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One key element in Dell’s multicloud by design motion is referred to as cloud-to-ground. It is essentially delivering simplified cloud experiences for customers through collaborative innovation with our partners Microsoft, Red Hat, and VMware.
The outcome of these collaborations is modern cloud platforms and consumption models that enable customers to implement a cloud operating model for their entire IT infrastructure across the company, application, and data space.
These new platforms that help customers break the barriers for a multicloud successful adoption are built on Dell’s successful story in the hyperconverged space. Whether we look at the VMware hyperconverged infrastructure (HCI) or the Microsoft Azure Stack HCI markets we find the common fact that Dell offerings are market leaders. If we analyze in detail the key aspect that is common in both offerings is that they deliver real business outcomes through automated operations and lifecycle management. In the Microsoft space, this is mainly done via the Open Manage Integration with Windows Admin Center (OMIMSWAC), and in the VMware space through VxRail HCI System Software.
These offering had different building blocks on all the domains: Compute, Storage, and Network.
Figure 3. Building blocks for Dell’s Microsoft and VMware HCI offerings: Azure Stack HCI and VxRail
As newly designed solutions, Dell APEX Cloud Platforms have been conceived from a common infrastructure building block approach.
The compute layer is built on Dell MC (Multicloud) nodes. At this stage there are two types of nodes, MC-660 (based on Dell’s PowerEdge R-660) and MC-760 (based on Dell’s PowerEdge R-760).
The common storage layer is built on Dell’s Enterprise Software Defined Storage (SDS). This option is not available at first release for the Microsoft offering but will be ready later. Dell’s Enterprise SDS inherits the technology core to PowerFlex.
For infrastructure Management and Operations, all APEX Cloud Platform leverage the APEX Cloud Platform Foundation Software that plays a key role in:
Figure 4. Dell APEX Cloud Platforms common building blocks
Dell APEX Cloud Platform Foundation Software, a key building block for Dell APEX Cloud Platforms, inherits the technologies and innovation that resulted in the VxRail HCI System Software and its evolution over the years. The 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.
Dell APEX Cloud Platform Foundation Software consists of a collection of microservices running in a Linux-based virtual appliance. This Virtual Machine (VM) is the Cloud Platform Manager VM. It communicates with the underlying infrastructure and integrates automation workflows into the Dell APEX Cloud Platform extension in Microsoft Windows Admin Center. This VM is instantiated on each platform during initial cluster deployment, and it remains running throughout the life of the platform.
Cloud Platform Foundation Software integrates with native partner user interfaces (Windows Admin Center and Azure Portal for Microsoft, OpenShift Web Console for Red Hat, and vCenter for VMware), enabling administrators to have a consistent user experience through familiar tools, managing on-premises resources as they would in the public cloud. This software provides general benefits on automating platforms deployment and operations, as described in previous sections. But it also provides benefits that are specific to each cloud platform.
Although providing a fully automated end-to-end Day 1 deployment and cluster creation experience is a common feature for all APEX Cloud Platforms, the way it is delivered in the Azure space has its unique implications.
At its initial launch, in September 2023, Dell APEX Cloud Platform for Microsoft Azure in not customer installable. Dell offers a white-glove deployment experience via Dell ProDeploy Services to make the process smooth and successful. (This deployment experience will be made available soon for customers to drive.)
The APEX Cloud Platform Foundation Software provides specific benefits for Azure environments:
A broad set of publicly available RESTful APIs are a provided to customers to deliver greater cloud and IT automation extensibility.
Customers always have access to Dell Secure Remote Support (SRS) for all included hardware and software throughout the entire lifecycle of the infrastructure.
Figure 5. Dell APEX Cloud Platform Foundation Software
Multi-cluster, cloud-based management provides AI driven operations insights to provide detailed health checks, predictive analytics, and further simplifies the upgrade process by pre-staging all required components for individual cluster upgrades making management at scale easier than ever. Multi-cluster management also helps with the ability to rapidly scale up or out by proactively forecasting resource consumption. It learns the existing state of resource capacity, and leverages predictive analytics to forecast when a node might run out of storage, memory, or compute. This insight helps proactively address resource constraints before they happen.
Ecosystem connectors tightly integrate with infrastructure components including Dell Enterprise SDS, physical server components including network interface cards (NICs) and Graphic Processing Units (GPUs), enabling automation and orchestration services across the entire stack.
Automated, intelligent lifecycle management (LCM) functionality automatically updates clusters with pre-validated, pre-tested SW and firmware components, ensuring the infrastructure is in a continuously validated state.
Dell APEX Cloud Platform for Microsoft Azure
Dell APEX Cloud Platform for Microsoft Azure is a on-premises infrastructure platform that is designed to extend and optimize the Azure cloud experience. Dell APEX Cloud Platform for Microsoft Azure is the first offer in the market for Premier Solutions for Microsoft Azure Stack HCI. This platform is the result of extensive engineering collaboration between Dell and Microsoft, and it is designed to uniquely optimize Azure hybrid cloud operations across data center, edge, and colocation environments.
With over 60+ announced regions, Microsoft’s global reach is second to none, however, with a heritage in the enterprise, just like Dell, Microsoft realizes that meeting customers where they are, and where they need their workloads to run, is incredibly important. Back in 2019, Microsoft announced Azure Arc – a set of technologies that unlock key hybrid scenarios by bringing Azure services and management to any infrastructure. From its single control plane in Azure, organizations can manage, govern, and secure non-Azure resources side by side with native Azure resources, all from the comfort of the Azure portal. Since then, Azure Arc has grown in breadth and depth, providing more comprehensive range of services, along with management, governance, and security capabilities.
Azure Arc is a bridge that extends the Azure platform to help organizations build and run applications and services with the flexibility to run across on-premises datacenters, at the edge, and in multicloud environments and allows developers to build cloud-native applications with consistent development, operations, and security models. Through Azure Arc-enabled infrastructure, organizations can project non-Azure-based resources such as Azure Stack HCI, VMware vSphere, physical and virtual Windows and Linux servers, SQL Servers and Kubernetes clusters, into Azure, for purposes of management, security and governance and more. From there, Azure Arc-enabled services can be pushed out from Azure to run locally on-prem, unlocking a consistent experience to help modernize apps and workloads across your hybrid and multicloud environments.
Figure 6. Microsoft innovation with Azure and Azure Arc extensions
What are the specific capabilities that make Dell APEX Cloud Platform for Microsoft Azure unique?
Figure 7. Dell APEX Cloud Platform for Microsoft Azure
We are bringing the simplicity of Azure operations on-prem and to the edge. APEX Cloud Platform for Microsoft Azure empowers organizations to unlock innovation with a consistent and optimized Azure experience across all their IT environments. The platform helps to accelerate productivity by delivering familiar developer experiences across locations and by optimizing delivery of Azure Kubernetes Services and Azure Arc-enabled services.
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.
We are running Azure Stack HCI on our intelligently designed MC nodes. You can start with just a single node and scale up to 16 nodes in each platform.
Dell APEX Cloud Platform Foundation Software is one of the foundational stones. It runs in a virtual appliance on every platform and is the brains of the cluster providing management and orchestration at the granular, in-depth cluster-by-cluster level.
The Dell software defined block storage will run on MC storage nodes and will integrate with Azure Stack HCI at the OS level.
IMPORTANT: At initial release, Storage Spaces Direct will be the only storage subsystem we offer. We will release Dell software defined block storage soon after general availability.
As mentioned, Azure Arc is a bridge that extends the Azure platform to help you build cloud-native applications and services with a consistent development, operations, and security model. It also delivers fleet management at-scale with Azure management and governance services.
Dell APEX Cloud Platform for Red Hat OpenShift
For many years, our customers have told us they need to be more flexible, agile, and purposeful about how and where they develop and run their applications and workloads. For most organizations that has meant an evolution to virtualization and more recently to containers to modernize their environments, so they can accelerate development and optimize production workload placement. This has been a rapid evolution, Organizations of all sizes are either currently running containers, actively evaluating containers, or trialing them in non-production environments.
In a multicloud environment, customers will run containers in public clouds and on-prem -- and our goal with the APEX Cloud Platform for Red Hat OpenShift -- is to transform how customers deploy, manage, and run container orchestration on-prem.
There can be multiple challenges to implementing containers and container orchestration platforms, including management inefficiencies, and “marrying” the data plane and the application plane together.
Today, most Kubernetes orchestration platforms run in a virtual environment. This is because it can be extremely complex to deploy Kubernetes on bare metal. However, that can be inefficient from a performance perspective and result in unnecessary expenses- the “virtualization tax”.
However regardless of which deployment method the customers choose, the application plane is generally disparate and uncoordinated from the data plane. Often organizations have to manage these two layers separately, - this could cause application issues if there are storage bottlenecks that go unnoticed and make it difficult to optimize storage services across containers.
Together, our goal with the APEX Cloud Platform for Red Hat OpenShift is to address both of those deployment challenges and help customers transform how they run OpenShift on-premises --- and we do that by delivering a fully integrated stack - including OpenShift, compute, storage resources and automation software.
Figure 8. Dell APEX Cloud Platform for Red Hat OpenShift
With this turn-key approach optimized for bare-metal, we help customers overcome complexities and get the best results from their modern applications.
We are uniting the data and application plane with this platform, so customers can operate the whole stack as one unified application delivery platform, simplify how they manage different layers of infrastructure and ensuring optimal application outcomes.
This new, on-premises infrastructure platform has been jointly engineered with Red Hat to provide faster time to value, simplify operations, and ensure a more secure environment, all while reducing licensing costs.
You can think of it as a unified application delivery platform that helps delivering a solution to address our joint customers’ top priorities:
Let us take lowering cost and complexity first. Customers can now eliminate the virtualization tax – that means removing the costs associated with licensing and managing a hypervisor in a virtualized environment.
Then there is workload SLAs – there are inherent performance benefits from running your mission-critical applications on bare metal – and that means on-premises.
Finally, when it comes to security and governance, what we are really talking about is reducing the security attack plane. With a smaller attack surface, a bare metal OpenShift deployment mitigates the vulnerability of virtualization.
Customers will benefit from our joint engineering -- from day one -- with deployment. We learned from our own internal testing, depending on a customer’s experience and expertise, it can take up to 10 days to deploy and configure OpenShift on bare metal infrastructure. With the APEX Cloud Platform, we have brought that down to just six hours. That means a 90% reduction in deployment time- talk about a faster time to value- customers can start developing and deploying apps almost immediately!
Once they are up and running, the underlying Dell APEX Cloud Platform Foundation Software drastically simplifies the management experience so IT teams can focus more on delivering business value -- through new apps and new features -- and spend less time managing infrastructure.
We all know security is top of mind for customers and the APEX Cloud Platform ensures that all components of the stack – BIOS, firmware, and more – are validated and in compliance when performing upgrades. Through Dell’s partnership with Red Hat, we are making critical security patches and upgrades available in real-time.
In terms of deployment, Dell APEX Cloud Platform for Red Hat OpenShift is built as a two-layer architecture that starts with a minimum of eight nodes, four dedicated to compute, and four dedicated to storage. CoreOs is installed on top of the compute cluster, as well as the OpenShift Controller and worker nodes. The rest of the Kubernetes and Management components can be seen in the following figure:
Figure 9. Dell APEX Cloud Platform for Red Hat OpenShift two-layer architecture
The result of these automated Day-1 deployment process is an OpenShift environment, fully operational, including:
The overall picture is shown in the next figure:
Figure 10. Dell APEX Cloud Platform for Red Hat OpenShift Day1 deployment outcome
Dell APEX Cloud Platform for VMware
Dell Technologies and VMware have a long story partnering on the development of integrated solutions in the HCI and multicloud space. As part of Dell’s Multicloud by Design strategy, we are working to release Dell APEX Cloud Platform for VMware, designed with the right balance between simplicity, scale, and flexibility.
Dell APEX Cloud Platform for VMware is a fully integrated turnkey system integrating Dell infrastructure and software and VMware cloud operating stacks delivering consistent multicloud operations by extending vSphere operating models across on-premises and edge environments. Managed through familiar tools like vCenter, combined with integrated automation, and leveraging a common Software Defined Storage (SDS) layer powered by PowerFlex, customers can drive consistency throughout multicloud deployments.
Figure 11. Dell APEX Cloud Platform for VMware
Dell APEX Cloud Platform for VMware is built on a common sets of building blocks:
The Dell APEX Cloud Platform for VMware takes advantage of the rich VMware ecosystem with Tanzu and VMware Cloud (VMC) to extend IT and application modernization as well as the ability to manage both VMs and K8s on-premises and in the public cloud. This enables developers and IT teams to develop anywhere and deploy everywhere.
Security is top of mind when managing multicloud infrastructure. Siloed application environments make it difficult to consistently enforce policies to establish a zero-trust approach. The lack of engineered integration between the hardware and ecosystem software increases the likelihood of misconfiguration and discourages updates. Automated full-stack lifecycle management means that upgrades and patches can be applied quickly and non-disruptively to improve security posture. Consistent operating environments across multiple deployments enables teams to apply hardened security and governance across locations. And layers of protection, from the cyber-resilient features embedded in the Dell PowerEdge hardware, to the vSphere security frame works developed by VMware in the application layer, serve to inherently secure deployments.
With this new offering, Dell broadens the range of VMware solutions, providing a choice of deployment for HCI and multicloud, Dell APEX Private Cloud, Dell APEX Hybrid Cloud, HCI and now Dell APEX Cloud Platform for VMware.