Two major enterprise players are engaged in a joint initiative to bring containerization and bare metal together.

A strategic partnership spanning more than two decades between Dell Technologies Inc. and Red Hat Inc. has led to a range of solutions, tools and reference architectures designed to simplify IT. Now, the two companies have jointly engineered a platform optimized for bare metal that will sharply reduce application deployment time using OpenShift.

“Customers for a long time have struggled with how to get better agility, how to get more flexibility in where they build, where they deploy their applications,” said Caitlin Gordon (pictured, right), vice president of product management at Dell. “That was for a number of years, virtualization. Increasingly, that’s containerized workloads. We knew that we really wanted to help simplify that experience on-prem.”

Gordon spoke with theCUBE industry analyst Rob Strechay at the “Future of Cloud-Native Infrastructure Is Now” event, during an exclusive broadcast on theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s livestreaming studio. She was joined by Chris Morgan (left), senior director of hybrid platforms customer and field engagement at Red Hat, and they discussed how a partnership between the two firms led to a breakthrough solution. (* Disclosure below.)

Unique platform

The collaboration between Dell and Red Hat is being driven by a strong move toward containerized workloads, now and in the years to come. Gartner predicts that 95% of enterprises are going to have containers deployed in production by 2028, which is not that far away, according to Gordon. The joint solution is designed to bring a level of simplicity and optimization for container orchestration on bare metal.

“There’s a lot of really unique things about this platform,” Gordon said. “It’s optimized for bare metal …that alone is very different. We’ve unified the application and the data plane. It brings together the compute, the storage, the container orchestration, all in one turnkey experience.”

For Red Hat, the solution represents a continuation of the company’s mission to deliver a hybrid experience for enterprise IT.

“We’ve been about hybrid for a long time at Red Hat, and this is really an extension of that, where hybrid is becoming more about the experience than just a consistent technology,” Morgan said. “If you want to modernize the infrastructure, it’s a way to bring your containers and your virtual machines, even other clusters together on one control plane. That, to me, is really what makes it a unique offering for those customers that are looking to upgrade their infrastructure but keep some things the same.”

Validated state

The latest solution leverages APEX Cloud Platform Foundation Software to weld the experience together. This enables a continuously validated state from the bios to the firmware, all the way up to OpenShift, to make sure that the entire stack is able to work together, according to Gordon. For customers, the joint offering from the two companies provides an opportunity to significantly lower deployment times, which can translate into productivity gains for the business.

“In OpenShift and bare metal, it can take up to 10 days to deploy [with] a standard build-it-yourself approach,” Gordon said. “What we’ve been able to do here is reduce that down to hours. [It’s] a 90% reduction in deployment time, which is really powerful. That means you get to really invest in your business.”

This is likely to appeal to a wide range of users within enterprise operations, as the offering provides key integration and support.

“That platform engineer and admin, they are going to love this,” Morgan said. “If you are a developer, if you’re used to working with OpenShift for your apps, and all the different things that we have, it’s that same experience wherever you have been doing it before except now it’s nicely integrated to a point where even Dell support is a part of this appliance. Right within the OpenShift console there’s this ‘phone home’ capability.”

Benefits for AI

Rapid growth of artificial intelligence has led businesses to seek IT solutions that can support increased processing demand. The Dell-Red Hat appliance was designed with AI in mind.

“There’s compute and storage and they both play an important role here,” Gordon noted. “On the compute side, we have 4th generation Intel processors, so you’ve got the throughput, you’ve got the processing power to really handle those AI workloads. The storage plays a very important role here, which is having that linear, scalable software-defined storage. It’s something we call the universal storage layer. You have the flexibility to use that AI on-prem and also the portability to be able to connect into the public cloud as well.”

The latest appliance provides a turnkey solution, but its significance can be found in the combination of Red Hat software and the power of Dell infrastructure coming together to provide a simpler experience using Open Shift and bare metal.

“If you want to modernize your apps and your infrastructure, now you’ve got one complete solution to do that,” Morgan said.

Here’s the complete video interview, part of SiliconANGLE’s and theCUBE’s coverage of the “Future of Cloud-Native Infrastructure Is Now – Dell APEX Cloud Platform for Red Hat OpenShift” event:

You can watch the entire event below:

(* Disclosure: TheCUBE is a paid media partner for “Future of Cloud-Native Infrastructure Is Now” event. Neither Dell Technologies Inc., the sponsor of theCUBE’s event coverage, nor other sponsors have editorial control over content on theCUBE or SiliconANGLE.)

Photo: SiliconANGLE