As an important partner of Amazon Web Services Inc., Dell Technologies Inc. helps organizations make the most of their AWS investment through data protection and management. Dell’s most recent announcement is that Dell PowerFlex is now available in the AWS Marketplace, enabling customers to utilize PowerFlex’s performance, scale, resilience and management.

Dell’s data protection solutions — including APEX Backup Services, PowerProtect Data Manager and PowerProtect Cyber Recovery — are also important services AWS customers can utilize, as data security threats on the cloud continue to grow.

Brian Henderson (pictured, right), director of unstructured data storage product marketing at Dell, and Marc Trimuschat (pictured, left), direct and worldwide cloud storage go-to-market specialists at AWS, spoke with theCUBE industry analysts Lisa Martin and Dave Vellante at the recent AWS re:Invent conference, during an exclusive broadcast on theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s livestreaming studio. (* Disclosure below.)

They discussed the partnership between AWS and Dell, data protection and security, and what the AWS/Dell partnership has done to support customer cloud journeys. [The following content has been condensed for clarity.]

Martin: Talk about the role, from Amazon’s point of view, that third-party vendors like Dell plays in AWS’ expanding vision of cloud.

Trimuschat: What we’re seeing today is a shift to … more traditional enterprise customers who are demanding the performance, the scalability and also the resiliency of what they had on-premises, and they want that on the cloud as well. Another big trend that we’re seeing is customers being affected by things like … malware events … and data protection. Dell provides some great solutions in both those areas that allow enterprise customers to really experience that mission-critical capability and resiliency that they have on-premises in the cloud.

Vellante: The question for you on PowerFlex is, why should customers start there on the cloud if they are early in this journey?

Henderson: If you’re cloud-native, the advantage would be things like a really, really advanced block file system that has been built from the ground up to be software defined and … cloud-native. What you’re getting is that really linear scale up to about 1,000 nodes. You can span that across regions, across Availability Zones, so it’s highly resilient. So if there’s a node failure in one site, you’re going to rebuild really fast, depending on the size of that cluster. We didn’t have to change a single line of code to run this product in the cloud because it was cloud-native by default.

Vellante: How does Dell’s APEX Backup Services fit in here?

Henderson: So APEX is the categorization for all the things that we’re doing around a modern cloud experience for Dell customers. So we’re taking them also on a journey. So everything that we’re doing around … enterprise software capabilities in the cloud … it’s all under that APEX umbrella and journey. So we’re kind of still just getting started there, but we’re seeing a lot of great traction.

Martin: Do you have a favorite customer story that you think really shines the light on the value of the Dell/AWS partnership in terms of the business impact they’re making?

Henderson: We have several large customers. One of them is a very large video game production company. And we do a lot of work together where they’re rendering … in house, they’re sending to a shared location, they’re copying data over to S3, they’re able to let all their editors access that. They bring it back when it’s compressed down a little bit and deliver that.

We’re also doing a lot of work with … Amazon Thursday Night Football. What they’ve done there, it’s a partner of ours working with AWS. All the details inside of that roaming truck that they drive around, there’s a lot of Dell gear within there. And then everything connects back to AWS for that exact same kind of model. We need to get to the editors on a nightly basis. They’re also streaming directly from that truck while they’re enabling the editors to access a shared copy of it, so it’s really powerful stuff.

Here’s the complete video interview, part of SiliconANGLE’s and theCUBE’s coverage of AWS re:Invent:

(* Disclosure: Dell Technologies Inc. sponsored this segment of theCUBE. Neither Dell nor other sponsors have editorial control over content on theCUBE or SiliconANGLE.)

Photo: SiliconANGLE