Dell Technologies unveiled several new multicloud capabilities under its Apex portfolio to help organizations manage, store, and protect data across different cloud environments along with DevOps-support platforms.

Some 83% of organizations have adopted a multicloud approach or plan to within the next 12 months, according to a recent Forrester study commissioned by Dell.

However, the challenge for using multiple clouds is “none of them really work together,” said Caitlin Gordan, VP of product management at Dell Technologies. And that results in more data and operational silos combined with less visibility and unpredictable cost, she added. 

The new services “help our customers move into a world of what we would call multicloud by design, to move out of this by default, and really get into a place where you've designed your multicloud strategy to be able to work together,” Gordan said. “At the broadest level, that's really what our Apex portfolio is about.”

Dell founder and CEO Michael Dell in 2019 pledged to offer all the company's new products and several of its existing ones under its on-demand portfolio. The vendor unboxed its Apex portfolio of as-a-service offerings last May, which includes Apex Data Storage Services, Apex Cloud Services, Apex Custom Solutions, and Apex Console.

Apex Multicloud Data Services Simplify Data Access

Dell’s Apex Console is a unified dashboard that enables customers to deploy workloads and monitor costs and system health as well as shop for cloud services via an online marketplace.

Integrated with this dashboard, Dell today introduced Apex multicloud data services, which is a fully-managed service for its storage portfolio. It provides file, block, and object storage as well as data protection with simultaneous access to all major public clouds. 

“​What that really enables us to do is help customers keep their data in one place,” Gordan explained. “And they're essentially paying for the service of the storage and the interconnect to the public clouds.”

This helps break down some data silos and avoid public cloud vendor lock-in, egress fees, and the cost and risk associated with moving data from one cloud to another, Dell claims. 

Dell is “in a unique position” to solve customer challenges across a broad set of public clouds because it plays in the vast majority of all the infrastructure markets, Gordan said. “We have the advantage of our customer base, as well as all of our engineering capability and supply chain capability around being able to support that infrastructure broadly.”

These advantages enable Dell to build a broad ecosystem of software and services to “support probably a broader set of use cases than anyone else could,” she added.

The Apex multicloud services will be available in the United States, United Kingdom, Germany, and Australia later this quarter.

Apex Backup Services Secure Data in Cloud

Dell also rolled out a software-as-a-service (SaaS)-based data protection application dubbed Apex Backup Services. It offers centralized data monitoring and management for SaaS applications, endpoints, and hybrid workloads.

“There's no infrastructure to manage,” Gordan said, adding that customers can deploy the backup services in minutes and scale on demand. 

In addition, Dell built ransomware protection capabilities into the services, which makes it “a software-as-a-service simplified approach to ransomware protection in cloud,” she added.

Dell also recently teamed up with Amazon Web Services (AWS) to offer an air-gapped cyber vault designed to secure, isolate, and recover data from a ransomware attack, which is part of its PowerProtect Cyber Recovery portfolio. ​​

Gordan described this service as a “full-fledged, enterprise-class, sheltered-harbor, validated, certified solution,” designed for the most stringent environments.

Dell Expands Data Storage Portfolio

On top of data access and protection, Dell also extended its storage portfolio with Project Alpine, which aims to deliver flexibility and consistency in managing data between on-premises and public clouds environments.

Project Alpine brings Dell’s block and file storage software to major public clouds, and it can be delivered as a software or as a fully-managed service.

Dell expanded its managed enterprise storage service to 13 countries last year. Now, the Apex data storage services are also available at Equinix colocation facilities in the United States, United Kingdom, France, Germany, and Australia.

Dell Increases Kubernetes Support

In addition to the technology enhancement in customers' multicloud journey, Dell says it is also paying attention to the people aspect: developers. “Developer velocity is a really important thing,” Gordan said.

Because of this, Dell partnered with cloud vendors including Amazon, Microsoft, Google, IBM’s Red Hat, and VMware to provide a range of DevOps-ready platforms and support a variety of different Kubernetes distributions and cloud environments on its infrastructure. 

The most recent addition includes support for Amazon EKS Anywhere platform on Dell’s PowerFlex and PowerStore systems and SUSE Rancher container management platform on Dell’s VxRail.

The vendor also expanded its developer portal to serve as a one-stop shop for application developers and DevOps teams looking to provide infrastructure as code.

The refreshed portal “gives customers direct access to all of our automation, all of our APIs, tutorials, documentation, everything,” Gordan explained.  “So it can be a self-service experience for our customers to be able to consume this and deploy Dell infrastructure as code.”