Companies are increasingly being tasked with navigating a complex multicloud landscape, which requires sophisticated strategies — such as the Dell APEX multicloud approach — to manage diverse cloud environments across public, private and edge locations. The complexity is complicating IT infrastructures and demanding more advanced solutions.

There is a balance at play here. Executive leaders must balance the greater flexibility of technology options offered by a multicloud strategy against the greater complexity and increased costs of multicloud strategy, according to Gartner Inc.

“A multicloud strategy increases the complexity and cost of IT, and demands greater skills. While most organizations will eventually be multicloud, many adopt multiple providers without deliberate planning, creating unnecessary chaos,” the technological research and consulting firm wrote in a February 2024 report.

With multicloud challenges in mind, Dell Technologies Inc. has sought to respond with its Dell APEX multicloud solution. Launched in 2020, APEX was designed to deliver a unified, consistent experience across all environments, according to Shannon Champion, vice president of product marketing at Dell Technologies.

“APEX was created to deliver multicloud by design — a seamless, modern cloud and consumption experiences in all locations that bring simplicity, agility and control,” Champion said last November.

There are three main elements to the Dell APEX multicloud strategy. The first element is helping customers transition from ground to cloud using APEX Storage for Public Cloud, which offers enterprise-class storage software for block, file, and data protection across leading cloud providers. The second part involves integrating cloud ecosystems on-prem with consistency and control through APEX Cloud Platform, Champion explained. Additionally, the company aims to simplify multicloud experiences with a range of dedicated IT landscapes and subscription-based services, creating a universal storage layer with software-defined storage services.

“When you look at that from a storage perspective, all of this together really creates that universal storage layer, this common set of software-defined storage services everywhere,” she said.

As the past year has unfolded, Dell has sought to continue to evolve its APEX platform. While more is on the way, as will be revealed during the “Build Now and for the Future With APEX Cloud Platform for Red Hat OpenShift” event, airing September 10 on thecube.net, it’s worth looking back at the Dell APEX multicloud strategy, the company’s strategic partnerships and the impact of APEX when it comes to navigating multicloud complexity and innovation. (* Disclosure below.)

Dell APEX multicloud key developments and strategic partnerships

With an eye on tackling the complexities of both cloud-to-ground and ground-to-cloud operations, Dell has been looking to significantly expand its APEX Cloud Platform family. The number one problem customers are facing is more and more operational complexity because of multicloud, according to Sudhir Srinivasan, senior vice president of multicloud and data solutions at Dell.

“We’ve taken a holistic approach to multicloud that really simplifies operations across cloud, on-prem, edge, wherever. The trick is how to deliver that consistency at all layers of the stack, all the way from infrastructure all the way up to the application layer,” Srinivasan said last October.

The APEX Cloud Platform family is also intended to provide choice, consistency and control through a set of common building blocks. The first building block is the hardware.

“We bring our industry best, industry leading PowerEdge servers, the latest generation of PowerEdge servers, which are all based on the Intel 4th generation Zeon scalable processor,” Srinivasan said.

The second piece is software-defined storage, which works independent of which cloud stack is used. It brings the same software-defined storage across all of them, according to Srinivasan.

“The last piece is the management and orchestration software that makes this platform be what it is, which is a turnkey solution, extreme levels of automation that give you a fast time to value,” he said.

The Dell APEX multicloud strategy is also to embrace strategic partnerships, including with major cloud providers such as Microsoft Corp. and APEX Cloud Platform for Microsoft Azure. That partnership involves an on-premises infrastructure platform, which was collaboratively engineered, according to Caitlin Gordon, VP of product management, APEX Cloud Platform for Microsoft Azure, at Dell.

“It’s really all about bringing the best of what Microsoft has in their edge and data center technology with what Dell has brought together with the Azure Stack HCI software,” she said last September. “The whole magic of this is that we have integrated the full stack from the firmware all the way up to the Microsoft software, and that’s fully automated.”

Managing the rise of generative AI

The rise of generative artificial intelligence is driving innovation across industries, and its role in managing multicloud environments is becoming increasingly vital. That’s leading to increased resource demands to drive complex analytic processing. It’s something that Dell is focused on given that resources may not always be available in one location, according to Srinivasan.

“With the universal storage layer, now you can actually move data to wherever you need, wherever you might have the GPUs, for example, to be able to do your AI,” he told theCUBE.

The APEX Cloud Platform Foundation Software is also a key part of the company’s strategy when it comes to developing at common framework for management and orchestration. Dell has extended the reach of its automation and lifecycle management software, expanding its capabilities beyond hyperconverged systems to encompass the broader multicloud infrastructure, Srinivasan pointed out.

The automation enabled by the Dell APEX Cloud Platform Foundation Software significantly cuts down on deployment time, according to the company. That works out to a cut in deployment time by more than 90% while reducing time for complex lifecycle management tasks by up to 90%.

“Further, we performed over 21,000 hours of interoperability testing for each major release, ensuring predictability and reliability,” the company wrote in a blog post.

A look toward the future

Over the course of Dell’s APEX journey, the company has sought to make strides in addressing the complexities of multicloud environments, whether that involves expanding its APEX Cloud Platform family or integrating AI-driven solutions. Over time, there has been a trend in the landscape away from a cloud-first mindset toward a more balanced approach, according to Rob Strechay, principal analyst at theCUBE Research.

“Companies and organizations that we talk to are really taking a hard look at where they place their applications going forward, not just going cloud-first or cloud-only,” he said, after Dell’s APEX expansion for on-premises Microsoft Azure Cloud deployments.

Instead, companies have backed off of that strategy in favor of looking at colocation, according to Strechay. It’s led to on-prem becoming more in vogue for cloud-native apps.

“They can get that agility on-prem that they’re so used to in the cloud,” said theCUBE Research chief analyst Dave Vellante, in the same conversation. “Maybe if you need like massive scale and unlimited resources, then maybe you put those in the cloud. But it really is much more of a balanced picture.”

Elements such as the Dell and Microsoft announcement have further illustrated an approach to those companies seeking to run workloads across multiple locations, from cloud to edge. That’s been a vision one can trace back to the early instantiations of the Azure stack, according to Vellante.

“But it didn’t quite have that sort of common experience that we’re now seeing,” he said. “[Customers] can get that agility on-prem that they’re so used to in the cloud. It starts to blur the lines between public and private.”

As Dell has continued to refine its APEX strategy over the past year, it has been focused on navigating the evolving demands of the multicloud landscape while seeking to reduce complexity and enhancing operational consistency. As companies look to adapt to a dynamic environment, future updates to APEX will surely continue to be of interest in the months to come.

(* Disclosure: TheCUBE is a paid media partner for the “Build Now and for the Future With APEX Cloud Platform for Red Hat OpenShift” event. Neither Dell Technologies Inc., the sponsor of theCUBE’s event coverage, nor other sponsors have editorial control over content on theCUBE or SiliconANGLE.)

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