Dell Allies With Red Hat to Build OpenShift Platforms
Dell Technologies and Red Hat this week announced a collaboration through which instances of the Kubernetes-based Red Hat OpenShift platform will be made available on systems from Dell.
Caitlin Gordon, vice president of product management for Dell Technologies, says there will be two options. One is an instance of Red Hat OpenShift that has been certified to be installed by an internal IT team. The other is a managed APEX Containers for Red Hat OpenShift service that provides IT organizations and their developers with an on-premises container-as-a-service (CaaS) platform managed by Dell.
In addition, the two companies pledged to work together to build a hybrid cloud offering that will extend the management of on-premises instances of Red Hat OpenShift to both public clouds and edge computing platforms.
This offering will use Dell software to provide full stack Red Hat OpenShift integration on Dell software-defined storage and servers. Dell and IBM, the parent company of Red Hat, have also committed to infusing artificial intelligence into IT operations (AIOps).
Dell APEX Containers for Red Hat OpenShift is expected to be available in the U.S. in early 2023 with broader geographic availability to follow. Dell Validated Platform for Red Hat OpenShift will be available globally by the end of this month. The Dell hybrid cloud solution with Red Hat OpenShift has planned availability in 2023.
Dell has been making a concerted effort to provide a set of managed services through which it assumes responsibility for managing its infrastructure. That option is especially attractive to organizations that are starting to manage complex cloud-native computing environments that are challenging to manage, Gordon says. The Apex services allow an organization to focus their efforts on building and deploying applications versus managing the infrastructure upon which those applications depend. It also enables IT teams to move forward when there is a chronic cloud-native skills shortage, adds Gordon.
It’s not clear how quickly organizations are transitioning to managed infrastructure services in on-premises IT environments but, in effect, Dell is providing organizations with the same classes of services that a cloud service provider makes available. The cloud is not a destination but rather an operating model, notes Gordon. Dell, for example, regularly updates and upgrades the systems it provides under the terms of a managed services contract. That approach is intended to appeal to organizations that are solely focused on building application software versus managing Kubernetes or the infrastructure it’s deployed on.
It’s probable Dell will offer similar managed CaaS services as more organizations look to deploy them. In the longer term, it’s clear Dell, along with Red Hat and IBM, are betting that as more workloads are distributed across multiple cloud computing environments, the demand for managed services will exponentially increase. Today, of course, the bulk of most workloads are deployed in on-premises IT environments. However, as the transition to cloud-native applications continues to accelerate, there is no doubt a larger percentage of cloud-native applications will be deployed on public clouds. However, that doesn’t mean a similar percentage won’t be deployed in on-premises IT environments to address a range of performance, security and compliance concerns.
