Cisco integrates its Intersight cloud operations platform with Red Hat’s Kubernetes-based OpenShift Platform to simplify bare metal containerized workload operations in hybrid-cloud environments.

The networking giant’s recent hybrid cloud trends report showed that 82% of those surveyed have a hybrid cloud strategy and nearly 80% of those enterprises have adopted containers for production environments.

“The collaboration between Cisco and Red Hat enables our two companies to target, identify, and build solutions for key hybrid-cloud use cases such as business continuity, data backup, multi-cloud automation, and application modernization delivered through Cisco Validated Designs (CVDs),” Dhritiman Dasgupta, VP of product management for the Cisco Cloud and Compute team, wrote in a blog post.

He added the vendor has delivered more than 20 full-stack CVDs for OpenShift, which are solutions based on common use cases or current engineering system priorities tested and documented by Cisco engineers.

The announcement comes on the heel of IBM’s plan to continue to integrate Red Hat’s OpenShift platform, after closing the $34 billion acquisition in 2019. The company has standardized on OpenShift as its hybrid cloud platform and modernized its software portfolio to run on the platform and weaved the OpenShift Data Foundation (ODF) into IBM Spectrum Fusion.

The combination of Cisco Intersight and Red Hat OpenShift aims to address the growing need for bare metal computing options to run containerized applications.

“This includes using Intersight to provide Red Hat OpenShift users with enhanced visibility and control to run and manage Red Hat OpenShift clusters on Cisco infrastructure in bare metal environments more easily,” Dasgupta explained.

The service covers “the entire lifecycle of a Red Hat OpenShift deployment,” he added, including automating the “cluster zero” deployment — installation, simplifying multi-cluster scaling and management, and streamlining the monitoring, maintenance, and upgrades.

This is not the first time the two have worked on hybrid-cloud services. Cisco announced in June plans to integrate its UCS X-series servers with Red Hat OpenShift to modernize workloads.