Dell and Red Hat Deliver on Managed OpenShift Server Promise

Dell Technologies and Red Hat today announced that managed bare metal servers that come with the Red Hat OpenShift platform based on Kubernetes pre-installed are now generally available.

Caitlin Gordon, vice president of multi-cloud product management and DevOps for Dell, said this extension to the Dell Apex portfolio eliminates the need for a 10-day process that would otherwise be required to manually install OpenShift on Dell PowerEdge servers.

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Dell has been making a case for an Apex server portfolio that it manages on behalf of organizations that want to devote more of their resources to building and deploying applications. That approach reduces the time required to update servers on an ongoing basis by as much as 90%, said Gordon. Dell claims to have now performed 21,000 hours of testing and validation on full-stack updates.

Apex servers configured with Red Hat OpenShift are being deployed on bare metal to eliminate a layer of virtual machine software that is no longer required to simply install Red Hat OpenShift, she added. That approach eliminates any additional performance penalty that comes from running that additional layer of virtual machine software in a way that natively employs the management framework developed by Red Hat, noted Gordon.

Chris Morgan, senior director for technical marketing and partner products executive for Red Hat hybrid platforms, said the alliance with Dell will facilitate deployments of Red Hat OpenShift in on-premises IT environments where the bulk of most workloads continue to run. In fact, with increased regulatory focus on data sovereignty and more stringent data privacy regulations, more cloud-native applications than ever are being deployed in those IT environments, he added.

In addition, many organizations are also now opting to build and deploy workloads infused with artificial intelligence (AI) models in IT environments where they have more control over sensitive data, noted Morgan.

To further that effort, Dell and Red Hat also made available a Dell Validated Design for Red Hat OpenShift AI on APEX Cloud Platform to make it simpler to install large language models (LLMs) and the Retrieval Augmented Generation (RAG) framework that organizations use to customize existing LLMs using their own data.

It’s not clear whether organizations will prefer to rely on Dell to manage their IT rather than managing it themselves or relying on a third-party IT services provider. Kubernetes environments tend to be more complex than legacy IT environments, and most organizations don’t have much internal expertise available to manage them, so it may turn out that relying on an external services provider to manage those clusters is a viable option for many organizations. That can be especially true for organizations that, in addition to managing fleets of Kubernetes clusters, must master all the nuances of providing persistent storage for those applications.

Of course, many internal IT organizations are not inclined to cede control over IT infrastructure and applications to a single IT vendor, especially if they tend to rely on IT infrastructure from multiple vendors.

Regardless of the approach, it’s clear that the number of Kubernetes clusters running on servers that need to be managed will only continue to increase exponentially.