Utilizing Tech - Season 7: AI Data Infrastructure Presented by Solidigm - 05x09: Delivering Mature IT Platforms at the Edge with Pierluca Chiodelli

Episode Date: June 26, 2023

Datacenter IT is used to having tight control over infrastructure and applications, but this is challenging to maintain at the edge. This episode of Utilizing Edge features Pierluca Chiodelli of Dell Technology discussing the modern edge application platform with Allyson Klein and Stephen Foskett. A typical edge environment features many different platforms, devices, and connections that must be deployed, managed, and controlled remotely. When looking at the modern edge, Chiodelli recognizes the different personas and needs and constructs a plan to achieve the required outcome at this location. Modern applications need specialized hardware and connectivity that must be supported, deployed, and managed. Hosts: Stephen Foskett: https://www.twitter.com/SFoskett  Allyson Klein: https://www.twitter.com/TechAllyson  Guests: Pierluca Chiodelli: https://www.linkedin.com/in/pierluca-chiodelli-3b743a4/ Follow Gestalt IT Website: https://www.GestaltIT.com/  Twitter: https://www.twitter.com/GestaltIT  LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/Gestalt-IT Tags: #UtilizingEdge, #EdgeComputing, #Edge

Welcome to Utilizing Tech, the podcast about emerging technology from Gestalt IT. This season of Utilizing Tech focuses on edge computing, which demands a new approach to compute, storage, networking, and more. I'm your host, Stephen Foskett, organizer of Tech Field Day and publisher of Gestalt IT. Joining me today as my co-host is Allison Klein. Thanks for joining me today. Of course, Stephen. It's a pleasure. Thank you so much for having me. So we've had you join us as a guest in the past, and you're somebody that I know who knows an awful lot about these subjects.

In fact, you're one of the people that I really wanted to be a co-host of this at the start. And so it's really nice to have you after Edge Field Day number one. It's a real pleasure. I just finished a report on edge computing. I've been talking to folks in the industry about all of the challenges in deploying edge, and I can't wait to hear about what we're going to talk about this week. So I don't want to make it sound like we're old or anything. But, you know, we've been around in the industry for a little while. I, you know, got my start in data center IT in the 90s and then pivoted into cloud. And yet through it all, I've worked with some edge environments. I worked with a big retail company. I've also worked with oil and gas, doing, you know, literally connecting gas stations all over the United States.

And one of the challenges, I think, is that coming from enterprise tech, it's very easy to say, like, look, this is how IT should be done. And I'm going to make it happen. And this is my domain. But once the stuff gets outside the walls, it's kind of outside your control, isn't it? I think that in data center, you get really used to the fact that every aspect of that compute from infrastructure to the stacks and management are tightly controlled and tightly within the domain of IT. And I think that when I've talked to customers about Edge, it is really a wild west. I mean, I would love to hear more about your gas station experience of the IT capabilities of all of the gas station

employees for the devices that you're installing. But this is a prevalent challenge for anyone looking at Edge, because Edge is not, you know, the, Edge is not data center. No. And in the 90s, what we were doing, it was, it was kind of crazy. I mean, we were, we were literally rolling people out to all of these, you know, mini markets and gas stations all around the country, we were installing stuff, it was it was basically make believe data center, except not data center, and everything was its own weird stuff. Every application had its own hardware stack, its own backhaul, everything. And that's all changing now. And what we're seeing is companies starting to introduce more unified systems, more unified platforms to run applications, and also trying to figure out how not to have

people, not to roll trucks and have staff and so on. And that's why we've invited Pierluca Cidelli from Dell to join us today, because he's got a little bit to say about this challenge as well. Welcome to the show, Pierluca. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. It's a pleasure to be here.

Thank you for the introduction. I'm actually running a product manager today for what we call our edge, specifically our edge platform and solution, Intel. I'm not new in the arena. I share multiple of the same story, come from a very IT-centric experience and a lot of storage in the past, basically approaching my 25 years in the company and still having fun and now going to the far west with the Edge. So it's very exciting. And as a company like Dell, I mean, you know, you're providing hardware, obviously,

but it's a lot more than that. I mean, Dell is not just shipping boxes to companies. I mean, you're really trying to partner with these companies and trying to figure out how best to deploy a solution, a platform for applications all around the world. And I think that that's maybe a bigger job than people realize. No, absolutely. As Alisson was pointed out, right, the edge, it's really diversified. It's very chaotic in one way. And, you know, the personas at the edge, they are different and different from the normal people we used to speak with, the IT data center, where they know everything. Everything is very tight, controlled, and they have best

practice and everything. The edge is all about the solution. I mean, you mentioned the gas station is fun enough when we start this journey to understand what we need to do for the edge in a different way, right? I mean, Dell has been selling to the edge for 25 years but something was changing something was more about okay now i really need to deploy a solution an end-to-end solution and customer came to us and one of them was one of the biggest gas stations and we have an interview and one of the things that this person told me,

she said to me, listen, it's become extremely painful to try to manage the gas station. Because in the gas station I have someone that is at the cash register and I already have 40 to 45 different gateways camera

in that gas station. And when there is a problem with one of them, this guy need to call different numbers, need to try to dribble shooting. It's not his job. And so that's one of the things that made us realize that there was an opportunity, right? There was an opportunity to extend the understanding of best practice and controlling and change control and security um not only to the hardware but really to manage

the outcome for the edge so that's that was a very good realization the challenge is that you know many customers want to take the core capabilities that they're used to in data center and deploy them to these environments. And there's arguably no company better than Dell that really understands the enterprise and understands the customer requirements. solutions that you brought to market, how did you take a tighter look at that customer pain point and define the determinants of what needed to be in a solution? No, absolutely. So that was one of the main journey when, you know, a little bit of story here. At the beginning, we look at the edge and we said, okay, first of all, it's different, right? When you deploy a solution to a manufacturing, to retail, to an energy,

there are three different things, right? And there are three different level of people and organization that you need to try to understand. So the first thing we did was really to acquire that knowledge because nobody of us had that knowledge. How we did? We hire people that they are aspiring that. And so to the other point was, okay, but is solution enough? Is solution solving the problem? No, solution is a way to show that there is an outcome and you can do that outcome. But without changing the architecture underneath, it's very difficult to solve the end-to-end.

You know, application and solution span across cloud, data center, name it, co-location, and edge. And in each one of this environment, they have different requirements. So the point is the guy that the end is in the store, he only care about the outcome of that solution. For example, if I bought a curbside pickup, the fact that there is a camera there and there is a GPU inside of the server and the data are also sent to the cloud to do micro fulfillment,

for example, doesn't matter. But there is all of this behind. So the challenge was, okay, you know, we sell a lot of hardware. We can do solution as much as we can. But everybody can do solution with hardware. But what really is the problem? The problem is how you deploy that solution, how you secure, manage, and end-to-end things

with different personas that they don't have that expertise in some area. They are expert of the store. They are not expert about the solution. And on the other end, you have expert in IT, right, that they look at modeling and all other things, right? So how you make that trade union between these things that it's kind of a, if we want to call a stretched CICD pipeline that he needs to connect all of this, right? So that was really what we thought was a very important thing to solve, including obviously the security challenge, because if you are outside of the wall of the data center of the cloud, right, that is still very boundary, you need to solve other things, like there is no security. So the approach needs to be no security there. And as Stephen was pointed out as well,

you cannot send an army of people for a device that is $500 device. Someone needs to be able to install that device. That device needs to be able to recognize itself and also put the application there because otherwise the economy doesn't work. So I see a parallel between what you're saying and sort of the DevOps wave that's been striking IT as well, because there again, you've got developers who may have some IT skills, but really don't want to have operational and infrastructure skills. They really just want a platform that works for them. And of course, there are developers developing edge applications as well. But if we stretch that metaphor, just like IT has had to make the infrastructure and platforms that supports cloud

applications and other modern applications more flexible, more, dare I say, composable, you know, and yet enforce IT policies of data protection and security and high availability and so on. They've tried to make those things very repeatable and programmatic as software. And yet the same story is true, except in a more extreme case at the edge, because at the edge, like with end user computing, which is another category, I think that you have a lot of experience with. You have people who really don't care. They don't care about software. They don't care about hardware. They care about outcomes. I need to get my job done. I need to service the customers. I need to check people out. I need to make things, you know, make sure that the building is secure. And so it's a very different, it's a different thing, but it is actually an extension of what IT has been trying to do for decades, which is to make this stuff easy and repeatable and supportable. Yeah. The parallel is, you remember when back in the days, again, I don't want to date ourselves, but think about when we didn't have a self-service portal.

I mean, I can mention other companies that they made an entire business based on the fact that now you can offer a service portal and you can go there and order your VM or your license and be deployed. All of that is not there, right? So that's a very interesting angle. And by the way, that's why in our architecture, we acquire a specific open source technology that we use that is a Tosca blueprint. It's kind of a language that describes an outcome, describes the packaging, describes the VM that you need to deploy,

describes the memory that you need to use, describes the device where you need to, and it can be very complex. And the things we want to do there, obviously, is to make this also a no-code approach, right? You mentioned Composer. That's actually one of our idea and things that we have that allow you to compose this blueprint. And this blueprint can be a validated certified blueprint for Dell, but can be a validated certified blueprint for one of our ISV or from our partner that stay in the catalog. And so you can click and basically deploy in the same way that you can do that for your VM or exchange or Power BI for your central IT.

Now, we are at the infancy of these things because at the edge, you need to also have the secure of the hardware. You need to have that zero trust and zero touch. This is not just to do a CI-CD pipeline, but if you merge that also, we speak a lot about AI, for example, and generative AI, where you can build these things

based on all that no-code technology and transform these things, then they very powerful, right? In the example that I was made, like a computer vision example, or you need to deploy a lot of things in multiple locations. Now, for the edge, all of the compute need to be secure, not tamper, very locked down. So, I mean, the operator that is there,

that he looks at the monitor, needs to only look at the monitor. That is attached maybe to a gateway with sensor and other thing. But then in every step in place you want also to have the ability to deploy application to existing infrastructure right as dell another one we have very um very successful product from hci and other things but you may need only for making that edge end-to-end to deploy one piece there, right? Now, you don't care really there.

Yes, you care, but not about the zero-trash security because you are in a data center. It's something that is already there, or you are in the cloud, but the entire end-to-end need to work. So there is different things that are happening. Not only you need to have the right hardware, but now you need to deploy the things. But on top of those things, when you secure the things,

you need to deploy the application. And how you deploy needs to be very transparent, right? Like we're doing today for a service portal, for example. When you look at, we're using the term edge, like it's one edge. So I just want to take a step back and say, you're looking at a continuum of locations and operating environments from data center through the near edge and to the far edge. When you think about that,

one of the things that I consider is how do you get a continuous view from an IT ops perspective into looking into the IT free frontiers that exist in some of these operating environments? And how do you determine what those non-IT resources need to be able to view in those edge locations? What do you think is the right approach to that? This is an awesome question because we spend so much time to try to understand the personas, right? So when, like in our case, when we decide to build the platform that we call native edge, right? There was a lot of discussion because obviously what someone need to look to and the person that is on the manufacturing line

is different from the person that operate inside of the manufacturing. And it's different from the person that is in the IT or the person that manages the cloud. So we need to create a multi-tenant but multi-persona approach where, based on your persona, you have access to the things that are relevant to you. And how are we doing that? First of all, you need to have the right ISV for relevance to, for example, the persona that is on the

manufacturing line. Like for example, we have a partner Litmus or Telet device-wise that connect and aggregate thousands of different sensors to a place. Now the outcome of that, the persona that look at that stuff wants a dashboard. That's what he wants. Now, he doesn't know that there is an application there that is a container that needs to run on the thing and need to connect to a cloud and there is another piece in the cloud. Maybe there is a storage in another place. But we orchestrate the entire end-to-end. Now, the person that is in IT

or the operator of the platform need to know that there are all different levels. For the person that is just outside, is consuming what the dashboard and everything has been produced, that's not relevant. So that's why you need to, at the edge, not only you need to solve the scale, but you need to solve the different personas aspect. That is more relevant than in IT in the sense that in IT, if you remember, right, Steve and myself, we came from storage as well. There is an operator, an administrator, and another monitor. And that's it. I mean, there is no, in the edge, depends of what application you deploy,

you need to give access to those personas to the relevant thing. And so that's the tricky part, that you need to have a tight but open way to deploy this thing. And so that's why the blueprint allow you to open certain things and allow you to change the thing based on the fact that you have people that they understand the end-to-end and build this solution that also they are kind of coding. And CICD pipeline allow them to open certain things to these different personas. So it's a very fascinating thing

because it's not something that we face in the past in the IT, right? And it's a challenge, but it's also very rewarding things where you can do it. You know, it is kind of like what we've been facing for years, though. But one of the things that I want to key in on there is that's interesting is many times when we talk about edge, there's sort of a cookie cutter versus not cookie cutter dichotomy. You know, we'll talk to some people, and they'll say, I have 20,000 restaurants, and I need to deploy the same stack everywhere, And it needs to be supportable and secure and et cetera, et cetera.

But it's basically the same thing everywhere. And then you also hear these environments that are exactly the opposite of that, where it's I've got, you know, maybe it's not 20,000 locations. Maybe it's 30 locations. But I have to be ready to run anything, anywhere, and have different things and different configurations. It's a very different problem. I agree, Stephen, but the thing is nobody looks at the top, right? So, and look what is common. Also, the people, they say there is nothing common. It's not true. There is commonality. At some level of the stack, there is some commonality.

It's just that, as we said before, right? Edge is new, right? It's a new forming market. And so there is a lot of silos. The people, they may not speak the same language, first of all. You know, one of the things that happened to me the first time when I speak with someone, we actually created dictionary because like, you know, me starting to speak Italian now and you speak English and another one speak, I don't know, Polish.

The edge was like this. spoke about, for example, from an IT point of view, when we say lifecycle management, what do you think is? Lifecycle management for us from IT is I upgrade the thing. Lifecycle management for someone at the far edge means I take that piece and

I replace with a new one. It's a completely different thing. It's the middle life cycle of the equipment, right? So you need to first understand that, that also inside of different silos, there are commonalities. Now, the key is to find that commonality and explain there is a commonality and have a technology to allow to make those commonality very easy to use. Now, the other things is you need to have an architecture

that allow you to push yourself to the far edge or the more close to the functional edge. Now, obviously there will be always things that, for example, from safety concern or that will be very, very customized. But there is always an aggregation point, especially when we look at the AI ML and the inferencing at the edge. When you collect it, there is always a point where you need to collect the data. You need to aggregate stuff. And that's where we can help to simplify,

optimize the investment as well, right? So now, obviously, the technology needs to be there because you don't need to only support GPU. You need to support Canvas. You need to support 5G. You need to support many, many different things, right? And the diversity of hardware is many different things, right? And the diversity of hardware is also very important, right? Low cost, high cost,

ruggedized, not ruggedized, security, not security, low-ran or other form of communication, right? You say oil rig, for example, right? If you have a solar panel and your only way to communicate is low-end or other kind of communication, you need to support that stuff.

But I think there is a point where there is an aggregation point. That aggregation point is very interesting because you can actually try to simplify the things. And that's the point where you can start to apply that IT best practice if you're doing it in a more pragmatic and platform-wise way. I'm glad you brought up security. You know, coming from an IT data center background, we think about a perimeter. We think about protecting around that perimeter. We've basically blown up the perimeter.

There is no perimeter anymore. How are you approaching security and what are your customers asking you about that? Yeah, I mean, you know, you're right. When we thought about what is the security at the edge, there is no security. So how you solve a place where there is no security? So now we have an overused, I think, term that is called zero trust. Now, zero trust means everything and nothing. What we really do for doing zero trust. Now for us, we took a very, very, very,

very bottom up approach in the sense that we build an entire end to end security platform. And so what we're using, for example, we took SDO, secure device onboarding. We are part of the FIDO Alliance. And what we did, we did this at the massive scaling in the sense that we changed our manufacturing process. We put a rendezvous server. We have vouchers that we can provide to partner customers that they follow the device. In that way, we can drop ship the device to the final location. That device comes up by itself, but already connect back with the voucher and say, okay, A, nobody tampered this device.

B, I need to apply these security things, including I can lock down all the ports in this device. So if someone take this device, it's a break. The orchestrator that we have will not allow this to come up in any other place. And so that's one of the things. The other things, all the communication at the edge need to come from the device, from the endpoint, up and not down. That's why I say that, you know, would be great for Dell, for example, that we can take what we have and just repurpose. The reality is you need to build something that is built for solving the constraint of the edge, and security is the biggest constraint, right?

Obviously, we are at the beginning. We want to do more and more. I mean, if we have sometimes our architect, he dreams about all this stuff every day, right? So there is more to do. But I think the baseline was, okay, how you can do this at scale and secure the device

and make sure they are not tampered, but also the operating system you put on that. Because we provide an operating system inside of the things secure. And how you can put a layer that then is open. Because if I need to put solution on top of that, I need to be open. I can't close everything, right? I need to have the people using what they pay for. And so that's the other things

where you need to balance the things. So it's very exciting. I think we can do certainly more as an industry and define better the zero trust and what it really means to different people with standard for sure. And I think security is important because, as you said, right, we used to have two data centers, three data centers, four data centers. The clouds, they have regional data centers, but still a data center.

We have in some manufacturing that I visit, there is 20,000 of gateways, only gateways. How you secure all of that, right? Well, and it comes back to what we were talking about with lifecycle as well, because it's not enough to just have a good out-of-box experience. You have to have an experience that allows the device to connect, sure, when you plug it in, but don't know, run other applications. Hey, that looks like a PC. I wonder if I could, you know, and then when it's done too, when you need to upgrade the thing or when you need to replace the thing, you know, to make sure that the data doesn't leak, to make sure that the system is still useful and, you know, until it's not. And that then there's no, you know, I don't know, somebody can't, you know, have it show up on eBay with everybody's, with all of your credit card numbers on it or something.

All of this stuff has to be taken into account. And since it's by default outside the firewall, to me, zero trust is a philosophy more than a technology. Yes, correct. It says this end device cannot be trusted. It can't trust what it's talking to. You can't trust that it's talking to. You can't trust that you're talking to it. But yet we have to make a system that temporarily, while it's active, while it's alive, works in a reliable and secure way. And that is a big challenge. Yeah, it's absolutely a statement. And by the way, zero trust combined of a lot of things, right? Immutable OS, right?

We apply immutable OS because some people can change the OS, can enter in the thing. There is no SSH to our nodes. You can't SSH. You can't enter directly to the device. You can access the application, but every communication is encrypted and is also redirected through specific things that we create. So as I said, there is more to do, but you need to design this from the bottom up. There is no other way. And you have hundreds of

thousands of devices in different, completely different locations that may be also disconnected. So you cannot expect that every time this device still needs to be secure, as you said, right? And it's in the middle of the jungle, okay? The satellite connection goes down. Guess what? Still not need to be accessed, right? Well, this is, honestly, it's been a great conversation. I hate to do this, but we do go for half an hour. So we got to kind of wrap up. What's

your impression of this, Alison? What's your takeaway and your message to our listeners? You know, what I was thinking about, Stephen, is the edge to me is going from the wild, wild west to the wild west. And I think that some of the ideas that Perluka has introduced has given me some confidence that the industry is moving in the right direction to give customers the tools and infrastructure that they need to deploy those capabilities that they so desire in places where they don't have a bastion of IT resources. I think there's still a lot that we need to do as a broader industry to figure out what are these use cases? How can we get the most value out of this distributed computing landscape?

But, you know, the progress that we're making is fantastic. And I'm excited by what we talked about today as a massive step for the enterprise. Pierluca, I think that we could probably talk to you all day. What's your takeaway? What's your message? I mean, as you see, I'm very excited about the edge because, I mean, to me, if I go back at the beginning of my career, I saw the storage transformation coming. This is a new transformation, right? And there is so many things that we can explore. And I think we, as Dell, we just put the flag, right, in the place. And then we have people adopting and we will understand more and more. But what we create is really to try to solve that wild, wild west and bring it to a wild or a west, depends. But, you know, it's very exciting, right?

It's a very exciting market because it's like living a new life, working life, because I see the same things that I saw 20 years ago, right? It's the same mantra. There is a lot of excitement, a lot of failure and understanding, quick fail, understand again and change things. And people are exciting and people need to be helped. I mean, you know, we're doing a customer event and we have our advisory board. I mean, I, and I'm sure you experienced as well, you, when you start this edge adventure, that there is a,

the excitement of, of those days where, you know, people really think that they want to do something and they need to change. And there is this very, very exciting things going on. So that's a very good module. And I'm, you know, yes, there are competitors and everything, but everybody here, we try to really bring this more easy way to consume the edge and secure the edge and optimize the edge for the benefit of everybody, our industry, our vertical, and at the end, our day-to-day life as well, right? Yeah. And I agree with you absolutely that it does so remind me of that sort of,

initially in the data center, we were just trying to make this stuff run. We just wanted to get it to work. And then we kind of got to the make this stuff run. We just wanted to get it to work. And then we kind of got to the point where it worked. Then we wanted to figure out how to make it more useful, how to make it more consumer friendly, how to deploy it as a service, et cetera. We were kind of maturing the processes and the practices along with the platforms. And I absolutely see that happening here. This is not a new field. It's just new to deploy the sort of mature IT practices and IT thought processes in this new world. And to me, that's, I think, the topic, the theme of what we've talked about all day today, which is basically those of us

who've worked in data center IT, who've worked in cloud, looking at the edge and saying, we need to mature this. We need to bring these data center practices, these established IT practices, and we need to figure out a way, as you said, to deliver a solution that meets the needs of the application users, not just to put something together that just sort of works. And I think that that's the most powerful statement from this. So it's been a great conversation. If people want to continue speaking with you, Pierluca, where can they find you and continue the conversation? They can find me in LinkedIn and on Twitter as well, but also at Dell. Excellent. Allison, any news from you? Well, I'm on Twitter at TechAllison. I'm on LinkedIn at Allison Klein. And of course,

on my platform, the Tech Arena. And as for me, you'll find me every Monday on Utilizing Tech, every Tuesday on On-Premise IT, and every Wednesday for the Gestalt IT News Rundown. So check those things out in your favorite podcast app or on YouTube. Thank you very much for listening to Utilizing Edge, part of the Utilizing Tech podcast series. If you enjoyed this discussion, please do subscribe in your favorite podcast application and consider leaving us a rating and a nice review if you can. This podcast is brought to you by gestaltit.com, your home for IT coverage from across the enterprise. For show notes and more episodes of this podcast, head over to utilizingtech.com or you can look us up on

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