Dell APEX multicloud strategy continues to evolve

Firms are increasingly being tasked with navigating a fancy multicloud landscape, which requires sophisticated strategies — corresponding to the Dell APEX multicloud approach — to administer diverse cloud environments across public, private and edge locations. The complexity is complicating IT infrastructures and demanding more advanced solutions.

There may be a balance at play here. Executive leaders must balance the greater flexibility of technology options offered by a multicloud strategy against the greater complexity and increased costs of multicloud strategy, in line with Gartner Inc.

“A multicloud strategy increases the complexity and price of IT, and demands greater skills. While most organizations will eventually be multicloud, many adopt multiple providers without deliberate planning, creating unnecessary chaos,” the technological research and consulting firm wrote in a February 2024 report.

With multicloud challenges in mind, Dell Technologies Inc. has sought to reply with its Dell APEX multicloud solution. Launched in 2020, APEX was designed to deliver a unified, consistent experience across all environments, in line with Shannon Champion, vice chairman of product marketing at Dell Technologies.

“APEX was created to deliver multicloud by design — a seamless, modern cloud and consumption experiences in all locations that bring simplicity, agility and control,” Champion said last November.

There are three primary elements to the Dell APEX multicloud strategy. The primary element helps customers transition from ground to cloud using APEX Storage for Public Cloud, which offers enterprise-class storage software for block, file, and data protection across leading cloud providers. The second part involves integrating cloud ecosystems on-prem with consistency and control through APEX Cloud Platform, Champion explained. Moreover, the corporate goals to simplify multicloud experiences with a variety of dedicated IT landscapes and subscription-based services, making a universal storage layer with software-defined storage services.

“Once you have a look at that from a storage perspective, all of this together really creates that universal storage layer, this common set of software-defined storage services all over the place,” she said.

Because the past 12 months has unfolded, Dell has sought to proceed to evolve its APEX platform. While more is on the way in which, as might be revealed throughout the “Construct Now and for the Future With APEX Cloud Platform for Red Hat OpenShift” event, airing September 10 on thecube.net, it’s price looking back on the Dell APEX multicloud strategy, the corporate’s strategic partnerships and the impact of APEX in relation to navigating multicloud complexity and innovation. (* Disclosure below.)

Dell APEX multicloud key developments and strategic partnerships

With an eye fixed on tackling the complexities of each cloud-to-ground and ground-to-cloud operations, Dell has been trying to significantly expand its APEX Cloud Platform family. The primary problem customers are facing is increasingly operational complexity due to multicloud, in line with Sudhir Srinivasan, senior vice chairman of multicloud and data solutions at Dell.

“We’ve taken a holistic approach to multicloud that basically simplifies operations across cloud, on-prem, edge, wherever. The trick is the way to deliver that consistency in any respect layers of the stack, all the way in which from infrastructure all the way in which as much as the appliance layer,” Srinivasan said last October.

The APEX Cloud Platform family can also be intended to supply alternative, consistency and control through a set of common constructing blocks. The primary constructing block is the hardware.

“We bring our industry best, industry leading PowerEdge servers, the newest generation of PowerEdge servers, that are all based on the Intel 4th generation Zeon scalable processor,” Srinivasan said.

The second piece is software-defined storage, which works independent of which cloud stack is used. It brings the identical software-defined storage across all of them, in line with Srinivasan.

“The last piece is the management and orchestration software that makes this platform be what it’s, which is a turnkey solution, extreme levels of automation that provide you with a quick time to value,” he said.

The Dell APEX multicloud strategy can also be to embrace strategic partnerships, including with major cloud providers corresponding to Microsoft Corp. and APEX Cloud Platform for Microsoft Azure. That partnership involves an on-premises infrastructure platform, which was collaboratively engineered, in line with Caitlin Gordon, VP of product management, APEX Cloud Platform for Microsoft Azure, at Dell.

“It’s really all about bringing one of the best of what Microsoft has of their edge and data center technology with what Dell has brought along with the Azure Stack HCI software,” she said last September. “The entire magic of that is that we’ve integrated the total stack from the firmware all the way in which as much as the Microsoft software, and that’s fully automated.”

Managing the rise of generative AI

The rise of generative artificial intelligence is driving innovation across industries, and its role in managing multicloud environments is becoming increasingly vital. That’s resulting in increased resource demands to drive complex analytic processing. It’s something that Dell is targeted on provided that resources may not at all times be available in a single location, in line with Srinivasan.

“With the universal storage layer, now you may actually move data to wherever you wish, wherever you may have the GPUs, for instance, to give you the chance to do your AI,” he told theCUBE.

The APEX Cloud Platform Foundation Software can also be a key a part of the corporate’s strategy in relation to developing at common framework for management and orchestration. Dell has prolonged the reach of its automation and lifecycle management software, expanding its capabilities beyond hyperconverged systems to encompass the broader multicloud infrastructure, Srinivasan identified.

The automation enabled by the Dell APEX Cloud Platform Foundation Software significantly cuts down on deployment time, in line with the corporate. That works out to a cut in deployment time by greater than 90% while reducing time for complex lifecycle management tasks by as much as 90%.

“Further, we performed over 21,000 hours of interoperability testing for every major release, ensuring predictability and reliability,” the corporate wrote in a blog post.

A glance toward the longer term

Over the course of Dell’s APEX journey, the corporate has sought to make strides in addressing the complexities of multicloud environments, whether that involves expanding its APEX Cloud Platform family or integrating AI-driven solutions. Over time, there was a trend within the landscape away from a cloud-first mindset toward a more balanced approach, in line with Rob Strechay, principal analyst at theCUBE Research.

“Firms and organizations that we consult with are really taking a tough have a look at where they place their applications going forward, not only going cloud-first or cloud-only,” he said, after Dell’s APEX expansion for on-premises Microsoft Azure Cloud deployments.

As an alternative, firms have backed off of that strategy in favor of taking a look at colocation, in line with Strechay. It’s led to on-prem becoming more in vogue for cloud-native apps.

“They will get that agility on-prem that they’re so used to within the cloud,” said theCUBE Research chief analyst Dave Vellante, in the identical conversation. “Possibly in case you need like massive scale and unlimited resources, then perhaps you place those within the cloud. But it surely really is far more of a balanced picture.”

Elements corresponding to the Dell and Microsoft announcement have further illustrated an approach to those firms in search of to run workloads across multiple locations, from cloud to edge. That’s been a vision one can trace back to the early instantiations of the Azure stack, in line with Vellante.

“But it surely didn’t quite have that kind of common experience that we’re now seeing,” he said. “[Customers] can get that agility on-prem that they’re so used to within the cloud. It starts to blur the lines between private and non-private.”

As Dell has continued to refine its APEX strategy over the past 12 months, it has been focused on navigating the evolving demands of the multicloud landscape while in search of to cut back complexity and enhancing operational consistency. As firms look to adapt to a dynamic environment, future updates to APEX will certainly proceed to be of interest within the months to come back.

(* Disclosure: TheCUBE is a paid media partner for the “Construct Now and for the Future With APEX Cloud Platform for Red Hat OpenShift” event. Neither Dell Technologies Inc., the sponsor of theCUBE’s event coverage, nor other sponsors have editorial control over content on theCUBE or SiliconANGLE.)

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