Blue integrated circuit with edge computing icon.
Image: Michael Traitov/Adobe Stock

At Dell Technologies World this week, the company announced its new edge operation software platform NativeEdge. First announced last October as Project Frontier, the project has now been officially unveiled as a product, NativeEdge, that will be available for purchase with a one- or three-year subscription this August.

Jump to:

What is Dell’s NativeEdge?

Dell’s NativeEdge is an edge operation software platform for edge infrastructure and application deployment, including device onboarding at scale, remote management and multicloud application orchestration to data centers or the edge.

“When we started work on this and designing this, we had a lot of very specific edge constraints we designed for,” said Gil Shneorson, senior vice president, edge computing offers, strategy and execution at Dell Technologies. Those constraints included teams without skilled local resources and ecosystems that required zero-trust architecture, or faced connectivity challenges from patchy satellite links to air gapping for security.

“Use cases for modern edge workloads are widely varied and growing, creating more complex infrastructure environments and edge operations,” said Jennifer Cooke, the research director of Edge Strategies at IDC. “Dell’s introduction of Dell NativeEdge offers an interesting new solution that addresses this complexity.”

From the catalog of popular apps, applications can be deployed to all edge points in an automated fashion. Those applications are secured using a device onboarding service with tamper protection, so an application can be drop-shipped to a device, secured along the way and auto-configured to the application it needs to run.

From there, Dell can deliver hardware and software into an operating environment and stand by it, remotely manage those devices and do application orchestration in data centers as well as in clouds, Shneorson said.

SEE: Don’t curb your enthusiasm: Trends and challenges in edge computing (TechRepublic)

“The timing couldn’t be better, as every day we hear from customers and prospects seeking new ways of deploying Fastly services … in environments beyond the traditional data center or cloud,” said Artur Bergman, the chief architect and founder of Fastly.

NativeEdge will be available in 50 countries starting in August 2023.

Other major announcements at Dell Technologies World

  • The company now offers ProDeploy Flex, a modular deployment service for edge computing.
  • The Dell Private Wireless program has expanded with support for Airspan and Druid.
  • Dell’s SONiC networking operating system solution is now Enterprise SONiC Distribution by Dell Technologies 4.1.
  • For retail, Dell Validated Design for Retail Edge with inVia Robotics intelligent automation is designed to make last-mile warehousing more efficient with a single infrastructure stack for edge retail IT and applications.

Disclaimer: Dell paid for my airfare, accommodations and some meals for the Dell Technologies World event held May 22-25 in Las Vegas.