtualized, as they've streamlined and operationalized how they deliver IT services to their employees. We're seeing that happen in the telecom space. So we see this as really an opportunity for Dell to take what we're strong in, which is leaders in open architecture, and applying it to a new industry that's looking to move into that direction. From an edge perspective,

you know, we've been at the edge for years, right? So back in the day, it was called remote offices and branch offices. And, you know, as new technologies have emerged, you know, AI, ML, I'm sure we'll talk more about that going forward, you know, new sets of workloads and use cases have emerged at what's now being referred to as the edge. But this is a space that we've been doing for years with our OEM and with our direct sales. We've probably got, I think the numbers nowadays are around 45,000 different customers that are leveraging Dell technologies in their edge environments. But we see that really being a massive growth area going forward as these technologies start getting pushed out of the core and cloud data centers out to where data is being generated. And so it's a

huge opportunity for us. And we think we bring a lot of our strength and experience to these markets. This is exactly why I wanted to talk to you, because I see a confluence between telecom and enterprise when it comes to the edge. And I knew that you would have a really interesting opinion on this. How does Dell view the drivers for edge computing? And as you worked with customers, what do you see as the primary use cases today that are driving deployment? I'd be kind of referring to it as this, there's lots of drivers, but when I think of the technology drivers, the four key ones I always think about is one, the massive explosion of data that's being generated at the edge. If you think about as smartphones and endpoint devices and IOT starts to emerge, there's just so much data being generated outside of the data centers that

companies are trying to be able to figure out how do they capture that, curate that, make intelligent decisions against that data. Historically, that's had to happen by being pulled back into a core data center post-process analyzed and then acted upon. But a couple other technologies have emerged that are really making the edge much more alive and much more possible.

First, obviously, is compute. So, you know, people talk about Moore's law, how it doubles in speed every year and a half. When you think about what that means, every five years, our compute is 10 times denser. It's not so much that it's 10 times faster. You can fit the same amount of performance in one tenth of space. Every 10 years, it's a hundred times denser. Every 15 years, it's a thousand times denser. We've gone to the point where you can literally put compute into everything. I joke that when I walk around the streets with an iPhone,

with a laptop, with a tablet device, I've got as much compute network and capacity as a mid-sized data center of the early last decade, right? So when you put that compute that can now go anywhere, you bring the compute to the data. There's advances in AI and machine learning that allows us to crunch that data in all of that compute. And of course, in emerging industrial situations, the performance, the reliability, the capabilities that 5G private wireless is going to provide

really is that last piece that connects the data to all of that compute with the right AI systems. And now industries can start really acting upon that data right now as it's generated and be able to deliver value faster. I think those pieces of data, AI, dense compute and form factors, and high performance connectivity

are all coming together to make this real today. From a use cases perspective, you know, I think that this is really primarily focused today on a lot of the industrial industries. So I think manufacturing, mining, energy, I think COVID really brought a real explosion in looking at ways of using it in retail environments, especially in touchless interaction. And so there's a lot of pieces there that in some of these industries that are starting to leverage it today and more aggressively. I'm glad that you brought up COVID. It is something that I wanted to touch on. There was a lot of press and I think the industry responded to a massive demand for more compute and capability in the cloud during the pandemic.

I'm wondering how you saw that play out in the edge. You mentioned touchless retail, but was there any delay in adoption of edge technologies because organizations were having to contend with different types of demands on their IT infrastructure? Or did you see edge continue to deploy? And how did that shape anything in terms of different use cases that might have been prioritized that you didn't see playing out as quickly? Yeah, I mean, I think there's always been the question is when's the time going to happen? I think in so many cases, you get that killer app or that killer use cases and something takes off.

Did COVID delay things? I don't know. I mean, I certainly think that there were issues that the broader industry dealt with. You know, people went home. Can they innovate as quickly? Can they still develop these technologies in a timely fashion? You know, everybody knows that there were supply chain challenges and being able to deliver some of the componentry and chipset challenges. I don't think it delayed people's desire to adopt.

I think it actually took them quite a bit of an opportunity to pause and think about how will I use these technologies to be able to deliver value going forward? You know, that retail one is one that surprised me coming out of COVID. I still remember the very first business trip that I took was to World Congress Barcelona last year. I flew, I live in the Boston area. I had to connect through Newark. I landed at Newark during my connection and everything was touchless.

I've been to that airport a million times, but you couldn't buy food or any of the items. Everything was touchless, whether it was in the sort of self-service area or go to the restaurants in there. You scan a QR code and do your orders on your phone. Everything shifted to a new way of consuming. I thought it was great, but it was shocking to me how literally I took a pause for a year and a half of travel

and how you actually navigate that airport experience was completely fresh. And for somebody who's been traveling for my job for decades, it was really a very interesting experience that I thought was really cool to see. And so that's an example of how if COVID actually accelerated those particular use cases and how they deliver better services and engage with their customers in new ways. You've talked about some of the various areas that you're engaging. Dell has a great history of working with enterprises on technology transitions and technology adoption. When you look at these various industries, industrial, retail, other edge environments, like you mentioned mining, how does that come into play when you're looking at deployment of private 5G networks, deployment of edge infrastructure that

has to connect in with a cloud strategy. How does that play out with the customer? And what does Dell bring to utilize all of your experience to make that journey for the customer easier? Yeah, like I said earlier, we've been involved in edge technologies for years. You know, I think, like I said, OEM has been doing this for 20 plus years. We've got thousands of customers. I think it's over hundreds of thousands of sites now that we're, over 100,000 sites now that we're deployed in at the edge. So it's something that we've been doing for quite a

while. How do we look at it? We spent the last probably 15 years working closely with customers to figure out how do they navigate the shifts from on-prem IT to a cloud-based or a hybrid-based model for being able to deliver IT services. The edge is different. The edge is new. It's a different kind of set of workloads. It's less about IT workloads. It's more about OT workloads. And so we want to take our experience in IT, work with the particular industry technologists to be able to figure out how do we work with them to deliver value to their industry. Probably one of the most important things to think as we talk about the edge that's different is IT conversations tend to be very horizontal in nature. You can deliver similar technologies for a broad set of industries. Edge is very industry specific. The

outcomes they're looking for retail are very different than the outcomes for manufacturing, very different from outcomes for healthcare. And so the solutions that we're building and designing with them require partnering close with industry experts, with in many cases, with solutions integrators and with other companies that also specialize in those industries, and then take what our knowledge is around IT and figure out how do we deliver capabilities at the edge, but in many cases, be able to bridge that back out to the cloud as well. I don't know if I answered that exactly right. I think I missed the second half of the question. I was thinking ahead. No, but I think you did a good job. And I think that

when you're talking about that, when you talk about OT use cases, it's something that I think about a lot with Edge, which is the end game for enterprises is to ensure that everything has consistent management from Edge to cloud and consistent provisioning from Edge to cloud. That gets into cloud native capability for this architecture. And from what I've seen from the industry, it seems like we've made some good advancements, but we're pushing some of the bounds of cloud-native within edge environments. What's been your experience with that? And what do you see enterprises doing when they look at deploying these workloads? Are they really thinking from that lens of a future of distributed computing?

You know, it's funny. Cloud-native, I put my previous hat on. I was a cloud architect before I got into marketing. Cloud native to me is actually a marketing term. You know, before cloud native existed, we were talking about containers and functions and serverless and 12-factor applications and all these terms that were really confusing. And so once the industry kind of said, all those things are cloud really confusing. And so once the industry kind of said, all those things are cloud native applications. It's different from traditional IT applications. People go, okay, no, I get it. These are things that are born in the cloud. They're built to run

differently on different architectures. The infrastructure and the services provided to support cloud native applications are different, fundamentally different than those that you deliver to a traditional IT stack from before, right? So when I think about the edge, one of the first things that I kind of needed to chew on was this idea that it's really not about extending cloud-native to the edge. The principles, right, leveraging container technologies, leveraging new ways of being able to package and deliver applications are somewhat similar. But the actual workloads themselves are custom designed for OT environments, not IT environments. And so much like I said, cloud native is that is more of a marketing term. It's really becoming more of an edge native world where the infrastructure designed for these workloads needs to be

fundamentally different. In a cloud native world, you can deploy, you know, you don't care about infrastructure failing because you can deploy, you know, multiple instances of that application up across a compute grid. Any given node is not going to take the system down. It's really about moving reliability and resiliency up into the application stack. At the edge, you might be running it on a single server in a remote environment, right? So the infrastructure requirements for an edge native application is different than that would be required for a cloud native app. To your point, though, we need to be able to, there are similarities, right? There needs to be able to, how do I simplify deployment of workloads? How do I patch those workloads? How do I upgrade workloads?

But not in a single data center, but hundreds or thousands of data centers spread out across a variety of edge environments. So we need to be able to develop sets of tools that solve that from day one provisioning to day two operations to full lifecycle management of the infrastructure and of the applications working on top of that. And last year in October, we announced something called Project Frontier, which is our innovation we're working on to be able to deliver an edge operating environment. It's not just selling hardware. This is actually the software required to operate and orchestrate workloads across a variety of locations. And so that's a problem that we're working on and that needs to get solved. On top of that, there's the software provisioning.

Unlike the cloud environment where you might deploy a thousand instances of the same app in a cloud for scalability and resiliency, at the edge, you might deploy those across a variety of edge environments. And maybe I'll only do the management tool in a cloud provider, right? So the management, the operations, the reporting tools that report against 10 edge locations, I might want to deploy that in Azure or in AWS or in my core data centers, but I might be deploying dozens of instances or hundreds of instances of the actual OT app across my edge environments. So yeah, these are challenges that we're looking to solve. It's something that we've done in the cloud world,

but there's a different scale and scope and need in the edge and also keeping in mind that those edge applications, those edge native apps are built slightly differently and have a different set of expectations or requirements on that infrastructure and software underneath. And we're looking to solve those unique characteristics at the edge that are different than the cloud. That's really interesting. Thank you for sharing that vision. It's something that I haven't heard articulated as clearly in as many industry conversations I have.

And I love that concept of edge native. Earlier, you mentioned private 5G networks, and many could say that that is foundational to everything that we're talking about in terms of the core capabilities required for edge implementation. Some folks have said that we're a bit slow on where we should be in terms of private 5G deployments. Are you seeing that? And what is your view on the future of private 5G as we head further in 2023 and beyond? Yeah, so private 5G is going to be one of those things that really enables a lot of those industrial use cases to work. When you're looking at large scale robotics or manufacturing lines or QA and all the different

things that kind of come together in an industrial environment, scalability, predictability, performance, density of connectivity, being able to have dozens or hundreds or thousands of things connected without having conflict and without having, you know, sort of noisy neighbor situations. These are the things that private 5G promises that really were challenges for Wi-Fi environments to be able to scale or traditional wireless solutions in those environments. So I agree. I think people are wondering when's it going to take off. Some of the biggest challenges are around how do we handle spectrum, which is different in every country. They've got their rules and regulations. So that's something I think the industry as a whole is working through. And then the other challenge too, is being able to pull the hardware,

the software, the radio stacks together in a sort of package that can be deployed and handed to the enterprise to go and leverage. They're not network experts. They're certainly not carrier experts. So being able to deliver a sort of company integrated solution that pulls all that together and centrally supported and deployed is going to be important. And so one of the things that I think when this podcast comes out, we'll have just announced two new solutions that Dell's actually just announced. We are formally launching a private wireless program. And the first two solutions we're doing, one is targeted for very small environments. So this is using Dell Compute, Athenet, Mobile Core, and kind of bring your own radio.

Although there's a series of radios that we will certify and recommend, literally fits inside of a briefcase. So you can bring it on the road with you and pop up a mobile wireless solution out into a farmer's field or into a mine situation or different areas where you want to be able to bring that connectivity with you. And then in larger environments with medium and large scale campus wide deployments, things like that. We've also got a solution with Airspan Radio and Expeto for the packet core. And what these allow these enterprises to do is to stand up their own self-managed 5G wireless connectivity in their location. But if it's delivered through a carrier, when we are looking to partner with telecoms to be able to deliver these as a service to enterprise customers

interested, the carrier can extend that private network out into their carrier network. So think about manufacturing environments that need to use trucks to move goods to a warehouse. As those trucks move out and leave the local radio connectivity, they can use the carrier backbone to be able to still have access to their private network environments. So there are things that it's early days. We are launching a couple through partnerships. We're going to continue innovating the space for anybody who's going to Mobile World Congress. We've got a whisper suite in the back if anybody wants to know kind of what we're innovating on going forward. But I do expect if you look at the breadth of RAN technologies, you know, macro RAN and carrier VRAN, ORAN versus private 5G,

I think private 5G is what you're going to see take off first. I think that's going to be happening just in the next couple of years, but it's requiring solutions like what we're hoping to provide through these two offerings and where we're innovating going forward. And then of course, working with governments and industries to figure out the spectrum challenge. How do we deliver that? What's required from a spectrum perspective for each of these locations? Erin, thank you so much for your time today.

It's been a real pleasure talking to you. I definitely want to connect to you next week at Mobile World Congress. And for those who are listening online, please do visit Dell's booth. Where can folks go if they're not going to be in Barcelona to connect with you and your team and learn more

about the new solutions that you just announced? Sure. So probably the easiest way is to go to the website. So for anything telecom related, dell.com forward slash telecom, we'll get you to any of the offerings we're doing specific to the carrier industry. And then for more deep dive into what we're doing, the enterprise edge, there'll be dell.com forward slash edge. Of course, we also are very active on LinkedIn. So LinkedIn Dell Technologies is a great thing to follow as well, not just for Edge and Telecom, but for everything that Dell is doing. And of course, it's pretty easy to find us. So feel free to reach out on LinkedIn or through the website and we can hook you up with anybody you're looking to have deeper conversations. Thanks so much for being on the program today. It was a real pleasure.

All right, great. Thanks a lot, Allison. I really appreciate it. Thanks for joining The Tech Arena. Subscribe and engage at our website, thetecharena.net. All content is copyright by The Tech Arena.