For decades, the enterprise infrastructure industry has been optimizing mission-critical applications performance, resiliency, security, and availability within the data centers. As a market leading supplier of software-defined storage, Dell APEX Block Storage, powered by PowerFlex, enables customers to deploy their applications in the public cloud, gaining many multicloud benefits, while preserving their core mission-critical applications requirements.
Dell APEX Block Storage takes multicloud resiliency forward by spanning multiple availability zones with a single highly available cluster. This improves resiliency and reliability over native hyperscaler block storage offerings.
Dell APEX Block Storage can be deployed on either managed disk, for most workloads, or on instances with native attached NVMe SSDs, for more performance optimized workloads. If you choose to deploy Dell APEX Block Storage using instances backed by general purpose disks, Dell APEX Block Storage can aggregate the shared storage resources of the lower performing and cost-effective disks to achieve higher performance and resiliency than the general-purpose disks can do on their own.
Dell APEX Block Storage deployment can provide these benefits:
- Flexible deployments: Provide options to optimize cost and performance based on your workload requirements.
- Seamless data mobility: Dell APEX Block Storage offers several ways to move data from on premises to the cloud and back, and between regions in the cloud. Features include native asynchronous replication, snapshots, and integrated backup and recovery solutions.
- Multi-AZ durability: Dell APEX Block Storage has a unique ability to spread data protection across multi-availability zones, ensuring data access without having extra copies of data or needing to use replication across AZs.
- Enterprise data services: The product provides thin provisioning, snapshots, and replication which can be required for mission-critical workloads on the public clouds. Dell APEX Block Storage native replication enables data mobility between on-premises and cloud and/or to have a warm standby copy in another region or on-premises for additional protection against a regional disaster.
- Performance and linear scalability: The scale out software-defined architecture enables extreme performance by aggregating storage resources and distributing the data access across the cluster to deliver large IOPS with low latency. Aggregating the cluster storage resources results in performance that is the sum of the component’s performance. The cluster can be expanded rapidly to increase both performance and capacity while maintaining low latency. Each additional storage node adds additional I/O and capacity to the cluster, with up to 512 nodes in a single deployment. This enables extreme performance and capacity. Dell APEX Block Storage is well suited to support large databases, analytics workloads, and multiple container (Kubernetes) development and production deployments.
- The cloud experience – anywhere: Being able to access and interact with cloud services, resources, and applications from anywhere, regardless of the physical location of the data.
Organizations that are looking at fresh deployments of their databases and applications in the cloud, or migrating existing workloads to cloud, can start taking advantage of Dell APEX Block Storage for Public Cloud—the cloud experience that is seamlessly delivered wherever organizations have data and applications.