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Dell APEX Cloud Platform for Microsoft Azure is the first offer in the Premier Solutions category for Microsoft Azure Stack HCI.
Figure 12. Microsoft Azure Stack HCI categories, including the new Premier one
This new platform comes to the market as the result of a long story of collaboration between Dell and Microsoft. During this long journey we have learned what customers needed to accelerate application development and optimizing IT operations, and worked to provide the best solutions that combined the strength and technologies of two market leaders.
To this innovative platform, Dell brings its consolidated experience creating engineering-validated infrastructure platforms, management automation and orchestration solutions, with the best services experience and portfolio.
Microsoft brings its cloud services leadership, with the ability to simplify customers’ management, governance and applications deployment and operations through a centralized Azure control plane.
To this successful collaboration, Dell has added one of its most valuable and proven Intellectual Property pieces, which comes from the leading HCI platform, VxRail.
Importing VxRail Manager technology to build the new Dell APEX Cloud Foundation software, a keystone of this new Dell APEX Cloud Platforms, enables them to inherit the automated operations, orchestration, lifecycle management and improved serviceability that VxRail has had for flagship for years.
Dell APEX Cloud Platform for Microsoft Azure is empowered by the latest generation of Dell PowerEdge servers, incarnated in these platforms in the MultiCloud (MC) nodes. Equipped with the 4th generation of Intel Xeon Processors, capable of offering a wide range of networking, storage and GPU capabilities, keeping a low footprint and power consumption profile.
On the storage domain, the platform is capable of offering both Microsoft’s and Dell’s Software define storage technologies (SDS). At initial release, only Microsoft storage spaces direct has been made available, but soon Dell SDS will be available for customer’s choice. This Dell’s software defined block storage will run on top of MC storage nodes integrating with Azure Stack HCI at OS level.
Core values
With these foundational characteristics, customers can benefit from the core value this next generation platform brings to the Azure marketplace:
Dell APEX Cloud Platform Foundation Software
With this key piece of software, Dell is leveraging and evolving its highly differentiated management and orchestration capabilities from its VxRail system software. We have taken the M&O Intellectual Property that distinguishes VxRail and we have customized it for Azure environments with this software. The software plays a key role in:
Dell APEX Cloud Platform Foundation Software consists of multiple, integrated software elements that extend cloud ecosystem native capabilities to deliver a seamless, automated, operational experience, keeping the infrastructure in continuously validated states to ensure workloads are consistently up and running.
Del APEX Cloud Platform Foundation Software integrates with Windows Admin Center and Azure Portal, enabling administrators to have a consistent user experience through familiar tools, managing on-premises resources as they would do in Azure’s public cloud
Azure Arc integration
As a hybrid designed solution, Azure Arc plays a key role, extending the Azure public platform to on-premises, helping building cloud-native applications and services with a consistent development, operations, and security model. Through Azure management and governance services, it delivers fleet management at-scale.
Figure 13. High-level solution architecture. * These will be delivered after initial Dell APEX Cloud Platform for Microsoft Azure launch
Simplify application modernization
Dell APEX Cloud Platform for Microsoft Azure is all about providing the optimal infrastructure foundation to deploy your modern and legacy applications, no matter where you want to deploy them and what specific use cases you are trying to address. This cloud platform will offer a broad choice of infrastructure nodes, some optimized for core datacenter and others for Edge and Remote Office’s or Branch Office’s (ROBO) use cases. Almost any type of workload deployment and operations gets simplified by the automated platform that has the rightsized infrastructure to host compute, storage, IO or throughput intensive workloads.
In this ample definition we can place generic virtualized workloads, transactional databases, AI/ML analytics, virtual desktop workloads, or containerized cloud-native applications. Edge and ROBO computing will have specific solutions as part of the portfolio, soon after the initial release.
Security and governance hardening
Dell 16th generation PowerEdge servers feature an enhanced Cyber Resilient Architecture that provides a hardened server design to protect, detect, and recover from cyberattacks. Since MC nodes in the APEX Cloud Platforms are built on 16th generation PowerEdge servers, the solution inherits the benefits of the Cyber Resilient Architecture.
Delivering the Cyber Resilient Architecture requires security awareness and discipline at each stage of development. This process is called the Security Development Lifecycle (SDL) model, in which security is not an afterthought but is rather an integral part of the overall server design process. This design process encompasses a view of security that spans the entire server lifecycle.
We are performing vulnerability scanning Black Duck® software composition analysis (SCA), penetration testing, threat modeling, code reviews, and more for every release of our APEX Cloud Platform for Microsoft Azure.
APEX Cloud Platform for Azure helps mitigate potential security and compliance risks by enforcing consistent Azure management and governance services from cloud to edge. It takes a full-stack approach to security with sophisticated controls and multilayered protection from security threats.