Dell Technologies is prioritizing flexible consumption with the newest release of its Apex data storage service. Apex is now available in both a Dell-managed and customer-managed option to take into consideration an enterprise's available management resources, Dell Apex VP of Product Management Chad Dunn told SDxCentral.

With the Dell-managed option, customers hold onto operational control of their workloads and applications while the vendor maintains and manages on-premises infrastructure.

In the customer-managed storage service, organizations control their own day-to-day management, "which is ideal for IT teams that want to implement a consumption-based storage model and are equipped with resources to handle tasks such as monitoring capacity utilization and managing infrastructure," Dunn explained.

The biggest question organizations need to ask when deciding between a vendor- or customer-managed storage service is about their ability to manage infrastructure. If you have the resources to manage it on your own, go for it. But other organizations might benefit from offloading management to a provider like Dell, Dunn explained.

He cited customers that maintain on-premises data centers with highly skilled IT staff that want to use the Apex storage service, but they "needed an option to take on a higher level of management responsibilities in exchange for a lower price point."

"With both options, we’re giving customers the flexibility to choose an approach that works best for them," he added.

Dunn said Apex approaches security by ensuring endpoints in the cloud are secure. He touted, however, the ability of on-premises infrastructure to "enable compliance with rigid security, regulatory, audit, and data sovereignty requirements," adding that a lot of companies still need or want to keep their data on-premises rather than in a public cloud, despite the rise of hybrid-cloud and multi-cloud as increasingly popular options for enterprises.

Dunn described the Apex service as "a transformation in how customers purchase and experience" the portfolio, noting a few differentiators from similar products on the market.

"Specific to storage as-a-service, we don’t charge a premium for on-demand usage," he said, adding that the end-to-end nature of Apex is unique in its elimination of the need for multiple vendors to handle storage, compute, and data protection. "With global supply chain, distribution, and services, Dell makes it simple for customers to adopt end-to-end as-a-service," Dunn added.

He noted the rapid growth of as-a-service models in on-premises environments for "keep[ing] up with changing customer demands and provid[ing] them with the flexibility to do IT the way they want without having to manage a lot on their own – a critical step for expediting IT transformation."

"In fact, IDC predicts that by 2024 more than 75% of infrastructure and applications and more than half of data center infrastructure will be consumed as-a-service. If we’re looking at storage as-a-service, Gartner predicts that by 2024, 50% of newly deployed storage capacity will be consumed as OpEx, up from less than 15% in 2020," Dunn said.