Home > APEX > Storage > White Papers > Dell APEX Block Storage for Microsoft Azure > SLA reimagined
On average, cloud providers will deliver anywhere between two to four nines of availability. With each “nine” there quickly adds exponential additional cost. Dell APEX Block Storage for Azure pools together lower cost and lower durability volumes, all while presenting six “nines” of availability[2] to your applications. By aggregating all the lower cost Azure Premium Storage volumes, Dell APEX Block Storage can concentrate the collective performance of those pooled volumes to achieve a IOPs/dollar ratio that is not possible with native hyperscalers.
For a cloud first, or cloud smart, initiative (and there is neither an appetite nor a skills gap that exists to refactor apps), APEX Block Storage for public cloud can deliver without the cost of application re-factoring and redesign, all while maintaining the most stringent on-premises SLAs. Combining the best of Dell software defined storage and cost-effective cloud agility can help satisfy the most mission critical SLA requirements.
Dell APEX Block Storage provides thin provisioning of storage to a VM consumer and highly effective snapshots without limitations, when compared to native Azure.