Looking to wring more value out of its VMware Inc. subsidiary’s multi-cloud strategy while advancing its own APEX composable infrastructure offering, Dell Technologies Inc. today announced a bundle that provides consistent operations across multicloud environments.

The company is also adding an object storage option that works with the VMware software stack and rolling out a reference design for the development of artificial intelligence-based applications.

APEX Cloud Services with VMware Cloud is intended to give organizations the ability to move and scale workloads across multiple cloud platforms with predictable pricing and transparent costs. The offering is built on Dell infrastructure that the company said delivers 99.9999% uptime with initial deployment in as little as 14 days.

Dell said it’s aiming to simplify the chore of managing multiple cloud consoles, each with a different set of options and commands. The APEX Console features pre-configured cloud instances for many common workloads to make configuration and management easier. Services can be deployed in a local or remote data center as well as at a colocation facility. A single set of policies can be defined to apply to all environments.

“Customers don’t have to shoehorn workloads into less-than-ideal situations,” said Varun Chhabra, a Dell senior marketing vice president.

Users can log in to a console and choose what outcomes they want based on instance types such as compute-optimized, general-purpose, memory-optimized or large-scale memory-optimized, Chhabra said. “You choose the number of instances you want, the [contract duration] and the location and Dell takes care of the rest,” he said. “If the customer wants to move a workload to or from a VMware environment in the public cloud they can do so with the tools they use for their on-premises infrastructure.”

The offering can also be used with VMware’s Tanzu application modernization toolset to allow legacy applications to be run alongside their cloud-native counterparts. Users can migrate workloads across multiple clouds with the included VMware HCX application mobility platform which eliminates the need to re-architect applications for different cloud environments.

Object storage for VMware

Another new product co-developed with VMware is Dell EMC ObjectScale software, a software option that enables object storage compatible with Amazon Web Services Inc.’s S3 standard to be run alongside VMware virtual machines. Object storage is a low-cost and highly scalable storage architecture that is rapidly growing in popularity.

The software-defined storage option leverages the Kubernetes orchestrator for software containers, Tanzu and the VMware vSAN Data Persistence Platform, which provides a foundation for building stateful services that interact with underlying VMware infrastructure.

“ObjectScale is the next evolution of object storage from Dell,” said Jon Siegal, vice president of product marketing for Dell EMC. “It’s a storage platform built to be S3-compliant and containerized.”

Dell said its approach provides self-service options in a private cloud operating model using familiar VMware tools. Dell EMC’s VxRail hyperconverged infrastructure will support the object storage extension through a software upgrade, giving users “the ability to scale out capacity without theoretical limits,” Siegal said. “They can replicate object storage wherever they are so they can scale anywhere.”

Finally, Dell is announcing a reference design for the development of AI-based applications that was jointly built with VMware and Nvidia Corp., which makes the most popular graphics processing units used for machine learning and deep learning workloads.

The reference design uses the Nvidia AI Enterprise software suite running on Nvidia-certified hardware to speed configuration and integration tasks by up to 20%. Dell will support the validated design on VxRail, PowerScale and PowerSwitch servers.

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