Recently at Dell Technologies World we unveiled our latest advancements for multicloud environments. Despite the potential to unlock tremendous innovation, the siloed nature of multicloud environments and infrastructure present challenges, such as lack of control and visibility, unpredictable costs, fragmented management experiences, complex data mobility processes and inconsistent security and compliance measures.
To address these issues, last year Dell introduced Project Alpine, an initiative aimed at bringing the unique software capabilities of our leading storage platforms to major public clouds. This year, Dell is delivering on the promise of Project Alpine with the launch of Dell APEX Storage for Public Cloud. This new portfolio of software-defined, customer-managed storage solutions brings Dell’s enterprise-class performance, scalability and cyber resilience to major hyperscalers, complemented by centralized management tools within the Dell APEX Console.
Enterprise-Class Block Storage in the Cloud
Many IT organizations have mission-critical workloads that require enterprise-class block storage, including large databases and containerized database workloads, analytics workloads or multiple container deployments. Dell APEX Block Storage for AWS and Microsoft Azure enables these workloads to be deployed in the public cloud. Dell APEX block storage is based on Dell PowerFlex software, a scale-out software-defined block storage offering that has a proven track record of delivering exceptional performance, scalability and flexibility for demanding workloads in on-premises environments. Offering the ability to leverage enterprise storage features like thin provisioning make it more cost-effective to use block-based storage in the public cloud. Now, we’re extending those benefits to deliver higher performance, larger volume sizes and improved resilience than what is currently available with public cloud storage today.
Extreme Performance and Scalability
Dell APEX block storage has a scale-out software-defined architecture that enables extreme performance by aggregating the data access across the cluster to deliver large IOPs. The cluster can be rapidly expanded to increase both performance and capacity while maintaining low latency. Each additional node added to the cluster will increase the total IOPs to meet even the most demanding performance requirements, with the ability to scale up to 512 instances (nodes) in a single deployment providing millions of IOPs, and a usable capacity of 4 PB, to address the needs of workloads that require high throughput and access to lots of data. In fact, Dell APEX Block Storage for AWS offers the world’s most scalable cloud block storage service available in the market today.
Flexible Deployments
Organizations can optimize for both cost and performance with Dell APEX Block Storage for Public Cloud. During deployment, users can choose between placing their data on shared managed disks (Elastic Block Storage) or on native attached NVMe SSD drives (EC2 Instance Store) for more optimal performance workloads. Dell APEX Block Storage for AWS and Azure is the only third-party cloud block storage provider that gives you the choice of these two options. And Dell’s internal performance testing has shown significant advantages in terms of throughput, with the EC2 Instance Store option delivering up to six times the transactions per minute (TPM) compared to the shared disk deployment. By offering these choices, businesses are enabled to tailor their configurations based on specific cost and performance requirements.
Seamless Data Mobility
Dell APEX Block Storage for Public Cloud facilitates seamless data mobility using snapshots and native replication. Organizations can easily migrate their data from on-premises to the public cloud and establish warm standby copies in different regions for regional disaster recovery protection. Furthermore, customers can leverage Dell’s backup and restore offerings to object storage, such as S3 on AWS, to enhance data protection for their mission-critical workloads.
Enhanced Resilience
The unique architecture significantly increases resiliency by distributing data across multiple availability zones (AZs) in the public cloud. By leveraging fault sets mapped across three AZs, Dell APEX Block Storage for Public Cloud protects against the loss of data access in case of an AZ becoming unavailable. This resilience is achieved without impact on performance or throughput by eliminating unnecessary data replication or additional copies.
Cost Optimization and Savings
Best of all, Dell APEX block storage offers a cost-effective alternative compared to other cloud-based offerings. Internal analysis reveals that at 500 TB usable capacity, Dell APEX Block Storage for AWS can deliver three times (300%) more IOPs per dollar compared to the native AWS Ultra disk (EBS io2). This translates to significant cost savings while still enjoying enterprise-class block storage in the public cloud. Additionally, customers can apply their pre-committed cloud spend to cover the public cloud infrastructure fees. It’s a win-win.
To find out more about Dell APEX Block Storage for AWS and Dell APEX Block Storage for Microsoft Azure, go to our Dell APEX Public Cloud Storage page or reach out to your Dell sales team.
