Dell IoT Gateways in Action at Intel IDF

A pleasant surprise for us at Intel Developer Forum 2015 last week was seeing our Dell IoT gateways in action, powering a number of demos at the show. 

Couchbase used a Dell IoT gateway at IDF 2015

SAS shared a demo based on sensors placed throughout the conference floor, capturing data around motion, sound and light. This data was fed into the Dell IoT gateway on which they had loaded their SAS® Event Stream Processing application, and from there the data was sent to the cloud. 

Bradley Klenz, Principal Architect, Advanced Analytics R&D, explains the logic:

“We’ve been doing work on streaming analytics. With the gateway, we can put intelligence and value onto the data before it gets to the cloud. And then, in the cloud, we can run our big data and visualization work.”  

We at Dell believe that this type of distributed analytics, where some analytics are run at the edge for lower latency and bandwidth issues, and more heavy duty analytics are run in a cloud or datacenter environment, will be a key model for large complex IoT solutions moving forward.

The SAS team was able to correlate the data streams with each other and with the conference schedule. 

“We are seeing patterns between activity on the floor, and with the back of the house. And times when the activity and noise here at our booth is louder than where the DJ is playing!” Klenz said.

Couchbase (above), right next to SAS, used a Dell IoT gateway in a game in which folks could hand crank a 3D-printed jet engine model in order to have it take off from the runway. This demo showed the power of their NoSQL storage engine ForestDB. 

ELM Energy, LLC, as part of the Dell IoT booth, showed its Fieldsight™ Microgrid Monitoring and Control solution.  Its solution optimizes and balances power generation by automatically maximizing the use of renewables.  It also improves power reliability by managing power demand against power supply, reducing grid instability and enabling demand response program participation.  For this demo, the Dell IoT gateway was integrated into the Fieldsight Microgrid system, where it computed forecasts around load requirements, managed energy storage and handled power generation dispatches.

“The integration of the Dell IoT Gateway into our FieldSight product line offering has allowed us to expand the target customer base for the microgrid and renewable energy market space by bringing computing power close to the source, at a fantastic value,” said Aron Bowman, Vice President of Product Development at ELM Energy.

KMC Controls was also in attendance with its building automation solution as shown in this video from the Dell Annual Analyst Conference.

KMC is partnering with Dell OEM Solutions and Intel to deliver a “complete IoT platform for building automation that forms an end-to-end solution, from sensors and controllers (edge devices) to cloud-based remote management applications. Remote visualization and control are enabled via a cloud-hosted, mobile application based architecture with secure data access.”

We had a great show at Intel IDF this year! If you’d like to see more Dell IoT gateways in action, come visit us at Dell World in Austin from Oct 20-22.  

About the Author: Kirsten Billhardt