Dell APEX Block Storage: It’s Not Where You Do Cloud, It’s How You Do Cloud
Fri, 13 Oct 2023 22:36:19 -0000
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The cloud isn’t just about where you are operating but how you are operating, a paradigm shift for many organizations. That’s where Dell APEX Block Storage comes in.
I’m not going to bore everyone with the history of Dell’s multicloud offerings announced at Dell Tech World and all the different APEX offerings being released. You can read all about those on the Dell APEX InfoHub. Instead, we’ll spend this bit of space talking about how Dell APEX cloud offerings systematically change how you do cloud rather than where you do cloud.
It’s safe to say that most readers here are familiar with the saying “the cloud is just someone else’s computer[s].” I even have a sticker someone gave me at a trade show a few years back with that quote, pictured here. The quote is commonly understood to say that the difference between operating in the cloud and in your own data center is where and whose computer you are using.
Figure 1. Sticker – There is no cloud, it’s just someone else’s computer
This is only a partially accurate statement though. By a show of hands, how many folks reading this would run their workloads the same way on someone else’s computer? You’re probably laughing and--if you work in IT security--potentially yelling at the screen right now. Why? Because it’s someone else’s computer! No one in IT would willingly move their workloads straight from the data center to a random computer and keep things the way they are. Rather, those systems would need to be reworked and reimagined to effectively “do cloud.”
We must approach the cloud as a mindset, not a location, asking “how can this workload be run on any computer — my computer, your computer, some “public” computer — and get the same results regardless?”. After all, it’s just someone else’s computer.
Diving into Dell APEX Block Storage
The Dell APEX offerings aren’t just another cloud, enabling organizations to readily adapt and adopt a cloud mindset for all workloads. For the sake of brevity, we’ll focus on the block storage varieties, Dell APEX Block Storage for AWS and Dell APEX Block Storage for Azure.
Dell APEX Block Storage allows you to consume cloud storage in either Azure or AWS. Both are powerful cloud platforms for enterprise workloads and PaaS offerings that aggregate low-cost cloud storage (just someone else’s storage) from the cloud provider to form cloud environments with enterprise-equivalent storage.
You might be asking, “what is ‘enterprise-equivalent storage?’” The answer may surprise you. Remember earlier when I described the cloud mindset of being able to run workloads anywhere? Adopting that, our workloads should function the same in the enterprise as well as in the cloud, encompassing not only performance (IOs and capacity) but also data resiliency, availability, and consistency across workloads.
But wait, only containerized workloads should run in “the cloud,” and those are already resilient. If a node goes down, just spin up another one. Why are containerized workloads special? Shouldn’t any workload be able to run anywhere, be it a traditional x86 application or a modern containerized app?
That’s why Dell APEX Block Storage is such an integral part of your organization’s cloud journey, enabling you to run any workload in any location and have the same experience. Who doesn’t want choice?
Beyond a consistent approach for consuming storage, the performance of that storage should be uniform across environments as well. Meaning, if you need a given number of IOPS or amount of storage capacity for a workload, they are imperative regardless of if it runs in your data center or on someone else’s computer (AKA the cloud).
The cloud provides many ways to satisfy resource requirements, some easy and some not so easy. If you want that consistent method for managing your data and workloads both on premises and in the cloud, Dell APEX Block storage makes it easy. It can aggregate cloud storage into a consistent, scale-out, software defined block storage service. Dell APEX Block Storage enables you to consume block storage from the cloud the same way you consume it in your own data center.
Deploying APEX Block Storage
Let’s walk through this concept. First, log in to your organization's Dell Premier Account. From the right-hand menu, select the Discover and Deploy option, then click on Available Services. From there, you will see the option, if entitled, to create a new APEX Block Storage instance. That can either be deployed on Amazon AWS or Microsoft Azure, as depicted in figure 2.
Figure 2. Dell Premier Account with APEX Block Storage capabilities enabled
Once you have completed the wizard, you will see additional instances or VMs in your cloud console of choice. The storage resources of these VMs (or instances) are aggregated to deliver APEX Block Storage that can be easily consumed. This is illustrated in the following figures for both APEX Block Storage for Azure and APEX Block Storage for AWS.
Figure 3. APEX Block Storage for Azure VMs
Figure 4. APEX Block Storage for AWS instances
What can APEX Block Storage do for you
The following diagram illustrates this aggregation and shows the relative ease with which storage can be expanded by simply adding an additional VM or instance in the cloud. You might be thinking, “that’s not a big deal, I’ve been doing that in my data center for several years”, and you’d be right. It shouldn’t be a big deal. Expanding storage should be the same, regardless of location.
Figure 5. Aggregating storage with Dell APEX Block Storage
Something else that has been happening in the data center forever is thin provisioning. I remember back when I first started in IT how cool it was to have a SAN in the office that could thin provision. That meant I had a SAN with 16 – 500GB drives or about 7TB of usable space, allowing me to allocate terabytes of space to my systems even though I didn’t have the capacity to deliver it. If I ever needed too, I could scale out my capacity to meet the greater demand by adding another shelf to the array. It was awesome and powerful and — for a young IT admin — it sure made life easier. Since then, I’ve always considered thin provisioning when building storage systems, and it’s nice that I can be consistent in my planning wherever my workloads run.
Additionally, Dell APEX Block Storage enables space efficient snapshots in the cloud, helping reduce your space consumption. The reason space efficient snapshots are a big deal is because, instead of making a copy of everything, only the changed bits are recorded. That’s monumental when you’re paying for every IO and byte of space.
Not only do you get space efficient snapshots, you can also have a lot of them. We’re talking 126 snapshots per volume or roughly 32k snapshots per storage pool, unlocking an abundance of capabilities, especially in the cloud. Remember the whole cloud is a mindset thing? Having data center options at your disposal can come in handy regardless of where the operations are taking place.
Snapshots are nice, but they don’t mean a thing if you can’t do something with them — preferably at the same time you are using the rest of the volume. With APEX Block Storage, you can do just that. You can mount the snapshots and read from or write to them like they are another volume in the environment, similar to what you have been doing with storage in the data center for years.
Earlier, I mentioned scaling. In that regard, Dell APEX Block Storage has you covered. Starting with 10TiB of useable capacity and scaling up to 4PiB in the cluster, I can create volumes that are 8GB all the way up to 1PiB, producing massive flexibility for building in the cloud and empowering you to meet the storage needs of your most demanding applications.
As you increase the capacity, rest assured the performance with Dell APEX Block Storage remains linear. As you can see from the following charts for IOPS and throughput, both scale linearly on both reads and writes, meaning you get reliable and consistent performance from the cloud1. This provides the opportunity to apply a cloud mindset at scale, allowing you to focus on optimizing cloud workloads as the cloud infrastructure is ready for them.
Figure 6. Linear IOPS as the number of nodes is increased in the APEX Block Storage environment
Figure 7. Linear throughput as the number of nodes is increased in the APEX Block Storage environment
Conclusion
Dell APEX Block Storage provides a host of capabilities, including aggregating underlying cloud storage into scalable and unified storage that linearly scales IOPS and throughput as new nodes are provided. We also looked at the availability of Dell APEX Block Storage in both Microsoft Azure and Amazon AWS clouds. Finally, we covered how cloud computing is a frame of mind to incorporate into our designs so our workloads can run in any location we choose.
Of course, the areas we went over just scratch the surface of applying a cloud mindset. After all, as we’ve said before, the cloud is just somebody else’s computer.
If you would like to find out more about how Dell APEX Block Storage can enhance your cloud journey, reach out to your Dell representative.
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Author: Tony Foster, Sr. Principal Technical Marketing Engineer
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1Based on internal testing, March 15th-16th 2021 – Extreme SLAs – Even in the Cloud