Dell Technologies Inc. today introduced a raft of additions to its APEX product portfolio that will enable companies to buy more of their infrastructure on an as-a-service basis.

The offerings debuted at the company’s annual Dell Technologies World conference, which is taking place this week in Las Vegas. Some of the new offerings focus on helping enterprises more easily procure data center hardware. The others will ease the management of cloud-based storage clusters and employee devices.

“Our customers continue to look for a simpler technology experience to easily manage and access their assets and applications with predictable costs and greater flexibility,” said Dell co-Chief Operating Officer Chuck Whitten. “That’s where Dell APEX comes in. Now, Dell APEX spans the breadth of our portfolio to give customers greater freedom for technology to support businesses as their needs dictate.”

Dell APEX Compute

Introduced in 2020, APEX is a portfolio of hardware and software products that Dell provides on an as-a-service basis. Companies don’t have to purchase everything upfront, which is how data center hardware was historically procured. Instead, they can pay for new infrastructure in installments and add or remove more systems as their requirements change.

Dell today extended its APEX portfolio with the addition of a new hardware lineup called APEX Compute. According to the company, it will enable companies to buy bare-metal servers on a subscription basis rather than paying for them upfront. An administrator can place an order for new servers through the APEX Console, a cloud-based infrastructure management service, and have the systems delivered in as little as a few weeks.

Companies have the option to order their machines with Nvidia Corp. graphics cards. Dell can deliver the hardware to a data center, edge location or colocation facility specified by the customer. Companies also have a choice in how to deploy their APEX Compute servers: They may have Dell set up the machines, manage the process in-house or entrust the task to a Dell partner.

Simplified hybrid cloud storage 

In addition to introducing new compute offerings, Dell today expanded the number of storage products available as part of the APEX portfolio. It debuted two software products for managing data that companies keep in the public cloud. Dell is furthermore rolling out a third, related service for managing those two products.

The first new offering, APEX Block Storage, is a cloud-version of the software that Dell offers with its on-premises storage systems. It can be deployed on Amazon Web Services and Microsoft Corp.’s Azure platform. Dell envisions customers using the software to power workloads such as databases, analytics tools and containerized applications.

According to Dell, APEX Block Storage can automatically optimize what instance types are provisioned in a cloud environment based on workloads’ requirements. The software is capable of supporting up to 2,048 instances per cluster. Additionally, it can spread out a cluster across cloud data centers in multiple parts of the world to reduce the risk posed by localized outages.

According to Dell, the fact that APEX Block Storage is based on the same software as its on-premises storage systems will ease certain maintenance tasks. In particular, the company says that moving data between on- and off-premises environments will be relatively simple for customers. Additionally, administrators already familiar with Dell’s on-premises storage hardware won’t won’t have to be trained in using new management tools. 

Dell promises to provide a similar set of benefits with APEX File Storage. It’s a newly announced cloud version of OneFS, the company’s on-premises file storage software. The offering is designed to power performance-intensive workloads such as machine learning applications.

APEX File Storage will be available for AWS on launch. According to Dell, the software is capable of powering cloud-based storage clusters with up to one petabyte of capacity. Each such cluster can read and write up to 10 gigabits and 4 gigabytes of data per second, respectively.

The new storage management offerings are joined by a third, software-as-a-service application called APEX Navigator for Multicloud Storage. It will allow administrators to manage APEX File Storage and APEX Block Storage clusters through a centralized console. The tool promises to simplify common tasks such as provisioning new capacity, which Dell says can be performed with only four steps.

Rounding out the list of new additions to the company’s storage portfolio is another software product called APEX Navigator for Kubernetes. It will help companies manage the data in their Kubernetes environments. The tool can be used alongside Dell’s Container Storage Modules, a suite of software tools for maintaining container clusters.

New hybrid cloud systems

Dell introduced the new storage offerings alongside a collection of appliances, also included in the APEX portfolio, that will help companies build hybrid cloud environments. The appliances can use APEX Block Storage to move on-premises data to the cloud and vice versa. They also include software that automates patching. 

All the new appliances are based on Dell servers. They’re organized into three product lineups that each offer integration with a different third-party software platform. 

The first set of appliances will integrate with Microsoft’s Azure Arc service. The service enables applications written for the Azure cloud platform to run on-premises, including at edge locations. Dell will offer systems optimized for use in both data centers and at the edge.

In parallel, the company is rolling out servers that integrate with Red Hat OpenShift and VMware Inc.’s vSphere. OpenShift is the commercial Kubernetes platform of IBM Corp.’s Red Hat unit. According to Dell, the platform’s management console will enable administrators to manage both containers and the underlying hardware resources centrally.

End-user computing 

As part of its efforts to grow its as-a-service business, Dell is extending the APEX portfolio beyond backend infrastructure to personal computers. At the center of the push is a new offering called APEX PC-as-a-Service that also made its debut today.

According to Dell, companies can now purchase laptops, desktops and workstations through one- to five-year subscriptions. They can also buy related products. Dell is offering support services, device management software and partner-developed cybersecurity tools.

A number of early customers are already using APEX PC-as-a-Service. According to Dell, those customers have  lowered their device support costs by 30% and reduced the amount of time it takes to deploy new computers. 

Photo: Wikipedia