Dell ISG President Arthur Lewis Talks Storage, Servers, Massive On-Prem LLMs, And ‘Crazy’ Pace Of Innovation

Arthur Lewis, president of Dell Technologies’ Infrastructure Solutions Group, said the company is focused on redefining the IT architecture that makes up the enterprise and data center with a private cloud platform and full-stack innovation that turns data into intelligence, he told CRN.

“You have to be thinking, ‘If I was a company born in AI, unencumbered by the past, what advantages do I have versus legacy companies. That is the mindset that you have to have,” he said during an interview at Dell Technologies World 2025 last week. “And you need to be scared that that company is going to run circles around you in a couple of years.”

Lewis leads the teams that produce the server and storage breakthroughs that have won Dell its first position ranking in market share in each of those categories and entrenched it there for quarter after quarter. For Lewis, the ideal pace is to never slow down.

“If you think you’ve won, you’ve lost,” he told CRN.

In terms of how customers should approach AI, the theme at the show is that organizations must act now. Lewis said those that are afraid to move first risk being left behind.

“I kind of joke that the AI revolution is not a spectator sport. It’s really not. You’ve got to get into the game. You’ve got to learn. You’ve got to make mistakes. You’ve got to learn some more,” he said. “If you’re going to sit around and wait to be a fast follower, you’re kind of dead in the water.”

He said while unlocking the power of AI is a significant task that involves incorporating disparate data from across a vast IT estate, Dell is hoping to make it easier.

He pointed to the company’s new offerings like the Dell AI Data Platform. He said data is fuel and AI needs premium fuel, which requires refinement. He said the foundation of the Dell AI Data Platform is built on Dell’s fast, scalable storage that has been engineered for the AI moment.

Dell’s file and object storage, PowerScale F710 and PowerScale F910 have twice the capacity they did a year ago, as well as data services wrapped around that to automate the ingestion of all those bytes with a proprietary RAG connector, as well as advanced search and discovery capabilities.

Meanwhile, Dell’s ObjectScale integrates with modern data lakes, AI tools and a large variety of object file extensions as it delivers an industry-leading throughput of 384 gigabytes per second.

Additionally, the company’s Project Lightning will be the fastest parallel file system in the world, Lewis told the audience at Dell Tech World, with 67 percent greater access to data and twice the level of throughput to its nearest competitor.

Lewis called Project Lightning a “superhighway for artificial intelligence” that eliminates bottlenecks and is designed for agentic training and workloads, it is capable of saturating “hundreds of thousands of GPUs,” which is needed for checkpointing, key-value caching, as well as high-end metadata analytics to ensure “seamless and continuous access” to data.

Dell’s data lakehouse combines the scalability, and cost efficacy of a data lake with the structure and reliability of a data warehouse, which gives customers a unified data approach across diverse data sources, tools and formats, Lewis said on stage.

“This, ladies and gentlemen, is the Dell AI Data Platform: from fast, scalable storage with PowerScale and ObjectScale, to cutting-edge technologies like Lightning, and end-to-end data management, with the Dell Data Lakehouse, we are giving customers the tools that they need to derive maximum value from their most valuable asset, their data.”