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The Dell APEX Block Storage scale and performance solution for public cloud offers an enterprise grade feature set that is not present with Azure Premium Storage. It does so at a price point that over a short amount of time can be significantly lower, dollar-per-I/O, than Azure Premium Storage.
Dell APEX Block Storage can exceed the capacity and performance limitations of any Azure Premium Storage type that will cost less to run overall. The performance of an APEX Block Storage volume is directly proportional to the scale of the APEX Block Storage cluster created. Simply stated, bigger cluster = faster volumes.
When we look deeper into the total cost of ownership (TCO), note the core tenets of the APEX Block Storage solution: its operational and cost benefits. These core tenets are:
Procurement time for hardware expansion can be long
Risk of running out of capacity due to long procurement
Customers can overprovision at rates at or exceeding 4:1 without any concern. This would not be an option for on-premises deployments.
A good way to understand the list price cost for an APEX Block storage deployment is to map the deployed instances into the Azure pricing calculator. Deployed instances can be found in the Deployment topologies section of this document. As with any pricing guidance for public cloud, the client enterprise agreement will govern the ultimate consumption pricing schedule.