Capitalizing on flexible IT solutions

To stay competitive in today’s digitally driven world, businesses need flexible server and storage systems that can easily scale up or down to keep pace with fluctuations in demand. This can be a challenging and costly proposition for many companies.

In a typical scenario, businesses buy excess capacity upfront to make sure they can meet growing demands for IT services. As a result, they end up paying for technology they don’t use, and in the process, consume budget that could otherwise fund critical projects. And all the while, what they really needed was a way to upgrade their technology without incurring large capital expenses and costly overprovisioning.

This was the case at a worldwide supplier of consumer, pharmaceutical, beverage and processed food products. The company had invested in on-premises technology and was enjoying the operational control of having its own data center and technology staff. However, the company’s IT leaders could see  the benefits of a cloud-based pay-as-you-use model. As seen in the desktop application approach, a similar model could be applied to data center enabling the ability to scale up and down.

When it came time to upgrade its infrastructure, this company found an ideal solution in APEX Flex on Demand from Dell Technologies. APEX Flex on Demand allows organizations to pay for only the technology they need, while providing access to ready buffer capacity with payments that adjust up or down to match usage.

The company adopted APEX Flex on Demand in a two-stage approach. Stage one focused on data storage. In order to simplify and reduce footprint within the data center, the company moved to Dell EMC PowerMax all-flash enterprise data storage. Stage two of the APEX Flex on Demand implementation saw the company replace its legacy servers with Dell EMC PowerEdge servers. This gave the company the ability to scale up and down according to need and buffer capacity that it would pay for only if used.

The company now recognizes better speed, performance, security and resiliency in their technology. All of the changes have been made with minimal disruption to the business, and with each invoice managers know exactly what they are consuming in terms of storage and compute time — and are only paying for the technology they use.

Ultimately, APEX Flex on Demand enabled the company to acquire the technology it needed to support its changing business needs without the pitfalls of overprovisioning. Had they used the CapEx model, the company would not have been able to scale quickly to meet peaks in demand resulting from business growth. Moving to an OpEx model allowed the company to acquire the technology it needed without waiting months to meet the immediate mission-critical business needs.

Even better, APEX Flex on Demand ensured that the company would pay only for the technology it used — while having immediate access to buffer capacity and payments that match actual usage.

In short, APEX Flex on Demand ticked all the boxes: simplicity, agility and control.

To learn more

For the full story, see the Dell Technologies customer case study “APEX Flex on Demand drives savings

and performance for digital transformation.” And for a deeper dive into this flexible approach to IT procurement, visit APEX Flex on Demand.