Dell today launched a set of advances to help customers scale data for AI today while emphasizing they’ve left plenty of room for the channel to add value. The additions include a way to give every application and agent the same view of enterprise data, storage enhancements to improve security, and data services to deploy AI in production faster.

Varun Chhabra, Dell SVP of Infrastructure and Telecom Marketing, said channel partners can help customers implement and scale AI through these new features.

“The opportunities for the channel ecosystem are immense,” he said. “Even though we're solving a lot of challenges for data through technology, there's always a lot of work that is still required to be done to help customers really learn how to adopt these capabilities to really get their data in a good place. And channel partners have a huge opportunity to really think through their business model and provide value-added capabilities to help customers think about their data strategy.”

Dell expanded its AI Data Platform with new data orchestration and storage capabilities.

“Thinking about how to connect the data sources together and really bring the AI Data Platform to best benefit, you have to do a lot of homework both before, during, and after the deployment of the AI Data Platform,” Chhabra said. “And this is not a once-done situation. The opportunities for the channel ecosystem beyond reselling is really around providing those value-added capabilities, and I think that what's happening with AI provides a massive, massive inflection point for channel partners.”

Varun Chhabra

The Dell AI Data Platform covers data extending from where data lives (storage) to where agents use it. It includes a unified semantic layer, knowledge graph and knowledge agents for a customer's structured and unstructured data, keeping the information inside the platform in the customer's data center.

On the storage side, Dell works with Nvidia to transform and analyze data, making sure compute is fast enough to keep GPUs saturated and stay protected. Dell PowerScale storage now supports up to 500 tenants in a single cluster, with the ability to encrypt and authenticate file traffic and more granular role-based access control for managing each tenant. A new Dell Storage Performance Tool helps customers confidently size AI infrastructure, and run their own benchmarks to compare vendor solutions and keep GPUs fed by testing the performance of their S3-compatible object storage across training, inference and checkpointing.

A recent Dell survey of business and IT decision makers found that 53% of respondents listed establishing and scaling AI capabilities as their top priority over the next 24 months.

“That is putting AI right alongside with cybersecurity and workforce skills as one of the defining investments of this era,” Chhabra said. “The gap that we hear from customers every day is that the infrastructure is ready, but the data isn't.”

NAND Research analyst Steve McDowell said Dell is move up the stack from storage and data engines to the semantic and knowledge layer occupied by cloud data platforms and data governance vendors.

“Dell now builds both the infrastructure where AI data lives and the layer that explains what that data means to agents,” McDowell wrote in a research note. “Enterprises with significant on-premises data estates and sovereignty constraints should include Dell’s context capabilities on their evaluation roadmap, as this gives the AI Factory a durable reason to anchor enterprise agent deployments on-premises.”