Multicloud management and mobility of distributed applications and data for the cloud has become a major pain point for enterprise. In a move to help address those challenges, Dell Technologies has partnered with Microsoft, Red Hat and VMware.

Dell is working with its partners to expand its Apex multicloud services portfolio by engineering turnkey cloud platforms that integrate Dell infrastructure and software with its partners' cloud operating stacks in an effort to create horizontal consistency out of distributed environments.

Sam Grocott, senior VP of product marketing for Dell, said businesses are “really struggling with the shift and pivot to large-scale multicloud and hybrid strategies,” in a press conference ahead of the Dell Technologies World event. More specifically, enterprises are finding it difficult to decide where each workload should run: on-premises, at the edge, in one cloud or in multiple clouds. “It's becoming a very complex setup and configuration to manage,” said Grocott, describing this reality as “multicloud by default.”

The partnership between cloud vendors is meant to usher in a much simpler world of “multicloud by design,” according to Caitlin Gordon, Dell Tech VP of multicloud product management. The vendor's Apex cloud platforms aim to “provide that simplified cloud experience, do that with trusted technology, but give [customers] the choice and the flexibility to do that wherever they want,” she explained.

In order to pursue that “multicloud by design” ideal, Dell partnered with cloud service providers Microsoft, Red Hat and VMware to develop Apex cloud platform offerings tailored to each cloud provider. This allows customers “to choose where they want [workloads] deployed and which partner they want to deploy with,” Gordon said.

Each offering is built primarily with horizontal consistency in mind, she added. The Apex cloud platform combines Dell PowerEdge hardware platforms, software-defined storage based on Dell PowerFlex tech, and automated management and orchestration — from firmware “all the way up to the cloud operating system for each one of these partners,” she said. “That means it's a consistent experience for any one of these stacks.”

The Apex cloud platforms also speed up time-to-value for each cloud operating system. Like an “easy” button, Gordon said, these services are able to “continuously validate” the entire stack and push out updates with one action. “We take care of making sure all that works together and [can] consistently be updated together,” she added.

Dell touts the Apex cloud platform for Microsoft Azure as the first of its kind, and Gordon anticipates the platform will “help our customers truly accelerate their app modernization,” she said. The platform uses Azure Arc-enabled infrastructure, management tools native to Microsoft and collaborative engineering processes between the two vendors. Together, that offers enterprises “a really seamless infrastructure experience.”

In a similar vein, the Apex cloud platform for Red Hat OpenShift is aimed at accelerating container-based, cloud-native application development. “It's all about simplifying that Red Hat OpenShift experience, enabling that development environment in any data center of choice and doing so as quickly as possible,” Gordon explained.

Dell's Apex cloud platform for VMware is focused on providing a native VMware management experience with Dell's software-defined storage on the backend. This allows customers to “have the experience, performance and scale of our enterprise class storage, and yet you can keep that completely as a VMware management experience,” Gordon said.

“Every one of these platforms is engineered to be used natively in any one of these environments,” she added. “Ultimately, this is about control, . . . workload portability and flexibility.”