It seems like we have a nice taste of Dell APEX sprinkled on everything these days. We are continuing to unpack all that Dell APEX can provide solutions for. Dell is right at the front, helping the multicloud acceleration adoption initiatives and efficiencies our clients are driving towards.

I am currently authoring a new paper on Dell APEX Block Storage that focuses on both the business case and the technical case. As I was writing, I included a few interesting nuggets on how Dell APEX Block Storage can accelerate multicloud SLA considerations. Multicloud acceleration focuses on improving performance, reducing latency, and optimizing resource utilization in a multicloud environment, by enhancing what the hyperscalers have already built. So, why Dell now?

I was recently having a conversation with one of Dell’s larger clients and they asked “Why is Dell getting into the software realm and competing with the hyperscalers? Isn’t Dell too late? Why Dell, now?”.

My response was this: With Dell APEX, we are arriving at the perfect time in history. We needed the hyperscalers to build out their extensive ecosystem topologies, PaaS and SaaS services and all the other good guy check boxes that create a gravitational pull to “the cloud”. Now, Dell Technologies matches the customer application needs with the correct solutions, in the correct location.

Dell is now uniquely positioned to offer our storage services (block, file, and backup) with the same platform admin skill sets, from ground to cloud, and cloud to cloud. We can even solve for cloud to ground with our APEX Cloud Platforms for Azure, OpenShift, and VMware. With Dell and any major cloud vendor, we truly have and deliver the ”AND” story.

So far, I have not seen the SLA angle addressed out in the wild, so let’s tackle it here. This is a super interesting opportunity for Dell APEX Block storage, and file, deployed in any public cloud to address SLAs (Service Level Agreements) that are lacking in public environments. As we all know, the cloud vendors are pretty much around three to four nines. Mostly three. Yes, you can potentially achieve additional “nines”, but this comes at a substantial cost.

Another awesome opportunity would be the ability to build in the SLA resiliency in “said cloud” with Dell APEX Block storage, without completely refactoring to cloud native. Many apps simply cannot get there because they’re constrained by legacy code and bloated data stores. The technical SMEs are required to find a way to lift and shift these legacy workloads to the cloud. These mission critical apps still need mission critical SLAs. With Dell APEX Block storage, these same mission critical legacy apps can now consume Dell APEX Block storage in AWS or Azure and potentially have the five or even six nines of availability. Our offer pools together the lower cost and lower durability volumes and can present up to six nines of SLA. Wow! That is awesome. The best of both worlds! Now, our legacy apps are resilient in the cloud and potentially can consume the additional PaaS and SaaS hyperscaler offerings.

Dell APEX Block Storage also saves VM storage deployment dollars by thin provisioning the storage that is presented to the VM. We also offer highly effective snapshotting without the snapshot count limitations, when compared with the hyperscalers.

We even have a single cluster combined with multi-availability zone configurations to allow our customers to provide highly operational efficiencies at the storage layer, within a cloud environment. Again, a win-win!

All of these factors line up to deliver the most stringent SLAs, in tangible and measurable ways. Combining the best of Dell software defined storage with cost-effective cloud agility is a win for even the most mission critical SLA requirements.

And if there is a need to move back on-premises, we also have that covered. The same software defined storage deployed as APEX Block Storage can also replicate back to on-premises as needed.

Stay tuned for my next white paper to expand on all the use case detail. Time to get back at it!

Resources

For more information, see the following:

• Video 1 APEX Navigator for Multicloud Storage demo
• Video 2 APEX Navigator Dell APEX Block Storage deployment into AWS
• Video 3 APEX Navigator and CloudIQ – Day 2 management and monitoring
• Video 4 APEX Navigator and Data Mobility
• Video APEX Navigator for Kubernetes
• The full APEX demo playlist
• Coming soon: White paper – Dell APEX Block Storage for Multicloud – AWS focus

Author: Robert F. Sonders, Technical Staff - Engineering Technologist, Multicloud Storage Software

About the author

Twitter: @RobertSonders

LinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/Robert-f-sonders