Dell Technologies today expanded the scope of its APEX managed cloud offerings to include integration with the Microsoft Arc hybrid cloud computing framework in addition to fulfilling a commitment to deliver block and file storage services on the Microsoft Azure and Amazon Web Services (AWS) cloud platform.
At the same time, Dell at its Dell Technologies World conference also announced it is extending existing support for managed APEX instance of VMware to include storage services.
Dell is also making available a bare metal edition of the service, dubbed Dell APEX Compute, that provides IT teams with the option of deploying any virtual machine or Kubernetes cluster of their choice.
Finally, Dell is also making available an instance of an APEX managed service that supports Red Hat OpenShift, an application development and deployment platform based on Kubernetes.
Overall, Dell is promising IT teams will soon, for example, be able to move data seamlessly between on-premises environments and Dell APEX Block Storage for Public Cloud first for AWS and then later this year Microsoft Azure. As part of that effort, Dell is also launching Dell Navigator, a software-as-a-service (SaaS) platform for managing services such as data replication that includes an edition for Kubernetes clusters. In addition, Dell announced a partnership with Databricks to integrate on-premises storage systems from Dell with the Lakehouse Platform provided by Databricks as a cloud service.
Caitlyn Gordon, vice president of multi-cloud product management for Dell Technologies, also claimed that file services running on public clouds using Dell software will be four times faster processing writes than any rival offering.
The Dell APEX portfolio, at its core, is based on a suite of fully integrated, turnkey servers, storage systems, and now PCs as well, that are all managed by Dell on behalf of organizations that subscribe to APEX service much like any other cloud platform. Dell is now extending the reach of those services into cloud computing environments to make it simpler to deploy workloads everywhere from the network edge to the cloud, said Gordon.
Most IT organizations today are managing multiple clouds by default. The Dell APEX services simplify the management of those environments by employing the same type of operating model to managing on-premises IT environments, she added.
Dell is betting that as organizations deploy more complex cloud-native applications many of them will opt to rely more on external services to manage the underlying infrastructure those applications depend upon. That approach is intended to enable IT organizations to devote more resources to building and deploying applications.
It’s not clear whether organizations will prefer to rely on Dell to manage their IT versus continuing to manage it themselves, or rely on a third-party IT services provider. Of course, many internal IT organizations are not inclined to cede control over IT infrastructure and applications to a single IT vendor, especially if they employ IT infrastructure that has been provided by a broad spectrum of vendors.
Regardless of approach, there are now more organizations that prefer to treat IT as an operational expense. In effect, Dell is enabling a cloud operating model to be applied to all IT infrastructure regardless of where applications are deployed.
