The evolution of a “multicloud-by-design” approach became clearer this week, as Dell Technologies Inc. unveiled upgrades to its APEX as-a-service product portfolio.

First introduced a year ago as Project Alpine, Dell’s APEX portfolio of hardware and software offerings was enhanced with the addition of APEX Block Storage and APEX File Storage. The latest products were designed with a “ground-to-cloud” strategy in mind, offering customers a choice of workload deployment on-premises or in the public cloud.

“It’s how we help our customers really unlock that workload flexibility, be able to choose where to deploy your workloads,” said Caitlin Gordon (pictured, left), vice president of product management, cross-platform software and solutions, at Dell. “Native storage services in the public cloud are great for a lot of things, but mission-critical workloads, scalable workloads are just not something that we’ve been able to solve for. Now with the APEX Block and APEX File for AWS, and Block for Azure, we can help our customers bring those workloads and unleash those workloads in the public cloud.”

Gordon spoke with theCUBE industry analysts Dave Vellante and Lisa Martin at Dell Technologies World, during an exclusive broadcast on theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s livestreaming studio. She was joined by Magi Kapoor (right), director of multicloud product management at Dell, and they discussed key elements of the APEX releases this week. (* Disclosure below.)

Navigating multicloud storage

By demonstrating how its customers can deploy its storage software in public clouds of their choice, Dell is seeking to provide both flexibility and control over where critical data resides. To facilitate that, Dell also introduced a software-as-a-service application called APEX Navigator for Multicloud Storage.

“It’s really extending the APEX Console to have these capabilities that we’re building with Navigator,” Kapoor said. “Think of it as an orchestrator that’s going to orchestrate this complexity of cloud that customers might have. This is a place, a centralized control plane, where you can see all your assets across everything, whether you are doing it on-prem, in co-location, on edge or even in the public clouds.”

While Dell’s APEX announcements were designed to address a need for flexibility in platform storage, customers have found the ability to transfer information and provide consistency appealing, according to Kapoor.

“What resonates most for our customers is this ability to move data,” Kapoor said. “We’re bringing a consistent experience no matter where your data lives. It’s really bringing all of our block, file, object, and data protection capabilities and have them available to our customers in all clouds.”

Here’s the complete video interview, part of SiliconANGLE’s and theCUBE’s coverage of Dell Technologies World:

(* 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