To automate the process of deploying OpenShift in any data center environment, Dell Technologies today launched a purpose-built appliance jointly engineered with Red Hat. "There is nothing else in the industry like this," Dell VP of Product Management Caitlin Gordon told SDxCentral.

The Dell Apex Cloud Platform for Red Hat OpenShift combines Dell's automation management software, PowerEdge servers and software-defined storage with Red Hat's container orchestration platform in a single appliance.

"What Red Hat finds is that one of the biggest challenges for customers is simply getting that infrastructure needed to deploy OpenShift up and running. And what we find is that customers are continuously wanting to have the experience that they've had from Dell [hyper-converged infrastructure] in other ecosystems." To that point, the vendors say they came together to "provide an easy button for customers with OpenShift, in a data center of their choice, on Dell infrastructure," Gordon said.

Fundamentally, this is Red Hat OpenShift running on bare metal with Dell compute, storage and automation as a single solution. In comparison, customers deploying OpenShift on bare metal without the use of this Apex cloud platform would have to piece together each element of the stack, which can take an average of 10 days after getting all the technology in-house. "With this new cloud platform and the amount of automation and integration we've provided, those deployments are cut by 90%," Gordon said.

This accelerated time to value "is huge," she said, "because people are investing here to build new applications and train AI [artificial intelligence] models. This is about transforming their business. The faster they can get up and running, the better."

While Dell isn't sharing specific details on how much this "easy button" will cost, the appliance is available as a service, or customers can buy the hardware outright and the software as a subscription. This is "the first time we're going to offer this level of flexibility and consumption for an appliance ... based on the feedback we've heard from customers in so many different industries," Gordon said.

This offering is the second major release in Dell's latest Apex portfolio strategy, following a similar appliance launch with Microsoft in September.

Dell also introduced a new validated design for Red Hat's OpenShift AI software on Apex Cloud Platform to simplify the process of building and deploying AI applications on OpenShift.

While the Apex offering automates the deployment and management of the infrastructure stack from compute to container orchestration, the validated design provides best practices and workflow documentation that guides IT teams through deploying Red Hat OpenShift AI on top of the Apex appliance. "Anywhere else, if you want to build and leverage that Red Hat OpenShift AI, you're going to have to do all of that work to get it going, and then you can deploy" the AI software, Gordon said.

But with Dell's validated design, available October 31, IT professionals can focus on building innovative and revenue-generating applications rather than the infrastructure needed to support those apps.