Dell Technologies Advances APEX Multicloud IT Operations

Dell Technologies is expanding its APEX Cloud portfolio with a series of new initiatives and partnerships designed to better enable multicloud IT operations.

The new cloud technologies were announced at Dell Technologies World 2023 that ran May 22-25 in Las Vegas. At the event, Dell Technologies outlined its multicloud strategy and announced a new edge operations platform and a cybersecurity strategy.

The news highlights from the event included the introduction of the following products:

Dell

"Right now, we have more power than ever before to turn ideas into innovations that fundamentally improve our businesses, life, and the entire world," Michael Dell, CEO and founder of Dell Technologies, said during the opening keynote.

APEX Expands for Multicloud Era

The Dell Technologies APEX portfolio comprises hardware and software components.

It's somewhat of a hybrid cloud approach, where on-premises assets are referred to by Dell as being on the "ground" and can integrate with public cloud technologies.

"This is the largest expansion ever to our APEX offerings, bringing customers a modern cloud experience and consumption model built for multicloud," Dell said.

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Chuck Whitten, co-chief operating officer at Dell Technologies, explained during a keynote that to enable a multicloud experience, organizations need a set of ground-to-cloud capabilities. Dell has been working on something it calls Project Alpine as a solution for extending advanced storage software capabilities out to public clouds.

There is also a need for cloud-to-ground capabilities to bring the cloud experience of all major cloud stacks down to on-premises IT, Whitten noted. And finally, he said that there is a need for "air traffic control" that brings consolidated deployment, monitoring, and management across and organization's IT assets and the ability to enable data mobility.

As part of the APEX expansion, Dell announced the new APEX Block Storage for Azure. The service will enable Dell's storage technology to directly work with the Microsoft Azure cloud. Dell also announced APEX Block Storage for AWSand APEX File Storage for AWS that bring Dell's file and block storage platforms to AWS.

In addition, Dell announced the new APEX Cloud Platform for VMware.

"This is our purpose-built cloud platform for VMware virtualized environments using Dell's high-performance software-defined storage and automated lifecycle management," Whitten said. "This is for customers looking to move and scale their workloads across their public cloud and on-premises environments and looking to streamline operations by tapping into existing VMware skill sets."

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Rounding out the partner integration is the APEX Cloud Platform for Red Hat OpenShift. Whitten explained that the new service is Dell's new purpose-built, fully integrated platform for deploying Red Hat's OpenShift cloud-native platform on-premises.

Going a step further is the new APEX Navigator for Multicloud Storage. Whitten explained that the APEX Navigator is a technology for providing "air traffic control," bringing consolidated deployment, monitoring, and mobility for APEX block and file storage across multiple public clouds.

"From cloud-to-ground, we're delivering a portfolio of integrated cloud platforms across hybrid cloud, virtualized, multicloud, and container orchestration environments with our partners Microsoft, VMware, and Red Hat," Whitten said. "So you can choose your preferred cloud service with the security, performance, efficiency, and control of an on-premises solution."