Dell Makes Play for IoT Gateways

How the Internet of Things Will Change Our Lives

Vowing to bring the same ruthless economic efficiency it has applied to other categories of IT infrastructure, Dell today announced its intention to become a major provider of gateways for Internet of Things (IoT) environments.

Based on thin client technology that Dell gained when it acquired Wyse Technology, Andy Rhodes, executive director for IoT Solutions at Dell, says that as IoT environments continue to rapidly expand, there is a clear need for a device that connects multiple endpoints back to remote servers. Instead of feeding massive amounts of raw data across a congested network, the gateway will host applications that can process raw data and then share those results with other applications.

In the case of Dell, those gateways are based on dual-core Intel Celeron processors capable of running multiple operating systems, including Windows and any number of distributions of Linux.

While IoT has been around for decades in the form of machine-to-machine (M2M) communications, Rhodes says Dell is committed to democratizing IoT by making it feasible to buy and deploy IoT gateways at unprecedented scale.

As that process occurs, Rhodes adds that there will be a convergence of traditional IT and operational systems around a common set of IT infrastructure that will make it possible to finally unify the management of both environments.

Of course, before any of that can happen, organizations will need to master IoT environments that are quickly evolving into instances of distributed computing at a previously unprecedented level of scale.