How can we achieve this?
The solution aggregates the resources and then shares them across the entire cluster. APEX Block Storage then automatically maintains a balance across all resources, to support each application’s need. You can also add storage and/or compute on-the-fly with no downtime or impact to applications because APEX Block Storage seamlessly balances the available resources.
The same flexibility exists with Dell APEX Block Storage for other hyperscalers. The software can be deployed on either managed disks for most workloads or on instances with native attached NVMe SSDs for more performance optimized workloads. A deployment of Dell APEX Block 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. Dell APEX Navigator for Multicloud Storage orchestrates data mobility capabilities, such as snapshot shipping, in a coming release of APEX Navigator.
- 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: 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 today have data and applications spread across multiple data centers, co-location facilities, public clouds, and increasingly at the edge. Customers enjoy the ease and agility of the cloud experience and are demanding this same experience across all their deployments. Simply put, this is the business case for Dell APEX Block Storage for Public Cloud—the cloud experience that is seamlessly delivered wherever organizations have data and applications.
To successfully deliver the business use case to end users, the APEX Block Storage solution provides these benefits.
Best of breed innovation:
- Cloud native storage built for cloud native development.
- Storage innovation where it is needed, extending existing IT investments and skill sets.
Data mobility:
- Mobility is geared toward both those who already have a PowerFlex on-premises environment and want to migrate to the cloud, and those who have already deployed Dell APEX Block Storage in the cloud and want to move data among various Dell APEX Block Storage deployments.
- Consume the public cloud PaaS services, with only the data attributes that you want, in the cloud.
- Consume the rich hyperscaler PaaS feature set reporting capability by mounting volumes copied from on-premises locations.
- Allowing for seamless data mobility, data teams can now place the right data, at the right time, in the right place.
- Snapshot shipping of volumes to the hyperscaler ecosystem to provide a source for, and to enhance, AI/ML model training.
- Consume what you need in the hyperscaler of choice, without incurring any egress fees.
- Copy and mount snapshots in the cloud.
- Kubernetes namespace data mobility. Inclusive of all PV and PVCs, with an option to rename a namespace in flight.
- Evolving S3 Object solution sets as a query able source for a modern database system.
- NOSQL databases – Develop in the cloud. Migrate to on-premises or other cloud. Following the no lock in pattern of NOSQL distributed systems.
Ease of deployment and provisioning:
- Complete automated deployment in less than two hours when deployed with APEX Navigator
- Scaling without physical hardware acquisition channels
- Network automation
- Code upgrades for the APEX Block Storage software defined solution
- Custom deployment guidance:
- Step-by-step instructions for manually adding to an existing Dell APEX Block Storage infrastructure.
- Support for use cases is not addressed by the orchestrated APEX Navigator deployment option.
Fully automated experience with APEX Navigator:
- Centralize APEX Block Storage deployment and life cycle management across multiple public clouds, including configuration and automated provisioning and deployment. This process requires only four simple steps.
- Drive data mobility between on-premises and multiple public clouds to meet shifting cloud strategies.
- API-first architecture makes it easy to integrate with automation tools such as Ansible and Terraform to accelerate productivity and embrace Dell software defined storage in the public cloud as part of your broader IT strategy.
- Take decisive action with intelligent insights to leverage comprehensive monitoring across your entire Dell storage estate. You can also track license inventory, system health, performance, and capacity with CloudIQ integration.
- Accelerate Zero Trust adoption with role-based access control, single sign-on, and federated identity, all leveraging Zero Trust principles.
APEX Block Storage for Public Cloud also offers:
- The ability to achieve extreme performance in the public cloud.
- Linear scalability to 100 s of storage instances to address large workloads and to consolidate large sets of applications in one cloud.
- APEX Block Storage for Public Cloud can be consumed by thousands of compute instances.
- Rapid deployment through an intelligent web-based wizard that removes the complexity of finding which instances best fit the workload and the capacity required. The solution supports the expansion and monitoring of your capacity, as needed.
- A unique use of Availability Zones which, mapped to fault sets, enable high resiliency with a space-efficient and cost-effective use of the distributed mesh data across the data store. This entails enabling ultrafast reprotection of an entire AZ that could go offline without disrupting access to your Dell APEX Block Storage.
- A choice of running block-based cloud storage on either EBS volumes or an EC2 instance store for performance optimized workloads.