Accelerating Time-to-Value with Workload-Optimized Configurations for Red Hat OpenShift

This post was written in collaboration with Clyde Hedrick,  Director, Software Solutions Business Development at Intel.

Digital transformation is accelerating and organizations of all kinds are modernizing their application infrastructure in order to compete. Analytics, artificial intelligence (AI), machine learning (ML), and complex data pipelines are all changing the ways that organizations manage and derive value from their data. Meanwhile, edge applications, analytics workloads, and high-performance applications all have distinct requirements ranging from compute, network, and storage such as access, capacity, and performance that drive distinctly different considerations. 

Monolithic application deployments on traditional virtual machines (VMs) cannot meet the multicloud agility, security and flexibility requirements of a modern data center. Containerized microservices are an increasingly popular approach to application development and deployment. Unfortunately, not every organization has the time and expertise to test, evaluate, and optimize various combinations of hardware and software to determine their suitability for diverse workloads.

Intel and Red Hat are collaborating to help organizations simplify and accelerate their digital transformation by defining preconfigured, validated workload-optimized configurations that include the hardware and software to deploy containerization. These architectures are based on industry best practices, benchmarks, workload characterization tests and customer deployments and feature Red Hat OpenShift with ​workload‑optimized compute, storage, memory and networking resources from Intel. 

The versatile configurations tailored for database and analytics workloads can be assembled in ready-to-deploy starter kits that enable converged compute and storage and data services into a 3-node compact clusters or more tailored to fit separate compute and storage and data services into 6-node clusters, both of which can be expanded upon with more converged compact clusters or the independent compute and/or storage and data services clusters.

Red Hat and Intel are also validating zero touch provisioning for these deployments. By accelerating the Red Hat OpenShift platform deployments on bare-metal systems at our partner’s factory, customers or solution providers can spend less time getting the systems up and running, and concentrate on deploying their applications and workloads in a fully functional Red Hat OpenShift environment on day one! 

In addition, our ecosystem partners, such as Dell Technologies, Teksystems, and Crossvale to name a few, help organizations accelerate Day 0 planning, and can also accelerate deployment of myriad workloads so that your business can hit the road running with Red Hat OpenShift. 

To take full advantage of Kubernetes, organizations need a complete platform that not only delivers container services including platform, application, developer, and data services, but can provide multi-cluster management, cluster security, a global registry and cluster data management. To this end, these configurations from Red Hat and Intel are built with Red Hat OpenShift Platform Plus.

Red Hat OpenShift Platform Plus

To ease the transition to a modern infrastructure, organizations need complete solutions with tested components that are designed to work together and ready to run. Red Hat OpenShift Platform Plus satisfies this requirement by providing a single hybrid cloud platform for innovative applications and their data. The platform lets you build, deploy, run, and manage fully modern containerized applications with comprehensive security settings at scale to support your digital transformation journey. Red Hat OpenShift Platform Plus includes Red Hat OpenShift as well as the following advanced components:

• Red Hat Advanced Cluster Management for Kubernetes. Managing Kubernetes clusters can pose significant challenges. Red Hat Advanced Cluster Management for Kubernetes offers end-to-end management visibility and control with a single view to manage your Kubernetes clusters.
• Red Hat Advanced Cluster Security for Kubernetes. Strong security is essential to any organization, and is paramount for cloud-native applications. Red Hat Advanced Cluster Security for Kubernetes is a Kubernetes-native container security solution that lets you build, deploy, and run cloud-native enterprise applications with greater confidence. 
• Red Hat OpenShift Data Foundation Essentials. Data-centric applications need scalable data services that run anywhere and everywhere in the hybrid cloud. Red Hat OpenShift Data Foundation is persistent software-defined storage integrated with and optimized for Red Hat OpenShift. Based on leading industry technologies that provide petabyte-scale persistent cloud storage, a Kubernetes storage operator, and multicloud object gateway technology, OpenShift Data Foundation runs anywhere that Red Hat OpenShift does—on-premise or in hybrid cloud environments.
• Red Hat Quay. Organizations need effective ways to store and deploy containerized applications in a Red Hat OpenShift environment. Red Hat Quay is a private container registry that stores, builds, and deploys container images. It analyzes container images for security vulnerabilities.

Intel inside

With  Intel Xeon Scalable processors, Intel Optane technology, and Intel Ethernet technology, you can achieve the portability, consistency, and performance that you need to run your specific workloads, with confidence that the overall platform is fully interoperable. With a wide range of preconfigured appliance choices, you can quickly and easily right-size your deployment for your particular workload, whether it’s edge computing, high-capacity big data analytics, or latency-sensitive database transactions. The combination of a best-in-class Intel-based platform workload-optimized with Red Hat OpenShift provides your business the trust that you can meet your digital transformation needs.

Learn more

To learn more about the extensive 25-year collaboration between Red Hat and Intel or for more details on data node configurations for Red Hat OpenShift, visit red.ht/intel and discover more about our technical proof points behind these recommendations:

• Red Hat OpenShift Platform Plus with Intel® Technology Solution Brief
• Build Container Platform Instances the Easy Way with Red Hat and Intel
• Easily Scale Your Apps and Data Services
• Red Hat OpenShift Data Foundation for databases and analytics
• Analytics Engine powered by Apache Spark on OpenShift
• Modernizing application infrastructure for 5G