Dell Technologies APEX Block Storage For Public Cloud Deep Dive

Kiruthika Gopal, a product manager, presents the key features and differentiators of APEX Block Storage. The main points of differentiation include extreme performance, with millions of IOPS for a single volume; flexibility and scalability, with the ability to scale up to 512 storage nodes and independently scale compute and storage; multi-AZ durability, offering the option to deploy storage clusters within a single or multiple availability zones without requiring additional capacity; and hybrid cloud mobility, allowing seamless data movement between on-prem and cloud across regions.

APEX Block Storage offers up to one petabyte per volume, multi-AZ deployment without extra capacity penalties, thin provisioning, snapshots and clones without additional fees, and asynchronous replication with a feature called snap mobility.

The product also provides multi-AZ durability by spreading storage nodes across availability zones, offering protection against entire rack failures. This feature has been tested in on-prem environments for over a decade and is now extended to the public cloud.

Questions from the audience cover topics such as the upgrade process for new instance types, the potential for split-brain scenarios in multi-AZ deployments, the testing methodology used to generate performance numbers, and the orchestration of testing and recovery processes.

Kiruthika also discusses cost savings through thin provisioning and snapshot savings, and the scalability of APEX Block Storage, with deployments ranging from 10 terabytes to multiple petabytes. The pricing model is subscription-based, factoring in capacity and the number of storage nodes.

Finally, Kiruthika touches on the ease of deployment using Dell APEX Navigator, which can set up the necessary AWS infrastructure and deploy the software in four simple steps based on inputted IOPS and capacity requirements.