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Design Guide – Consuming PowerFlex Block Storage from Dell APEX Cloud Platform for Microsoft Azure
Introduction
Introduction
Solution introduction
Overview Audience
What's New?
Design Guide introduction
Terminology
Architecture Concepts and Requirements Verification Summary and additional resources

Solution introduction

Home > APEX > Cloud Platforms > Guides > Design Guide – Consuming PowerFlex Block Storage from Dell APEX Cloud Platform for Microsoft Azure > Solution introduction

Solution introduction

  • Overview

    Dell APEX Cloud Platform for Microsoft Azure is an on-premises, turnkey infrastructure platform that Dell Technologies and Microsoft collaboratively engineered to optimize the Azure hybrid cloud experience. Azure Stack HCI not only serves as the operating system for this platform but also delivers new hybrid capabilities through Azure Arc services at a rapid cadence. Storage Spaces Direct (S2D) is built into Azure Stack HCI and functions as the primary storage solution for the APEX Cloud Platform for Azure.

    For many workloads, S2D adequately meets the current and projected performance and resiliency requirements. Many customers appreciate its tight integration into the Azure Stack HCI ecosystem and the ability to fully standardize on Microsoft technologies. In addition, APEX Cloud Platform Foundation Software fully automates the deployment and life cycle management of Azure Stack HCI with S2D as the primary storage. However, certain workloads might benefit from an alternative disaggregated storage solution.

    APEX Cloud Platform for Azure is the first offer in the Microsoft Premier Solutions for Azure Stack HCI category that supports linear scaling of storage resources independently from Azure Stack HCI compute and S2D with Dell PowerFlex software-defined storage. This design guide provides the conceptual and architectural foundation that you will need to successfully configure Azure Stack HCI clusters to consume PowerFlex block storage.

    Extending the Azure Stack HCI storage fabric to include PowerFlex block storage enables new use cases and provides many benefits:

    • Run a highly diverse set of workloads - including mission-critical databases and applications that require significantly low latency and high transactional performance at large scale beyond S2D's default capability.
    • Deliver consistent I/O performance for streaming, ingestion, and reporting transactions within AI and data analytics applications.
    • Achieve 99.9999% availability with extremely fast rebuild and rebalance operations.
    • Address exponential data growth with a modular scale-out architecture.

    APEX Cloud Platforms with PowerFlex is a key building block in the creation of a universal storage layer. A universal storage layer is created when common software-defined storage services are deployed across all locations where your data lives and applications run. You can enable native replication between on-premises APEX Cloud Platform for Azure with PowerFlex clusters and APEX Block Storage for Microsoft Azure. This enables new options for disaster recovery in your Azure Stack HCI environments.