Dell and Red Hat have enhanced the APEX Cloud Platform for Red Hat OpenShift with upgraded software, virtualization, and more storage options.
Dell launched its APEX Red Hat OpenShift service almost a year ago, supporting Red Hat’s OpenShift container orchestration service on Dell PowerEdge servers and PowerFlex block storage with SSDs. APEX is a set of services from Dell where it supplies compute, storage, and networking gear through a public cloud-like subscription model.
Alyson Langon, Dell’s director of Product Marketing for Multicloud and as-a-Service, blogged: “By managing everything on a single platform, operations are simplified.” To help with this, the APEX Red Hat OpenShift offering “now includes Red Hat OpenShift Virtualization by default … for organizations to run, deploy, and manage new and existing virtual machine workloads, alongside containers and AI/ML workloads.”
Dell and Red Hat have “expanded the block storage options from PowerFlex to include PowerStore and Red Hat OpenShift Data Foundation, which gives customers additional options who want a smaller footprint.”
OpenShift Data Foundation (ODF) includes Ceph, NooBaa multicloud object storage and data management, persistent container storage, multi-cloud object gateway and snapshot, clone, encryption, replication, and DR data services. PowerStore is Dell’s unified block and file, dual-controller storage array.
Existing PowerStore and PowerFlex appliances can also be used by the new APEX OpenShift platform.
On top of that, customers can hook up Dell’s enterprise block, file, and object storage offerings, such as PowerScale and ObjectScale, which Langon says is “important for the growing number of AI workloads.” With AI workloads in mind, we note that PowerEdge servers are x86-based, supporting 5th generation Xeons, and can run Nvidia GPUs as well. PowerScale is also Nvidia SuperPOD-certified.
Red Hat OpenShift v4.14 and v4.16 are supported by this new APEX OpenShift offering, which adds support for CPU hot-plug and picking a specific node for live migration.
Langon says the new APEX OpenShift cloud platform eases management of intricate systems and diverse workloads, streamlining IT operations for improved efficiency, and reducing the complexities associated with managing multiple versions of software.
