Dell Apex Cloud Platform For Red Hat Geared To Meet Enterprise Container Demand

“The cloud native application designs are driving that adoption of Kubernetes and containers, and I think the industry is ready to just explode,” Dell Senior Vice President, Multicloud and Data Solutions, and CTO emeritus Sudhir Srinivasan told CRN.

With cloud native application designs driving the adoption of Kubernetes and containers, Dell Technologies said customers can bring those workloads back on premises and reduce deployment time by 90 percent using its Dell APEX Cloud Platform for Red Hat Open Shift.

“What we saw in the last few years is customers want the flexibility to be able to develop and deploy applications wherever they need to whether it's on prem or in the cloud,” Dell Senior Vice President, Multicloud and Data Solutions, and CTO emeritus Sudhir Srinivasan told CRN. “And how do you do that in such a set of diverse environments? Well, one common factor that's emerged is containers and Kubernetes.”

Srinivasan said with Gartner estimating that 95 percent of enterprises will deploying containers in production, Dell sees a massive market opportunity in making it easy for customers and partners to deploy containers on premises.

“The cloud native application designs are driving that adoption of Kubernetes and containers, and I think the industry is ready to just explode,” he said. “And that's kind of one of the key principles of this announcement is that it makes it easy for our customers to now deploy containers on prem.”

Dell APEX Cloud Platform for Red Hat OpenShift is part of Dell’s lineup of cloud to ground capabilities, which are designed around taking what customers love about the cloud and making that available to them on premises through Dell, Srinivasan said. The products – including Dell APEX Cloud Platform for Microsoft Azure -- were announced at Dell Technologies World in May and have been rolled out in the months since. Dell APEX Cloud Platform for Red Hat OpenShift was released on October 26.

“If you were to take an open-source Kubernetes distribution and deploy it on a bare-metal infrastructure yourself, that is extremely complex today, it’s a very challenging task,” Srinivasan said. “Red Hat as the leader in Kubernetes container orchestration has made it easier to do that on the software side. What this platform does is … where it might take you days to deploy OpenShift on a bare-metal cluster, we’re now reducing it to hours.”

Srinivasan said Dell has achieved this by selecting the right infrastructure, right-sizing the hardware, the compute, the memory and storage, then layering in networking to connect it securely.

“Through this platform, we have already pre-engineered that. We pre-selected the hardware configurations that make the most sense, based on our experience. And we preloaded and pre-configured the OpenShift software to be able to deploy so it knows exactly what to expect in terms of the hardware.”

The tight R&D is the result of 23 years of partnering between Dell and Red Hat, he said. Matching the software to the hardware removes points of failure in the installation and maintenance that can cost engineers hours.

“If the software orchestration is designed and making some assumptions about what's available, but the actual hardware doesn't meet that, you can get into all kinds of error situations. And we eliminate all of that, not just for day one -- out of the factory-installed rack and stack and then up and running -- but also for lifecycle management,” Srinivasan said. “That whole flow of upgrading the software from one version to the next is pre-tested and pre-qualified between Dell and Red Hat jointly.”

For Dell’s reseller partners, those deep technology integrations lets them invest in one platform rather than having to learn the protocols of each stack, said Cheryl Cook, senior vice president of global partner marketing at Dell Technologies.

“It just represents an amazing opportunity for our partners to engage with upsell services capabilities, and really meeting their customers around any cloud stack,” she told CRN. “In this case, there's deep engineering work that's going on between Red Hat and Dell.”