Dell Extends AI Data Platform With Semantic Layer, Knowledge Graph and GPU-Based Data Prep

The orchestration additions are a Unified Semantic Layer, an Enterprise Knowledge Graph and Knowledge Agents. The new Data Processing Engine capability, intended to accelerate enterprise data preparation for AI, will run on graphics processing units using Nvidia Corp.'s cuDF library. The release was discussed on theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media's livestreaming studio, during an event titled "Dell AI Data Platform Event: From Ambition to AI at Scale."

Arthur Lewis, president of Dell's Infrastructure Solutions Group, said the intent is to bring the Data Processing Engine and Dell's storage engines closer together, reducing unnecessary data movement through zero-copy data access, memory-to-memory transfer and distributed processing. The result, he said, is a more direct data path from raw enterprise information to AI-ready context.

"In many cases, the model is not the next constraint, the data is," Lewis said. "That is the problem that the AI Data Platform was built to solve. Within the Dell AI Factory, it is the data foundation that curates, connects and serves enterprise data to fuel the AI, and especially agentic AI."

Dell paired the data path changes with storage products it says serve different performance, capacity and workload requirements. PowerScale is positioned as the foundation for enterprise AI at scale and supports up to 16,000 GPUs. ObjectScale delivers up to 40 gigabytes per second per node, and Dell's AI Storage Product Management team describes the Lightning File System as the world's fastest parallel file system, built for extreme throughput, large-scale training, checkpointing and the most demanding inference paths. In AI cloud deployments, storage performance affects revenue per GPU, infrastructure utilization and how quickly customers reach billable production.

Dell is positioning the AI Data Platform as the connective layer between enterprise data and production AI, bringing storage, data processing, orchestration, search, governance and GPU acceleration together. The announcements link the data orchestration engine, storage semantic layer, knowledge graph at scale and cyber resilience into one AI data architecture.

Dave Vellante of theCUBE Research said the focus is on helping customers get AI right by reaching the right information, harmonizing it and delivering it efficiently, at low cost and low operational complexity. "Two years ago, we said, look, the enterprise needs solutions. And what Dell is doing is they're bringing a solution," he said.

The Unified Semantic Layer provides an enterprise-wide knowledge graph native to the Data Orchestration Engine. Dell said it is addressing complaints from customers who have used other semantic tools that reach only structured data sources and leave unstructured information behind, or that build context once and depend on users to keep it current as the underlying data changes. Vrashank Jain, lead product manager for the AI Data Platform at Dell, said the layer gives structured and unstructured information consistent business meaning, so a term means the same thing everywhere it appears, and uses open models with human-in-the-loop verification to generate entities and definitions.

"No more standardized ontologies. Each organization is unique. Their semantic layer should reflect that," Jain said. The third addition, the Enterprise Knowledge Graph, connects entities across the platform.