Dell Technologies has announced Dell AI Data Platform advancements designed to help enterprises turn distributed, siloed data into faster, more reliable AI outcomes.

Why it matters

As enterprise AI adoption surges and data grows, organisations need a platform that can securely transform distributed, siloed data into actionable insights. The Dell AI Data Platform, a critical component of the Dell AI Factory, delivers an open, modular foundation to create value from scattered data silos. By decoupling data storage from processing, it eliminates bottlenecks and provides the flexibility needed for AI workloads like training, fine-tuning, retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) or inferencing.

The platform, integrated with the NVIDIA AI Data Platform reference design, is powered by four core building blocks:

Storage engines for smart data placement and seamless data movement

Data engines to turn data into actionable insights

Built-in cyber resiliency

Data management services

Together, they create a scalable, flexible foundation for customers to realise AI's full potential.

Dell AI Data Platform storage engines deliver peak AI performance

Dell PowerScale and Dell ObjectScale, the Dell AI Data Platform's storage engines, offer the performance, security and multi-protocol access essential for AI data.

Dell PowerScale delivers NAS (network-attached storage) simplicity and parallel performance for AI workloads like training, fine-tuning, inferencing and retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) pipelines.

With new integration of NVIDIA GB200 and GB300 NVL72 and ongoing software updates, Dell PowerScale delivers reliable performance, simplified management at scale and seamless compatibility with applications and solution stacks.

PowerScale F710, which has achieved NVIDIA Cloud Partner (NCP) certification for high-performance storage, delivers 16k+ GPU-scale with up to 5X less rack space, 88% fewer network switches and up to 72% lower power consumption compared to competitors.

Dell ObjectScale, the industry's highest-performing object platform, provides extremely performant, scalable S3-native object storage for massive AI workloads. ObjectScale is available as an appliance or through a new software-defined option on Dell PowerEdge servers that is up to 8 times faster than previous-generation all-flash object storage. New advancements improve ObjectScale's speed, scalability and efficiency.

S3 over RDMA support will soon enter tech preview. It will offer up to 230% higher throughput, 80% lower latency and 98% lower CPU usage compared to traditional S3.

Small object performance and efficiency improvements for large deployments deliver up to 19% higher throughput and up to 18% lower latency for 10KB objects.

Deeper AWS S3 integration and bucket-level compression give developers and data scientists better tools to store, move and use large amounts of data.

Dell AI Data Platform data engines power real-time AI

Dell is also expanding its data engines, the specialised tools in the Dell AI Data Platform that organise, query and activate AI data. Dell's data engines are built in collaboration with trusted AI leaders like NVIDIA, Elastic and Starburst.

The new Data Search Engine, developed in collaboration with Elastic, speeds decision-making by allowing customers to interact with data as naturally as asking a question. Designed for tasks like RAG, semantic search and generative AI pipelines, it integrates with MetadataIQ data discovery software to search billions of files on PowerScale and ObjectScale using granular metadata. Developers can build smarter RAG applications in tools like LangChain with the engine, ingesting only updated files to save compute time and keep vector databases current.

The Data Analytics Engine, developed in collaboration with Starburst, enables seamless data querying across spreadsheets, databases, cloud warehouses and lakehouses. The new Data Analytics Engine Agentic Layer transforms raw data into business-ready products in...