Dell-Red Hat Team Lifts ‘Barriers To Entry’ For Kubernetes Environments

‘We’ve been partners with Red Hat in a number of different areas for a long time. Really this announcement is focused on OpenShift. And how do we help our customers simplify the deployment of, the management of, the integration of an OpenShift environment on Dell infrastructure,’ says Caitlin Gordon, vice president of product management at Dell Technologies.

Dell Technologies’ latest collaboration with Red Hat OpenShift has simplified a complex deployment and given “Dell-centric” partners a line of business when customers ask for containerization options, a partner said.

“What is exciting about this announcement is that Dell has effectively removed the barriers to entry by providing multiple options for a validated engineered solution,” Rick Gouin, chief technology officer with Dell Platinum Partner Winslow Technologies told CRN.

The first of the three announcements: Dell APEX containers for Red Hat Open Shift, offers and on-premises cloud experience for developers using Dell-managed container-as-a-service products.

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Dell Technologies’ Satish Iyer, vice president and general manager of emerging services, said the fully managed product is built on the company’s Power Flex platform. It includes access to Dell’s customer success practice which helps end-users with container adoption.

“The fundamental goal of this one is allowing our customers to be able to have a native Kubernetes offering where they can basically manage a virtualized container. This is fully managed by Dell. All the way from infrastructure all the way up the Red Hat stack,” Iyer said during a pre-briefing. “This joint work will help simplify how organizations address the changing dynamics of enterprise IT, enabling IT teams to build applications once for on premises deployment but retain the agility to also run them wherever needed across the breadth of the open hybrid cloud.“

The company is also offering a Dell Validated Platform for Red Hat OpenShift, which lets independent IT teams deploy and manage on-premises IT for container orchestration, said Caitlin Gordon, Dell Technologies vice president of product management.

“With a lot of the larger enterprises, they already have a lot of the skills in house. And maybe they actually want to keep that as something they’re going to build themselves. At the same time, building these types of environments can get pretty complex both on the infrastructure side and on the software side,” Gordon said. “It’s all about combining infrastructure that’s built for scalability, for enterprise-class, mission-critical performance. You can meet those SLAs and get incredible latency and throughput for these cloud native applications, and combining that with the power of what you have with OpenShift.”

Additionally, Gordon said Dell and Red Hat are co-engineering a hybrid cloud solution using Dell software to integrate Red Hat OpenShift with Dell infrastructure and optional IBM intelligent automation software.

“What we know very clearly is that one of the things customers love about Red Hat OpenShift is that it gives you that multicloud flexibility, which is also a key tenant of what we are building,” she said. “So it’s really about simplifying that experience for IT so they can better serve the development community, to really increase that velocity. Its really all about having the common operating model. The more we can simplify and make the infrastructure common the easier it is from an IT perspective.”

Gouin said solution providers like Winslow have seen a surge in demand for containers as customers seek out the technology to improve business outcomes. However, the process of actually deploying containers is complex and can require hiring outside experts. Dell’s partnership has created a fully managed option for customers, as well as one that can be run by independent teams on a Dell Validated Platform for OpenShift.

“As a Dell-centric solution provider, we strive to fill our portfolio with the tools and parts we need to assemble solutions that exceed customer expectations,” Gouin said. “Dell’s new focus on OpenShift in partnership with Red Hat will allow us to participate in more projects and truly provide turnkey container services ... It is important that channel partners aren’t left behind. We feel that these offerings will help us be more competitive, particularly with our forward looking customers. “