Dell Technologies and Red Hat today expanded their partnership in an effort to improve and accelerate multi-cloud DevOps by providing enterprises with different ways to build applications in one vendor's platform while running them on a second vendor's infrastructure.

Dell’s APEX platform now provides integration with Red Hat's OpenShift Kubernetes orchestration platform via a Dell-managed, on-premises, container-as-a-service option. This allows developers to write cloud-native applications on Dell infrastructure.

"The key tenant of [Apex containers for OpenShift] is it's a fully managed offering. It's based on Dell PowerFlex software-defined infrastructure," Dell VP of Emerging Services Satish Iyer said during a briefing call. The goal of the service is to provide customers with "a native Kubernetes offering where they actually can manage a virtualized container," he added. "And this is a Dell-managed stack, full lifecycle. So, from support, deploy, all the way to the entire fleet management operation," Dell takes management off the shoulders of developers, Iyer explained.

"We're really excited about being able to bring this environment, that is really the leading enterprise cloud-native platform in the industry, bringing that to Dell infrastructure and offering that to customers in quite a few different ways," Caitlin Gordon, Dell VP of product management, added during the briefing.

The No. 1 priority for enterprise customers nowadays is increasing developer velocity, Gordon said of her conversations with customers, citing studies that show developers spend just 20% of their time at work actually writing code. "That is certainly not the velocity that IT organizations are looking for, [and] not the velocity that companies are looking for," she explained.

"There's a lot of different ways that customers want to be able to deploy, to manage, and to implement [OpenShift] in their environments. That's the backdrop of what we are doing here," she said. "How do we help our customers simplify the deployment of, the management of, [and] the integration of an OpenShift environment on Dell?"

Another piece of this expanded partnership is Dell's validated platform for Red Hat OpenShift, which "is really about having the deployment documented [and] configuration guidance to simplify and streamline an OpenShift environment but also really to give some huge benefits of" Dell's underlying infrastructure, Gordon explained. The validated platform speeds up the time it takes to get on-premises infrastructure set up and running, according to the vendor, and improves the predictability of operating an OpenShift environment on Dell's infrastructure.

"It's all about combining infrastructure that is built for scalability, for enterprise class, mission critical performance — you can meet those SLAs and get incredible latency and throughput for these cloud-native applications — and combining that with the power of what you have with OpenShift," Gordon said. And to support the Dell validated platform, she touted a pro-deploy option that includes not just the Dell infrastructure, "but actually the Red Hat OpenShift as well."

The Dell validated platform for OpenShift and Apex containers for OpenShift will both be available to customers at the end of the month, she said. These moves follow updates to the vendor's Apex storage platform to include a customer-managed option.

The two vendors are also announcing their work to co-engineer an automated hybrid cloud infrastructure to take these same principles and apply them to on-premises OpenShift deployments across public clouds and the edge.

"How do we enable our customers to go even further than what we've done with that validated platform? How do we really simplify the infrastructure stack so our customers can focus on building on top of that infrastructure, building their applications, and really being able to develop once and deploy anywhere?" Gordon said of the move.

Customers love OpenShift's flexibility across multiple clouds, "which is also a key tenant of what we are building," she said. "It's really about that experience for IT so they can better serve the development community."

In addition, the co-engineering effort will seek to establish a common operating model. "The more we can simplify and make that infrastructure common, the easier it really is from an IT perspective," she explained. Optimizing performance and minimizing risk while delivering a pre-integrated offering "is what we're aiming for here," Gordon said.

Dell is also pursuing a similar partnership with Red Hat's parent company IBM to offer added visibility and actionable insights up and down the full stack, along with intelligent automation features for the vendors' existing hybrid cloud offering.