Dell Announces Enhancements to Dell AI Data Platform

Dell Technologies recently unveiled new advancements to its Dell AI Data Platform, designed to help enterprises transform distributed, siloed data into faster and more reliable AI outcomes.

The Dell AI Data Platform is an important component of the Dell AI Factory, providing an open, modular foundation to create value from scattered data silos. The platform eliminates bottlenecks and provides flexibility for AI workloads, such as training, fine-tuning, retrieval-augmented generation (RAG), or inference, by decoupling data storage from processing.

The Dell PowerScale and Dell ObjectScale will both receive new enhancements, along with the Dell AI Data Platform data engines.

Dell PowerScale

The PowerScale delivers network-attached storage (NAS) simplicity and parallel performance for AI workloads, including training, fine-tuning, inference, and RAG pipelines.

The new integration of NVIDIA GB200 and GB300 GPU NVL72, along with ongoing software updates, will enable Dell PowerScale to deliver reliable performance, simplified management at scale, and seamless compatibility with applications and solution stacks.

“What we are actually doing here is that we’ve worked very closely with NVIDIA to deliver validation, validated performance for Blackwell GPUs, deliver higher intensity per rack, and simplify scale out operations as organizations are looking to scale their AI workloads so organizations can get more throughput with less overhead in terms of fewer switches or fewer racks to manage,” said Varun Chhabra, Senior VP, ISG Product Marketing. “On the software side, we have worked closely with NVIDIA so that PowerScale software integrates very neatly with NVIDIA’s AI stack, whether it’s NeMo, Titan, or Rapids, so that data can flow efficiently from end-to-end without customers having to do retooling or custom plumbing for their NVIDIA infrastructure.”

Dell ObjectScale

ObjectScale provides performant, scalable S3-native object storage for large AI workloads. ObjectScale is available as an appliance or new software-defined option on Dell PowerEdge servers.

New advancements improve ObjectScale’s speed, scalability, and efficiency. Among the enhancements are:

• S3 over RDMA support will soon enter tech preview and offer up to 230 percent higher throughput, 80 percent lower latency, and 98 percent lower CPU usage compared to traditional S3.
• Small object performance and efficiency improvements for large deployments will deliver up to 19 percent higher throughput and up to 18 percent lower latency for 10KB objects.
• Deeper AWS S3 integration and bucket-level compression to provide developers and data scientists with better tools to store, move, and use large data volumes.

“AI is transforming industries, and its success depends on unlocking the full potential of enterprise data. The Dell AI Data Platform is purpose-built to simplify data complexity, unify pipelines, and deliver AI-ready data at scale,” said Arthur Lewis, president, Infrastructure Solutions Group, Dell Technologies. “From real-time diagnostics in healthcare to predictive maintenance in manufacturing, Dell Technologies and trusted collaborators like NVIDIA, Elastic, and Starburst are empowering industries to move from AI pilots to production faster and with reduced risk.”

Data Engine enhancements

Meanwhile, Dell is also expanding its data engines — specialized tools in the Dell AI Data Platform that organize, query, and activate AI data.

These new advancements include:

• A new Data Search Engine, developed in collaboration with Elastic, will accelerate decision-making to allow customers to interact with data “as naturally as asking a question.” The engine was designed for tasks such as RAG, semantic search, and GenAI pipelines, and integrates with MetadataIQ data discovery software to search files on PowerScale and ObjectScale using granular metadata. Developers will be able to build smarter RAG applications in tools like LangChain with the engine, ingesting only updated files, saving compute time, and keeping vector databases current.
• The new Data Analytics Engine Agentic Layer for the Data Analytics Engine will transform raw data into business-ready products in seconds with LLMs that automate documentation, glean insights, and embed AI into SQL workflows. The Data Analytics Engine enables seamless data querying across spreadsheets, databases, cloud warehouses, and lakehouses. The new Agentic Layer will unify access to vector stores, enabling RAG and search tasks across Iceberg, Dell’s Data Search Engine, PostgreSQL + PGVector, and others. The new MCP Server for Data Analytics Engine also enables multi-agent and AI application development.
• Dell AI Data Platform integration with NVIDIA cuVS will also deliver advanced vector search performance and turnkey deployment for enterprise AI environments. The integration brings GPU-accelerated hybrid search to Data Search Engine for faster, more efficient insights with full on-prem control.

“Data holds the key to incredible breakthroughs, and our collaboration with Dell Technologies makes it easier than ever to unlock that potential. By fully integrating with Elasticsearch context engineering platform into the Dell AI Data Platform, we are providing a powerful engine for search and discovery,” said Ajay Nair, GM of Platform Engineering, Elastic. “This collaboration empowers organizations to accelerate everything from semantic search to complex generative AI pipelines, turning large amounts of unstructured data into critical insight.”

Recently, GTT Communications partnered with Insight Enterprises, Dell, and NVIDIA to launch an AI factory built on Dell PowerEdge servers with the NVIDIA accelerated computing platform. Read more about this collaboration and the acceleration of AI innovation.