Dell Technologies today announced a pair of new products, software for data centers, and a data analytics platform in a bid to expand its reach into the landscape of edge computing.

“We see the edge as really being defined not necessarily by a specific place or a specific technology, but instead it’s a complication to the existing deployment of IT,” said Matt Baker, SVP of strategy and planning at Dell Technologies.

“We’ve been on a pretty long period of centralization, and as the world looks to deliver increasingly real-time digital experiences through their digital transformation initiatives, the ability to sort of hold onto that highly-centralized approach to IT is starting to fracture quite a bit,” he added.

“Because we are increasingly decentralizing our IT environments we’re finding that we’re putting IT infrastructure solutions … into increasingly constrained environments,” Baker said. “We find ourselves in locations that can be challenged in some way.”

In other words, not the typical data center.

The Dell EMC PowerEdge XE2420 is described as a compact server designed for space-constrained environments and challenging operating conditions. It provides a low-latency, two-socket system and can be expanded to include up to four accelerators and 92 TB of storage.

The Dell EMC Modular Data Center Micro 415 is a smaller enclosure with cooling and remote management capabilities “in a size shorter and narrower than a parking spot,” according to the vendor. Dell Technologies also unveiled Dell EMC iDRAC9 Datacenter software, which enables streaming data analytics for edge computing on Dell EMC PowerEdge servers.

The vendor claims its remote deployment capability can reduce on-site management requirements by up to 99.1% per server. “We are now deploying infrastructure and solutions and software out in the world far away from skilled IT staff, which puts greater pressure on the ability to manage highly distributed environments in a hands-off, unmanned environment,” Baker explained.

Finally, the Dell EMC Streaming Data Platform is designed to ingest and analyze streaming data from the edge. It also provides “auto-scaling ingestion, tiered storage with historical recall on-demand and unified analytics for both real-time and historical business insights,” according to Dell Technologies.

“Edge doesn’t exist on its own, it’s part of a continuum,” Baker said. “Not everything is going to be at the edge, there’s a lot of data that we’ll want to process through rapid inferencing, streaming analytics, etc., at the edge, but increasingly we’re leveraging things like machine learning and artificial intelligence to fuel that inferencing.”

He added that more than 75% of enterprise data will be created outside of data centers and because that data is largely unstructured it needs to be processed in real time. “Edge, core, and cloud need to operate seamlessly with one another,” Baker added.

5G is just one aspect of edge computing, but it’s an important one, he explained, adding that Dell Technologies is making progress in the communication space and winning new accounts with operators.

The Dell EMC PowerEdge XE2420 and Dell EMC Modular Data Center Micro 415 will be commercially available on March 31, and in the second half of this year, respectively, while the Dell EMC iDRAC9 Datacenter software and Dell EMC Streaming Data Platform are on the market now.