Discover the powerful features of Dell Apex Navigator for block storage deployment in multi-cloud environments. Learn about its benefits, including centralized management, sub-millisecond performance, and enterprise data features. Follow a step-by-step guide as we demonstrate the deployment process, from configuring AWS accounts to setting up storage details and confirming the deployment. Apex Navigator ensures a seamless, secure, and automated experience for your storage needs.
And today, I wanted to show or record a brand new video for Dell Apex Navigator block storage deployment. We just released it officially in November 2023 at the end of the month. And I wanted to show all the new features and functionality. So let's get started first off.
Why would we use Dell Apex Navigator? Well, it is built for centralized management, multi-cloud experience, and the multi-cloud environments that a lot of our clients have been asking for for a long time. If you're looking for sub-millisecond performance that you had on-premises, you want it in the public cloud, maybe a database backend. Here's another great use case: scaling larger than the public cloud limits allow, multi-AZ. I love this one because this is a single cluster when we deploy it that deploys across multiple availability zones, talk about resilience, and of course, the enterprise data features that you know and love from on-premises that you don't have in the cloud, thin provisioning, snaps, data mobility just to name a few.
So let's dig here deeper and let's take a look at what an experience looks like with Apex Navigator first off: the single sign-on experience. Now, this is a Dell Premier sign-in I preconfigured this account. This is what ensures that users that have the login that have the IT ops role associated with it with a Dell Premier account. Those are the only people that can actually get to Apex Navigator and deploy and manage the storage. That's how we deal with security very highly effectively. So I'm gonna click continue here for the Dell Premier sign-in. This will redirect over to Octa, and that's what we're using inside our labs inside Dell for IDP Federation for authentication. Yours may be different. So I have my token here and now I can go ahead and move on to the Apex portal.
So perfect here right inside of the Dell home page, you see account up there, I'll click on account, and now I'm in the Apex Navigator home portal. Here we're here today to do a deployment. We see it's aligned with the IOPS role. We'll go to manage storage and we're gonna click manage cloud deployments, which is going to bring us to a page that would have a lot of deployments if you were there if we had more. But we're gonna click deploy system. And right here is step one. Now, this is where we initially set up our storage deployment. We're gonna select a product, a cloud, and a region, the regions aligned with which cloud you pick. In this case, we have AWS that's available right now, the product versions 4.5.0.1 and then pick the region of choice. In this case, I'm going to pick East one that is done with step one, click continue.
Now, I'm on to step two. So as part of step two, I've actually preconfigured my AWS account to have all the configuration needed to give back to Apex Navigator. How do I do that? Well, policies and permissions are all available for you to copy and paste into your AWS account. Build the proper policies and permissions, get the ARN back, you plug it in and then it will show up here as AWS account, you see my AWS account in the drop down. So that's the only one available, I'll pick it and click continue.
Now, the third step out of four is where we're gonna set up all the storage configuration details. So first off, I'm gonna give this deployment a name. You see there's a couple of options there for the storage types that's balanced or performance-optimized depending on what your workload requires. You can make those type of choices at this time and then scrolling down a little bit, we can configure the more storage details. Of course, the capacity and the IOPS. That's all part of what you can configure. Here comes multi-AZ, we talked about this earlier. Again, that's a single cluster. If you pick multi-AZ that spans across multiple availability zones for resilience very powerful. Now, we can either select or create a new VPC. I'm gonna create a new one. I'm gonna populate the and give it a name here. BPC deployment details. I give it a name, I give it a rable IP range and of course an IP range for the Subnets and its associated Cider block super easy here with the parameters you need to provide. And then lastly, we want to give a key pair for SSH. In case we need to SSH into these storage instances that are deployed up to AWS at a later time, we can do that. So we'll go ahead and build that key pair and click continue, and that's step four.
Now we're on to step four here confirming and deploying what the wizard has set up for us. So we'll go through a review here. You see we have a little pencil there. If we need to make some changes on any of these steps, we can do it at this time. We'll keep scrolling down. And then we see here that apex block storage, which is deployed with Apex Navigator is free for 90 days. That's a good thing, scroll down a little bit farther and we can see the actual instances that are going to be consumed and or deployed and then consumed into AWS via apex navigator as apex block storage. We have some check boxes to confirm and acknowledge what we're doing here and then we simply click deploy.
Now, once I click deploy here, this deployment is going to go off into AWS and start deploying the instances. And you're gonna see that here in just a second. I'm gonna click. I understand that my deployment has started. Perfect. Now, I'm gonna browse the running jobs. I know I have one job running that is my deployment. So there's the details. It's at 0% because it just got started. We see all the high level steps there and they're all queued up as part of this automated deployment. That's perfect. Let's jump over to the AWS portal because what's going on over there? Well, there's the instances that are initializing. We see them getting spun up right there. Those are the ones that we previously confirmed. We can look over to the BPCS inside the AWS portal.
There's that same BPC that I configured with Navigator. It's being automatically deployed and configured with the Ciders and the routes and the load balancers, everything's getting configured. There's some of the details for that BPC, that's just all automated. The SCG secure gateway is now deploying here. We see it just popped up and its configuration details and I'll jump back over to apex Navigator. And I see also that aligns with what I'm seeing in Navigator for the logging the logging in Apex Navigator, by the way, is very robust, very useful to understand the play by play of what's going on with the deployment back over. I see the machines are now stood up. Now, we have the apex block storage that's getting deployed. There it goes. And this will take a little bit of time. So I did fast forward but I fast forward about two hours and 13 minutes and the deployment is absolutely complete. It cuts it down quite a bit from doing it manually. And again, it's fully automated, the errors, no more, uh, error-prone, manual deployments, all fully automated, which is super cool and awesome to see. And at that point, that's it.
Thank you very much for watching Apex block storage deployed with Apex Navigator. Thank you.
