AI/ML
Dell’s AI Factory product set was majorly updated today at Dell Technologies World and faster search, indexing and object storage played a foundational part in this.
The company was early in to AI, making a substantial bet on it becoming an important and wide-ranging part of public sector, SMB and enterprise IT, and that bet has paid off big time. There are, for example, more than 5,000 AI Factory customers. Now Dell is announcing new AI-focussed workstations, rack-level systems for compute, networking and storage, and software supplier partnerships; Palantir for example, with agentic AI a primary focus.
CEO and founder Michael Dell said: “With the advent of Agentic AI, every organization now faces the same challenge to turn intelligence into impact at speed or become obsolete. At Dell Technologies, we’re helping customers turn their data into AI fuel on infrastructure they control with security, governance and cost efficiency.”
Jensen Huang, AI cheer leader in chief, and the founder and CEO of Nvidia, chimed in as well: "Agentic AI has arrived - enterprise AI adoption is going parabolic. Dell and Nvidia are building the full-stack AI factory for this moment, with accelerated computing, networking, storage, software and services that scale from the desktop to the data center — turning AI’s potential into unprecedented productivity for enterprises everywhere.”
The storage side of this starts with Dell’s AI Data Platform, a 4-layer system produced with Nvidia, which has three internal storage engines: PowerScale for high-performance, serial, file access, Lightning for parallel file access, and ObjectScale for object data access.
The Data Orchestration layer can index billions of unstructured files and connect them into governed AI pipelines. The platform has a Starburst-powered Data Analytics Engine with GPU-accelerated SQL analytics. Dell says it delivers up to 6x faster query performance [than non-GPU-accelerated systems] on Nvidia Blackwell GPUs today with support designed for future Vera systems. This new engine will accelerate processing for both traditional data analytics and data-intensive agentic AI applications.
The AI Data Platform’s storage and search engines integrate with Nvida Omniverse libraries to combine scalable object storage with semantic, vector-based asset search. This helps connect Product Lifecycle Management systems and repositories directly into Omniverse, feeding digital twins and physical AI training and validation workflows with data.
Dell has also announced an ObjectScale X7700 appliance, topping out the existing X560, XF960 and earlier EX5000 range. The X7700 provides up to to 45 percent more HDD capacity than the ECS 5000 generation, with flexible compute-to-storage scaling and improved TCO. It will also support coming 245 TB SSDs which “will more than triple ObjectScale flash density.”
There is more hardware news, as Dell has PowerRack systems; integrated rack-level products for compute, networking and storage, with built-in thermal design, power management and software optimization. The PowerRack for storage delivers factory‑integrated dedicated Dell Exascale storage which has storage drives and ObjectScale, PowerScale or Lightning (parallel file system) storage software personas executing on it. Dell is now adding PowerFlex block data access software to the mix and claims Exascale storage is the industry's only 4-in-1 storage built for extreme-scale.
The Palantir collaboration involves Palantir’s Foundry and AIP (Artifical Intelligence Platform) offering coming on-premises to Dell’s AI Factory. Palantir's Ontology layer will be deployed on ObjectScale and PowerFlex to ingest data from enterprise sources and automate business workflows using AI models deployed on the Dell AI Factory.
Dell says this will allow enterprises and sovereign entities to connect all their data sources across their organization, and define and dynamically manage relationships between those data sources. The aim is to optimize their business operations with AI, within their organization boundaries; enterprise AI data sovereignty as it were.
Availability
- Dell AI Data Platform orchestration and search advancements will be available in Q2 2026,
- Dell Data Analytics Engine accelerated by NVIDIA Blackwell and NVIDIA Vera will be available in Q1 2027,
- Dell ObjectScale Nvidia Certified Storage validation will be available in Q2 2026,
- Dell ObjectScale and Dell Data Search Engine integration with Nvidia Omniverse is available now,
- Support for 245 TB drives and an expanded drive count per node are targeted for an ObjectScale release in 2H 2026,
- Dell Exascale with the Dell PowerFlex addition will be available in 1H 2027,
- Dell PowerRack for Dell Exascale storage will be available in 2H 2026.
Read more in a series of forthcoming articles on Dell’s blog webpage.