This post was written by:

  • Lukasz Sztachanski @LSztachanski, Cloud Solutions Engineer with Intel's Data Center Solutions Group.
  • Dave Cain @thedavecain, Cloud Solutions Architect with Red Hat's Global Partners and Alliances team.

Intel and Red Hat have a long history of contribution on open source projects. Within the application development space, we have jointly and independently worked upstream to fine-tune orchestration tools, application services, and language runtimes for peak performance on Intel Architecture. Today we are excited to announce our newest joint effort, an Intel reference architecture for Red Hat OpenShift Container Platform, which packages many of these optimizations and streamlines their deployment. This helps IT decision makers move past concerns about implementation overhead and instead focus on the best business and technical solution for landing their workloads. It also addresses developer concerns around flexibility and agility of the container ecosystem.

A Solution Built on Container Strategy

The OpenShift solution is based purely on container strategy. Containers are widely believed to be the future of application development and scheduling, and many organizations are already testing, adopting and deploying containerized apps into production. OpenShift delivers containers as a service (CaaS), supported on private cloud and enterprise infrastructure such as OpenStack, vSphere, Red Hat Virtualization (RHV), as well as by Amazon Web Services and Google Cloud Platform for public cloud deployments. CaaS covers the gap between infrastructure as a service that requires more system administration and configuration, and platform as a service that tends to be limiting in terms of language support and libraries. As a part of the current solution architecture, Intel and Red Hat are using Ansible by Red Hat to fully automate the installation of Red Hat OpenShift Container Platform in a highly available and horizontally scalable configuration with persistent storage provided by Red Hat Container-Native Storage and powered by a pre-defined hardware bill of materials.

An Integrated Solution

Deploying a container-based architecture has been difficult in the past. Too many pieces and parts made it a challenge for many IT shops to integrate with positive ROI. This design from Red Hat and Intel is an integrated container solution that is easy to use, configure, and deploy.

In this design, users will find a simple to order and operationalize container application platform that’s deployable in under an hour using popular open source, enterprise-grade software solutions from Red Hat, and the latest Intel® Xeon® Scalable processors, Intel® 25 Gigabit Server Adapters, and ® SSD Data Center Family designed to support common requirements of QA, test, and developer infrastructure. Easy-to-deploy Ansible playbooks and scripts are tightly integrated with a pre-defined hardware stack. They provide validated deployment configurations utilizing networking infrastructure from Arista and software-defined storage from Red Hat Container-Native Storage.

OpenShift Container Platform integrates the architecture, processes, platforms, and services needed to help development and operations teams traverse traditional siloed structures and produce modernized applications, deliver new services, and accelerate development processes to help their business succeed. OpenShift is managed by the Kubernetes container orchestrator, which is an open source project and the industry standard for orchestrating Linux containers across a cluster of systems running Docker-formatted container images.

Red Hat Container-Native Storage is integrated with Red Hat OpenShift Container Platform and uniquely serves storage out of containers. Red Hat Container-Native Storage can eliminate the need to have an independent storage platform, enabling customers to achieve one integrated container platform with greater efficiency and cost savings, a streamlined user experience, single control plane, and a single point of support.

Learn More

This suite of products was designed with user experience in mind to accelerate the adoption of emerging technologies from Red Hat and Intel. It makes leading cloud and container software easy to deploy; and it deemphasizes installation, configuration, and maintenance overhead as decision criteria for on-premises deployments.

To learn more about this Intel reference architecture for Red Hat OpenShift, the following resources are available for download:

Other solutions from Intel and Red Hat are available at builders.intel.com or redhat.com/intel.

Come Talk to Us in Person This Week

If you are going to be at KubeCon + CloudNativeCon North America 2017 this week (December 6th - 8th 2017), be sure to stop by either the Intel (D3) or Red Hat (D1) booths to discuss this solution and more! Both Lukasz and I will be present.

If you’re not able to make it to Austin, be sure to see what we’re up to in real-time using Twitter. Watch the hash tags #RedHat #Intel and #KubeCon to see what we’re up to!

Categories

News, OpenShift Container Platform, How-tos

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