Dell's APEX expansion aims to bring multicloud efficiency with … – SiliconANGLE News

Dell Technologies Inc. is continuing to roll out enhancements and new features for its APEX as-a-service portfolio.

This week, the company announced general availability of new capabilities for multicloud management along with APEX Block Storage for Amazon Web Services Inc. public cloud users.

“Our first set of management and operations capabilities within the Dell APEX Navigator family are going to be generally available with the announcement of Dell APEX Navigator for Multicloud,” said Alyson Langon (pictured, right), director of product marketing at Dell. “It’s going to deliver improved TCO, centralized management, seamless data mobility, operational consistency between on-prem and your public cloud environments, and unparalleled performance. We’re also announcing availability of Dell APEX Block Storage for AWS that will support Navigator, and we are going to be delivering our Dell APEX File Storage for AWS early next year.”

Langon spoke with theCUBE industry analyst Rob Strechay at the “Elevate Your Multicloud Experience With Dell APEX Navigator” event, during an exclusive broadcast on theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s livestreaming studio. She was joined by Magi Kapoor (left), director of multicloud product management at Dell, and they discussed the latest enhancements for the Dell APEX family of products. (* Disclosure below.)

Centralized intuitive experience

With the unveiling of APEX Navigator for Multicloud, Dell has focused on providing an easier experience, one that incorporated functionality for workloads, security and data migration.

“Through this centralized SaaS-based intuitive experience, customers are going to be able to get up and running quickly through the self-service APEX console or through APIs,” Langon said. “[They] are going to be able to optimize workload placement more easily with purposeful data and application mobility. You are going to be able to reduce risk with secure operations and zero-trust adoption, and you’re going to be able to do all of this from that single centralized user interface.”

The Block Storage offering for AWS is designed to capitalize on enterprise interest in bringing storage capabilities that have powered on-premises infrastructure into the public cloud arena where many workloads reside.

“This just builds upon the value of our storage endpoints in the cloud as well, bringing enterprise class storage capabilities into a public cloud environment,” Langon said. “Things like thin provisioning, data reduction, encryption, these are enabling customers to power even the most demanding and mission critical workloads in the public cloud that they weren’t necessarily able to do before.”

Security and control

The latest additions to APEX reflect Dell’s interest in providing organizations with robust security and a measure of centralized control, important functions as critical data moves between different computing environments.

“As we were building the product, there were two things that were absolutely important for us from a product standpoint,” Kapoor said. “One was keeping security front and center and second, making sure that we’re not just bringing the product from a UX perspective to our end customers, but also have an API-first approach. The reality is to really give the end customers full control over the operations that they are trying to do. The roles, the permissions, the groups, certificates and the keys, bringing it all in the hands of users was very important.”

Also important was simplifying the complex task of deployment. This can be a complicated process because cloud infrastructure requirements can vary and provisioning can be a time-consuming burden.

“It’s a very complex task of not just deploying enterprise storage in the public cloud…but also provisioning the underlying public cloud infrastructure that goes along with it,” Kapoor noted. “Our deployment is a pretty easy four-step process. We give the option to do not just single availability zone, but also multiple availability zones. You get to customize your storage endpoint that you want to deploy in the cloud.”

Improved storage management

Streamlined deployment includes an ability to retain familiar storage management tools, according to Kapoor. Dell has drawn from its proactive monitoring and analytics solution CloudIQ to provide this capability in storage.

“If storage admins, IT ops folks are used to the toolsets that have been available, we just make them available in a much more integrated and easy manner for them to go in and do their day-to-day activities,” Kapoor said. “For monitoring, we have our tool CloudIQ. It’s powered by the same capabilities of CloudIQ but extended to monitor the license inventory, the health performance capacity of your storage endpoints, not just your cloud endpoints, but also your on-prem systems.”

Mindful of cloud costs, Dell has run a benchmark study to document whether the APEX solution will save companies money, according to Langon. Dell also has data from a financial customer’s trial run with the APEX storage offering.

“Through this study, our Dell solution was able to deliver up to 87% cost savings compared to just a standalone, native, public cloud storage offering,” Langon said. “A large financial institution recently completed a four-month proof of concept with our APEX Block Storage for Public Cloud offering. They were able to see $14 million worth of savings over a five-year TCO and are going to be cashflow positive by year two.”

Is there more to come from Dell in the APEX family of products? Containers may be next.

“This is really just the first step,” Langon said. “We’re just going to continue to expand from there to support more endpoints, more public clouds. We’re talking about our Navigator for Multicloud, but coming on the heels of that, which we also talked about at Dell Tech World last year, will be our Navigator for Kubernetes.”

Here’s the complete video interview, part of SiliconANGLE’s and theCUBE’s coverage of the “Elevate Your Multicloud Experience With Dell APEX Navigator” event:

(* Disclosure: TheCUBE is a paid media partner for the “Elevate Your Multicloud Experience With Dell APEX Navigator” event. Neither Dell Technologies Inc., the sponsor of theCUBE’s event coverage, nor other sponsors have editorial control over content on theCUBE or SiliconANGLE.)

Photo: SiliconANGLE