There is no doubt that the past ten years have been a golden decade for the development of cloud computing. The concept of cloud computing has been continuously accepted by the market. However, with the deepening of cloud computing and the increasing awareness of enterprises, the multiple-choice questions facing many enterprises have also become more and more complex. New changes have taken place, that is, from the entanglement of whether enterprises should go to the cloud or not to the cloud in the past, to how to better realize the cloud migration of enterprises, the cloud migration of business innovation and the free choice of cloud migration today.
Not only that, the current pure public cloud or private cloud is also difficult to meet the needs of enterprises' existing business. Enterprises need multiple cloud environments to coexist to adapt to new business development, which forms the soil for the growth of hybrid multi-cloud, or in other words A new "multi-cloud era" has arrived.
It is precisely because of this new change that Dell Technology Group officially released the Dell APEX Cloud Platform (ACP Cloud Platform) at this year's 2023 DTW. The cloud The platform is a fully integrated, turnkey portfolio of systems that seamlessly integrates Dell Technologies' infrastructure, software and cloud stack to help enterprises deliver consistent multi-cloud operations by extending cloud operating models to on-premises and edge environments.
There is no doubt that as a firm believer and practitioner of "multi-cloud", the launch of Dell ACP cloud platform can be said to be Dell Technology's realization of the entire technology stack from the perspective of multi-cloud strategy, from the underlying infrastructure, upper-layer application architecture, etc. The consistency of the cloud platform brings enterprises a set of cloud platforms that can realize the integration of cloud and cloud. This not only allows enterprises to have more choices, but also better resolves the multi-cloud business challenges currently faced by enterprises. , it can be said that today, when moving towards multi-cloud is the general trend, its value is undoubtedly important and far-reaching.
Going multi-cloud is a general trend
It can be seen that in the past few years, enterprise customers' acceptance of the cloud has been steadily increasing. At the same time, more and more enterprises and institutions are beginning to shift from traditional architecture to multi-cloud architecture, which also allows enterprises to move from "shallow-level" cloudization to "deep-level" cloudification.
According to HashiCorp's 2023 Cloud Strategy Status Survey, almost nine out of ten IT environments today are a mixture of public and private clouds, and multi-cloud strategy has become the current IT "new normal." This also means that when enterprises move towards "deep" cloudification, more and more modern applications need to keep pace with the development of enterprise business. At the same time, these applications must be built and run in public clouds, data centers or edge environments. , but it also brings new challenges.
According to Liu Zhihong, general manager of the storage business of Dell Technology Group's Greater China Information Infrastructure Solutions Division, many customers' core businesses today still run on traditional infrastructure. Traditional infrastructure has its advantages of stability and reliability, and can The evolution of traditional infrastructure to today is a result of historical development. However, under the general trend of multi-cloud, many companies are also considering how to build and formulate future IT infrastructure and multi-cloud strategies. In this process, it involves Here comes two very critical questions.
On the one hand, from an infrastructure perspective, although enterprises integrate a variety of basic resources such as public cloud data centers, private cloud data centers, traditional enterprise data centers, and edge data centers, upward support is based on various virtualization and microservice architectures. Various cloud applications, but how to build these infrastructures to achieve overall consistency is an issue that needs to be considered.
On the other hand, from the perspective of data and applications, in the process of moving towards multi-cloud, enterprises adopt different cloud technology stacks and different data platforms to achieve data integration and data compliance management, which also leads to It is difficult for many enterprises to migrate data that is in different formats and resides in different technologies. In addition, the acquisition and maintenance costs of portability solutions are also high, and the lack of portability will also lead to risks in the enterprise's multi-cloud strategy.
Therefore, the ACP platform launched by Dell Technologies at this time not only inherits the stable and reliable technical advantages of the past infrastructure, but also can maximize the needs of enterprises in multi-cloud environments. The use in the environment can better provide enterprises with a consistent infrastructure, as well as provide highly automated and simplified operation and maintenance management capabilities.
Xu Liangmou, director of enterprise technology architecture of Dell Technology Group's Greater China Information Infrastructure Solutions Division, also added that a few years ago everyone knew that the world was "cloud first" and enterprises going to the cloud has become a trend, but today it is In the multi-cloud era, that is, "cloud smart", many enterprises no longer blindly pursue the public cloud, but hope that different workloads can run in a suitable environment, and enterprises also hope that whether they go to the cloud or off the cloud, they can be independent Therefore, the transformation process from "cloud first" to "cloud smart" gave birth to the ACP platform, and the ACP platform can help enterprises The characteristic of realizing the integration of cloud and cloud has also become its important advantage.
Indeed, as the latest product portfolio in Dell APEX and a new generation of infrastructure, the launch of ACP can be said to have pushed technological innovation in the multi-cloud era to a new level, and Dell Technologies has demonstrated its strength in the process. Integration and innovation capabilities are also forward-looking and revolutionary.
Understand Dell APEX Cloud Platform
So, what are the unique technical advantages of the ACP platform, and why is it said to have revolutionary new value? In this regard, Ren Xiaoyan, enterprise-level hyper-converged and cloud computing product manager of Dell Technology Group, said that the ACP platform can be understood through "three major keywords".
First of all, it is the deep integration capability. The APC platform is a deeply integrated turnkey system. It is not just hardware or software, but a deeply integrated system solution that includes a complete ecosystem. Dell Technologies leverages its technical advantages in HCI and SDS (software-defined storage), and has been verified by the global market, with a TOP1 market positioning. It also actively cooperates with ecological partners such as Microsoft, Red Hat and VMware has in-depth cooperation and in-depth research and development to build a new generation infrastructure with strong consistency.
Specifically, the most unique ability of the ACP platform is to integrate part of its own hardware capabilities into the multi-cloud ecosystem. This is a capability that many public cloud vendors do not have. Therefore, this also allows ACP to help enterprises build multi-cloud stacks. It helps enterprises maintain and operate data center infrastructure in a compliant and efficient manner, and all software and hardware upgrades and 'patching' are certified and optimized. This process cannot be achieved by simply installing a software or program. It is the result of years of in-depth cooperation between Dell Technologies and its ecological partners.
Secondly, it is the general platform capability. The most "valuable" part of the ACP platform includes the universal platform capabilities of "one hard and two soft".The hardware level includes the latest generation of computing power platform, that is, the new generation of PowerEdge servers. Two major software capabilities are then "superimposed", including Dell Technologies' leading capabilities in software-defined storage, which can create a universal storage platform on the entire infrastructure and platform; in addition, based on Dell Technologies' VxRail hyper-converged architecture The operation and maintenance capabilities accumulated in the company can also help enterprises provide maximum assistance on the ACP platform, whether it is deployment, automated operation and maintenance, or even full life cycle management.
Ren Xiaoyan emphasized: "In particular, the value of universal storage platforms is huge. In real enterprise application scenarios, its multi-cloud architecture may have more than one cloud or just one technology. Then the data generated in the OpenShift container is not Can it be used on Azure? Can't it be used on VMware virtual machine applications? Obviously, enterprise data hopes to be fully accessible, and a common storage layer can well carry data storage and data storage in different environments. Circulation. In other words, no matter which way an enterprise's data comes in, it can enter a common storage layer to better support different ecological and application environments."
Finally, it is the ability of ecological cooperation. The ACP platform is deeply built by Dell Technologies together with partners including Microsoft, Red Hat and VMware.This time it provides Dell APEX Cloud Platform for Microsoft Azure and Dell APEX Cloud Platform for Red to the market. Hat OpenShift and Dell APEX Cloud Platform for VMware are three major cloud platforms. This deep integration capability also brings unique advantages to the ACP platform.
According to Shi Yongjun, director of the software engineering team of Dell Technologies China R&D Group, during the system deployment process, if an enterprise deployed cloud nodes manually or installed software in a certain environment in the past, statistics would require at least 50 manual steps. The setup is work, but on the ACP platform, Dell Technologies has automated all manual deployment through in-depth cooperation with partners, allowing enterprises to quickly deploy in different cloud environments.
“This is inseparable from the collaboration and in-depth research and development of the entire ecological partners. Now ACP can unify all software information and hardware information and provide it to the management platform, so that customers can see all software and hardware information on one interface. Information, its upgrade, current status, and whether there will be any subsequent updates can all be clearly displayed," Shi Yongjun said.
In addition,As a "member" of the Dell Technologies APEX family, the ACP platform also maintains a flexible payment model. Among them, the hardware part is given to customers in the most popular sales method that enterprises are currently accustomed to or the most mainstream sales method in the market; while the software part supports the form of subscription and is given to customers according to the number of years of the subscription service. , customers can also renew according to the use period later, and the ACP platform flexibly combines these two payment models.
It can be seen that thanks to the above unique advantages, the comprehensive value of the ACP platform is reflected in that enterprises can flexibly choose the software ecosystem they need based on actual needs, while Dell Technologies can provide a common technical architecture platform To customers, help more enterprises realize multi-cloud architecture with automation and simple operation and maintenance. This also means that the ACP platform truly provides enterprises with a set of "out-of-the-box" solutions in the multi-cloud era. More importantly, Dell Technologies also actively practices the concept of "leaving complexity to ourselves and leaving simplicity to customers", which also allows the ACP platform to provide more new choices and solutions in enterprises' journey to multi-cloud. new path.
The new paradigm of cloud migration in the multi-cloud era
It is worth mentioning that, as the first product of the ACP platform, Dell APEX Cloud Platform for Microsoft Azure has also recently been officially announced. It is not only the best "portrait" of the in-depth cooperation between Dell Technologies and Microsoft, but also plays a leading role in The value of the new cloud paradigm in the multi-cloud era.
In this regard, Wang Lu, senior product manager of the Azure Cloud Division of Microsoft Asia, said that Microsoft and Dell Technologies have a long-term cooperation. The two parties have previously cooperated on Azure Stack Hub and Azure Stack HCI. In particular, Azure Stack HCI can help enterprises through a Manage your own hyper-converged infrastructure in a simple, easy-to-use, integrated way. On this basis, you can more conveniently enjoy the capabilities provided by Azure in the cloud, including security center, backup, cloud native and other services, truly improving the efficiency of hybrid applications. Scenes.
The newly launched Dell APEX Cloud Platform for Microsoft Azure is a "Premium Solution" cooperation between the two parties in the HCI system, which mainly improves the capabilities of both parties from two dimensions:
First, it enables closer cooperation between Microsoft hybrid cloud services and HCI optimization, integrating some of the better capabilities of the original Azure platform, such as The carrying capacity of virtual machines and containers are brought to the ACP platform, allowing ACP to carry more HCI service capabilities.
The second is to enable enterprises to better optimize infrastructure in the Azure Arc hybrid cloud environment. To put it simply, in the past, services such as virtual machines, cloud service monitoring, security updates, and sub-health maintenance could only be provided by public cloud environments, but now they can be extended to hybrid services through Azure Arc. In the cloud platform, enterprises can also obtain consistent services in the ACP platform or local data center environment. In this way, enterprises do not need to invest in similar tools in local deployment, but directly rent them directly through Azure remote services. That's it.
Wang Lu gave an example: "In manufacturing factory scenarios, for multi-site and multi-factory scenarios, Dell APEX Cloud Platform for Microsoft Azure can provide a centralized management plane, so that enterprise operation and maintenance personnel do not need to go to each factory. Deployed, this is a typical optimization of infrastructure; for another example, enterprises have made a lot of innovations in containers on the cloud, as well as innovations including machine learning innovations and even virtual desktops. Now they can all be used through Azure Arc. The Azure Stack HCI platform imports these innovations from the cloud into its own hybrid cloud environment, making the whole process more convenient."
Looking into the future, Wang Lu said: "Dell Technologies has always been one of Microsoft's very important partners in hybrid cloud and multi-cloud strategies. We also see the prospects of the multi-cloud and hybrid cloud markets in the Chinese market, so both parties will definitely go there in the future. We will cooperate more with providers of different industries and solutions, and at the same time go deep into various industries to find the most suitable customer scenarios to help enterprises better implement multi-cloud strategies."
Similarly, Liu Zhihong also emphasized in the end: "Multi-cloud is an inevitable choice for enterprises today, and Dell Technologies has always been an advocate of multi-cloud, a leader of multi-cloud, and a strong practitioner, and this time the ACP platform The launch truly integrates multi-cloud, so continuing to promote the implementation of multi-cloud strategy will also be the mission of Dell Technologies in the future."
Summary of the full text: Only by having an insight into the trend can we focus on the trend and provide better services to enterprises. In the multi-cloud era, Dell Technologies not only provides enterprises with ACP platform, but also works with partners to provide solutions to get through the "last mile". I believe that products and solutions will enable enterprises to do more with less in the new multi-cloud era, and Dell Technologies will also play the role of "Mr. Key" in the enterprise's multi-cloud transformation.
Shenyao's Technology Observation was founded by Shensky, a senior technology media person. He has 20 years of experience in enterprise-level technology content communication and has long been focused on the observation and thinking of industrial Internet, enterprise digitalization, ICT infrastructure, automotive technology and other contents.
