How Dell APEX Cloud Platform simplifies hybrid cloud

Dell APEX Cloud Platform simplifies hybrid cloud

Here in this blog, we are going to learn how Dell APEX cloud platform simplifies hybrid cloud.

Historically, businesses with global operations have handled their on-premise systems differently than those hosted on public clouds. Beyond computation, storage, and networking, this infrastructure also comprises firmware, operating systems, the application platform, and the software packages that applications require. These systems require quite different processes, tools, and expertise for management, which can lead to increased complexity, higher costs, and less agility. For example, security teams need different technologies for vulnerability identification and breach protection than do product teams that prioritize faster delivery. Moreover, completing all of this with an on-premise platform may lead to further complexity in the upgrades and life cycle management of the many components as well as in the integration of them.

Organizations using on-premise infrastructure must purchase, set up, customize, and maintain these systems for the duration of their lives. In addition, hardware system administrators have to handle the challenges of providing application platform engineering tooling to development teams. Furthermore, gaps between various teams, tools, and procedures across layers of hardware and software might enhance potential security concerns when there is no single pane view of the system.

Red Hat uses the Dell APEX Cloud Platform. OpenShift leverages the capability of disparate tools required by different teams (developers, sys administrators, security) to deliver a single pane view of clusters and applications. The acceptance rate and agility of these tools can be greatly increased by deploying them via the operator framework.

Use cases

The following are a few use cases that Dell APEX Cloud Platform for Red Hat OpenShift can handle:

Applications that are vital to an organization’s operations: Organizations who need the highest levels of security, control, and performance for their applications can install and operate their workloads in an on-premise setting on APEX Cloud Platform.
Near/Heavy Edge computing: Using APEX Cloud Platform, businesses can expand their Red Hat OpenShift deployments to edge locations, providing low-latency access to services and apps at distant places. See the blog post on the necessity of edge computing.
Sovereign / Private AI: Organizations wishing to apply AI to their own data may find it advantageous to use APEX Cloud Platform to implement the entire solution on-site.
Hosting virtualized applications: Red Hat OpenShift Virtualization, a Red Hat OpenShift feature, gives users an easier method to manage and transfer their current traditional virtual machine workloads utilizing a contemporary application platform. Red Hat offers a free Migration Toolkit for Virtualization (MTV), which OpenShift uses to streamline the VM migration process. The Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform (AAP), training, and a vast network of partner consulting services can all help to expedite migration. Clients can benefit from a cloud-native hybrid cloud application platform’s simplicity and performance while maintaining their current virtualization investments.
Private cloud: For security, privacy, or control concerns, businesses can maintain their apps and data on-site using Dell APEX Cloud Platform for OpenShift.

Summary

APEX Cloud Platform for Red Hat OpenShift makes it easier for businesses to establish and operate Red Hat OpenShift clusters, deploy apps swiftly, and handle on-premise systems without worrying about the underlying infrastructure.

The following are some of the main benefits of Red Hat OpenShift’s APEX Cloud Platform:

Simplified deployments: Customers can more easily install Red Hat OpenShift clusters that come with pre-configured software.
Red Hat OpenShift upgrades are carried out automatically, ensuring that clusters are running the most recent stable release.
Integrated security attributes: Applications and data are protected by integrated security mechanisms including network isolation and encryption.
Multi-tenancy: This feature enables distinct namespaces for various teams inside the company’s organizations.
Developer Operations: Application deployment automation is facilitated by integration with well-known DevOps tools like GitHub and Jenkins.

Red Hat OpenShift components of Dell APEX Cloud Platform

In order to maximize and expand Red Hat OpenShift installations on-premises, Dell and Red Hat worked together to build APEX Cloud Platform for Red Hat OpenShift. For best use, APEX Cloud Platform has a two-layer architecture with computing and storage kept apart. The two distinct components—computing and storage—can each grow independently thanks to their independence.

Calculate

To improve the control plane’s resilience, Red Hat OpenShift is installed on bare metal compute nodes with a minimum of four compute nodes. Customers can benefit from Red Hat OpenShift capabilities such as RHEL guest host licensing, Knative for serverless computing, and Red Hat OpenShift Virtualization for operating virtual machines (VMs) with this implementation.

The Dell MC-760 or MC-660 servers, which are enterprise rack servers with one or two sockets and a 1U or 2U physical factor, make up these compute nodes. For demanding tasks, this offers extremely performant computing through the use of 16th generation servers driven by Nvidia GPUs and Intel Xeon processors.

Keepsake

Dell APEX Cloud Platform with Red Hat OpenShift uses Dell PowerFlex, a software-defined infrastructure technology, for storage. Among the technologies that PowerFlex supports are CSI drivers, PowerFlex REST API, PowerFlex Ansible modules, and Dell Container Storage Modules (CSM).

The APEX Cloud Platform’s physical architecture for Red Hat OpenShift is depicted in Figure. The Dell APEX Cloud Platform for Red Hat OpenShift computing layer is configured using four Dell APEX MC-760 nodes.

Sys administrators may utilize the Red Hat OpenShift console to control the underlying infrastructure thanks to Dell’s Cloud Platform Foundation software. As a result, businesses may oversee more infrastructure without growing their workforce. Customer operations teams benefit from increased trust and a far more straightforward firmware and driver update testing and application procedure thanks to Dell engineering’s integrated testing.

The diagram illustrates the cluster lifecycle management of the Cloud Foundation Platform Software.

APEX Cloud Platform Benefits Red Hat OpenShift

Customers may benefit from Red Hat OpenShift clusters with ease thanks to APEX Cloud Platform for Red Hat OpenShift. With its integrated monitoring and logging tools, enhanced security features, and automated patches and upgrades, it streamlines operations for customers. Customers may operate workloads at the optimal location that satisfies their performance, cost, and security needs thanks to more seamless data migration and administration across hybrid clouds.

Businesses can concentrate on providing value to their operations instead of putting in a lot of work on highly technical platform integration and life cycle management when they use Dell APEX Cloud Platform for Red Hat OpenShift. By lowering the amount of time required for manual updates and operational overhead, a single, unified procedure for all upgrades helps eliminate labor.

The advantages of Dell APEX Cloud Platform for Red Hat OpenShift are as follows.

Simplified scalability is made possible by OpenShift’s enterprise call power and Dell Powerflex’s exceptionally high performance, which together enable scalability to meet client demands. Massive ecosystems with hundreds of nodes and tens of thousands of cores are possible, as opposed to tiny, minimally sized units with four computation nodes and four storage nodes offering 256 cores of compute power.
Backed by businesses with a strong track record of performance, security, trust, and financial stability: In the IT sector, Dell and Red Hat are two of the most reputable businesses.
Boost Workload Portability with Red Hat’s Dell APEX Cloud Platform Organizations can transfer workloads between on-premise and public cloud environments as needed by using OpenShift, which makes hybrid cloud management simpler.
Red Hat OpenShift on bare metal: Red Hat OpenShift is installed on high performance Dell bare metal hardware, simplifying and streamlining the architecture, as opposed to a third-party hypervisor. This lowers management overhead, increases responsibility and support, streamlines troubleshooting, and makes better use of resources.
Consistently validated: The platform is kept in a consistently validated state by automating life cycle management and integration in Dell APEX Cloud Platform for OpenShift.
Revise your health examinations: Updating can be made less likely by using the security development life cycle, which offers updates that are thoroughly verified and certified before deployment.
Optimized storage: There are no storage silos in the Red Hat OpenShift ecosystem thanks to optimized and consistent storage, which increases operational efficiency.