Dell Technologies and VMware extended their cloud partnership from the private cloud to multicloud environments with a new infrastructure-as-a-service product during this week’s VMworld. The Apex Cloud Services with VMware Cloud (Apex Cloud with VMC) aims to help customers simplify their multicloud journey while enhancing flexibility and security.

“The solution combines Dell's industry-leading hyperconverged infrastructure along with VMware’s compute, storage, and network virtualization capabilities so that customers can power their most demanding workloads with peace of mind,” said Varun Chhabra, SVP of product marketing at Dell Technologies.

It also continues Dell Technologies' shift to cloud-delivered IT services, which it calls Project Apex.

Chhabra noted that Dell sees the demand for “a solution that brings together the best of what public cloud and private cloud solutions have to offer.” The new Apex Cloud with VMC “is really aimed at helping customers get that turnkey portfolio, a turnkey as-a-service experience so that they can focus on driving innovation and differentiation,” he added.

Dell claims that the new service will enable users to move workloads across multicloud environments and scale resources quickly with predictable pricing and transparent costs. 

Since Dell will manage the service on the customers’ behalf, “it frees them up from the hassles of the day-to-day infrastructure management,” he said. “What that means is we are responsible for managing and maintaining the underlying hardware as well as the software stack that supports the hardware, all the way from initial on-premises installation of the general infrastructure and then managing day to day.”

Chhabra also explained that the Apex Cloud with VMC journey starts with the Apex Console, which helps users to subscribe to, monitor, and optimize the service. Apex Console is a unified dashboard that enables customers to deploy workloads, monitor costs and system health, and shop for cloud services via an online marketplace.

And it adds self-service capabilities to the console so the customers can have the flexibility to choose subscription terms and deployment locations. Organizations can deploy it in their datacenter, at an edge location, or in co-location facilities provided by partners such as Equinix.

“This solution is built to deliver that outcome-based approach that our customers tell us they love about the public cloud,” Chhabra said.

Chhabra added that it offers customers a consistent framework to move workloads between different clouds and manage both traditional and cloud-native applications on the same platform. To migrate workloads across multiple clouds, the service uses VMware’s application migration and mobility software HCX, which eliminates the need to re-architect applications for different cloud environments.

In addition, users can integrate Apex Cloud with VMC and VMware’s Kubernetes-focused Tanzu platform, which allows customers to build, test, and run cloud-native applications alongside traditional applications. 

“This offer is really built to simplify our customers' multicloud world, a core part of the customer experience here is consistency across all of the customers' cloud environments, whether it be public, private, co-lo[cation] or increasingly edge locations,” Chhabra said. “No matter where this infrastructure is being run, customers can extend the same tools, the same skills, and the security policies across all of their environments.”