It was Conference time in Las Vegas May 22nd with Dell Tech World #DTW2023. Don't get too excited, I was in London ...and no, it wasn't raining. ALL the buzz around APEX, Multi cloud, AI and Edge ! How do these announcements relate to Data Protection and Cyber Recovery in the context of MultiCloud ? I thought I'd firstly start with how we got here and the current challenges, to put this all into perspective, and no marketing terms, I promise !
Multi-Cloud...How did we get here ?
Amazon launched its Amazon Web Services (AWS) in 2002. Customers could use Amazon's vast infrastructure originally built for its e-commerce business. 2008 Google launched the Google App Engine (GAE) which provided Platform as a Service (PaaS). Then in 2010 Microsoft entered with the Azure Platform. This was built to support web and mobile app development.
Then the world experienced one of the worst global financial collapses in modern history, the crash of 2008, which is now known as 'The Great Recession'. As a consequence Enterprises started to look at alternatives to the client server models and how they consumed and paid for infrastructure and applications. The flexibility provided by the pay-as-you-go model of public cloud services as well as having less to maintain and no requirement of the initial heavy investment was naturally extremely attractive.
So then Hybrid Cloud ?
Cloud computing was becoming the operating model and was at the forefront of Digital Transformation driven by the emergence of IOT, AI and Big Data. However there were challenges for companies moving all of their data into the public cloud. Challenges such as latency and performance, regulatory and compliance requirements per territory, security and availability concerns. On top of it all you're sharing equipment with others. This restricted certain organizations from adoption such as banking, government, healthcare. Cost was also a factor, it wasn't as cheap as initially thought, particularly when quantities of data being generated by use of technologies such as AI, meant data is growing at an breakneck speeds.
At the other end, software defined infrastructure and components accelerated the proliferation of Private Clouds which aimed to provide a similar experience to Public clouds when requesting resources, but within the customer's own premises and infrastructure. Gradually a mixture of Private and Public Cloud was seen as optimal. Data which required higher security, regulation would be held on premise and anything else, within the Public Cloud which could be a mixture of infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) , Platform as a Service (PaaS), Software as a Service (SaaS) use cases, depending on the provider within the Public Cloud. Hence a Hybrid model emerged. A hybrid model will therefore consist of on premise and off, and will limited to a single public cloud provider.
This hybrid model also came with its own challenges and complexities . How do you manage data between both Private and Public Cloud, how can you easily connect and move data between on-premise and off-premise ? Other technologies and use cases were also emerging which either required particular developer requirements for applications or infrastructure related such as lower latency requirements. Proximity to the point of processing due to the real time nature of operations. For example a grocery store with automatic payment for customers as they exit, or autonomous self-driving vehicles.
Wait..so now Multi-Cloud ??
The most frequent use case for customers using cloud infrastructure services according to research carried out by Enterprise Strategy Group, 2019, is running production applications followed by running business intelligent queries and then test and development environments. Now 2023 and where customers are running these workloads are no longer limited to a single Cloud Provider.
By definition, Multi-Cloud means two or more across eco system cloud environments. Organizations are using not only a hybrid model today but multiple Public cloud providers at the same time. Reasons for this evolution range from developers having particular requirements for applications which may dictate use of certain providers. A developer may also have his/her own preferences and expertise with a particular platform because of his/her own skills,
Containers
The increased adoption of Kubernetes is another factor. Studies have shown container-based organizations with 1000 hosts up work in multiple clouds. These organizations also tend to have more containers. Companies such as Tinder, AirbnB, Pinterest all adopted containers due to the enormous demand placed on their infrastructure, else they couldn't react to resource and application demands fast enough. The New York Times is another example. They migrated all of their customer facing applications to containers as they needed a much faster way for deployments and updates to be released. What used to take up to an hour now deploys and configures in minutes. Developers are more independent when releasing updates and deploying, and tickets are no longer used for requesting resources. Kubernetes is the most popular container orchestration platform. Most leading public cloud providers including Amazon Web Services (AWS), Google Cloud Platform, IBM Cloud and Microsoft Azure all offer managed Kubernetes services.
MultiCloud in the Context of APEX
At launch APEX combined traditional hardware with managed IT services, a cloud-based management interface and a metered consumption model so paid for as a utility. It originally started with Storage and later expanded to other hardware. The infrastructure was deployed on the customer premises but remained DELL's. It enabled administrators to manage the procurement, deployment, and even health monitoring of the deployed APEX solutions. using the APEX Console, a cloud-hosted management platform.
Today APEX aim's to address the challenges brought on by multi cloud.
What are the Multi-Cloud Challenges ?
You're running different providers, each with its own tools for a start, so the challenges enterprises face within the multiple-cloud model include having to support it all: multiple technologies, different costs, different expertise, tools, complex interconnectivity between providers on and off prem and in-between providers. These are complex issues and require a vast array of expertise. Other MultiCloud challenges include:
+The Management and deployment of components within each provider will be by using very specific tools.
+Has the organization left themselves open somewhere to a Security breaches. Will the different technologies, providers all have their own specific requirements and how do you keep up with them ?
+How is Governance dealt with each provider ?
+What are the Backup and recovery capabilities on each different platform, how complex are they to setup and how different is the configuration with each provider.
+How do they integrate them all so can move data between them ?
+The Costs...are companies over spending by use of multiple cloud providers ?
+The increased use of containers and multiple cloud provider use is pushing for convergence of cloud management tools as well as new container management offerings.
The below figure further shows the areas to overcome when faced when multi-cloud. Each of the areas listed below will need to be considered for each provider used, and each will have it own methods of configuration or setup.
You Still Need to Protect it
Whether on premise or in the cloud or multi cloud, it all still requires the same level of data protection when your applications were on-premise. You most likley need application-aware backups with application-consistent restores. Other use cases include a capability for disaster recovery, business continuance, test, and development. Organizations will struggle to achieve their previous levels of recovery or meet the SLAs using native data protection services within cloud providers, particulaly when using multiple providers.
How does APEX Address this ?
Below is a slide showing the announcements made at #DTW2023 relating to #APEX. A number of categories were announced covered from Storage, Management Tools, Cloud Platforms, AI. I'm going to concentrate on Cyber/Data Protection.
A lot of the DP related options announced at #DTW have already been available within the Public Cloud space for some time. For example Power Protect Virtual Edition or (DDVE) has been and is available within cloud market places for all the major cloud providers.
So What's New?
Nothing really...apart from how DP products and services are now categorized under the APEX 'Brand'. What I do think is important though is how this all sits under the APEX banner and relates to the Multicloud story above, which I do think is clearer. Understanding the benefits provided by APEX is more straight forward. If anything, the benefits weren't really discussed in past. I've post-it notes spread across my desk, trying to list and organize all the DP related products and services, pre #DELL Tech World.
I then tried mind-mapping to show how the DP related products and services fell within the APEX portfolio pre #DTW2023. There is alot in there and it does require some un-tangling, going from left to right.
How has it all changed post #DTW2023 ?
"DELL customers want the ability to use DELL products within the Public cloud and on-premise. They want movement of data between the two to be simple and seamless. Where ever the data, it needs to be protected and recoverable. "
Under the APEX brand we now have the below. I have highlighted the DP related areas we are interested, in Yellow and Green and moving from Right to Left across the below diagram.
APEX has been classed into two areas. Ground to Cloud and Cloud to Ground. Lets look at Ground to Cloud which deals with
How DELL storage is used within Public Cloud providers
Why you would do this
Data mobility between On-prem and Public Cloud.
We'll cover the three points above in more detail in upcoming posts, but first lets understand the strategy and set the stage.
Related to dat protection and within the below category of "Ground to Cloud" we have the "APEX Protection Storage for Public Cloud" category. This specifically relates to DELL Power Protect DD Virtual Edition (DDVE).
APEX aims to solve and, is solving Multi Cloud challenges
Perhaps the best examples of this is DDVE, now re-branded APEX Protection Storage for Public Cloud.
This is a data protection play across the multi cloud ecosystem and it's not new to us. We have had marketplace offerings for Dell data protection within different marketplaces (AWS and Azure, and Google and Alibaba) and on premises for some time now, to the point where we're protecting over 17 exabytes of data across these different public environments across 1700 plus customers, and, this is doing exactly what APEX plans to do more of going forward, it's identifying a multi cloud challenge and solving it.
Imagine again if you're using, let's say AWS and Google and have an on premises environment, how do you then
protect your data within those differnt environments ? Well, AWS has their way. Google has their way, GCP has theirs and so on. You probably do something else on-premises and that is 4 different ways to learn and protect your data, 4 ways to recover your data, and each siloed within each of these ecosystems.
If we can bring 1 consistent way to protect that data across all these environments (which we do though DDVE), it does what APEX aims to do within the Multi Cloud and Ground to Cloud strategy, it targets, identifies, solves a multi cloud challenge, which is through the use of Dell software i.e. PPDM and DDVE, bringing one consistent interface, skillset and workflow on-prem and into any cloud environment you use and may use in the future.
So hopefully that shows a clear example of Dells ground to cloud strategy which looks to solve for multi cloud challenges. We're not building multi cloud we are solving challenges within it.
In the Future posts we'll look at how DDVE (APEX Protection storage for Public Cloud) is solving specific Multicloud challenges around;
How DELL data protection appliances and storage are built and used within Public Cloud providers such as AWS, Azure. Googl etc
The Benefits it brings, think...... a consistent operating model, no matter where it's running,as well as cheaper bills from your cloud providor.
DR/CR and Data mobility between On-prem and Public Cloud.
Further Reading (marketing)
This article has been written by Faisal Choudry from DELL
Faisal Choudry has experience and a real interest in implementations of Data Protection and Recovery, whether protecting from Disaster, Cyber attack, or both. He has worked on a number of large implementations of DR and failover (audited) testing and has written a number of papers on the topic. Faisal also worked on the engineering, development, and early implementations of a number of products including VxRail and VCF on VxRail, vBlock, SAP HANA.
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