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Dell Technologies recently announced the general availability of its Apex Cloud Platform for Red Hat OpenShift, a turnkey infrastructure platform aimed at simplifying the deployment of microservices containers. It is designed to run in data centers and connect to multiple cloud services.

Apex is the first fully integrated application delivery platform purposely engineered for Red Hat OpenShift, the company said. It was jointly engineered with Red Hat for Dell PowerEdge servers using new, fourth-generation Intel processors. Apex is designed to upgrade how organizations deploy, manage and run containers alone or alongside virtual machines, Dell said.

OpenShift is a hybrid cloud application platform that automates many of the manual processes involved in containerizing, deploying and managing applications. It is built on top of Kubernetes, which has become a de facto cloud operating system for an increasing number of enterprises. The APEX/OpenShift package is bolstered by high-performance infrastructure and advanced DevOps automation tools.

Dell provides several options for the platforms deployment. They are: ground-to-cloud, which brings Apex to the public cloud; cloud-to-ground, enabling the deployment of modern cloud software stacks fully integrated on Dell data center infrastructure; and as-a-service, which brings the subscription cloud to dedicated on-premises environments. Apex Cloud Platform falls under the cloud-to-ground category.

Dell APEX Cloud Platform for Red Hat OpenShift is easily managed through the OpenShift console, so theres no additional steps needed or a need to leave your OpenShift environment to manage your infrastructure, Caitlin Gordon, Dell VP of DevOps product management, told The New Stack. It also includes deep DevOps automation tools and lifecycle management tools that allow developers to move faster, as theyll be focused less on infrastructure management and more on getting critical applications out the door.

While the Dell message indicates that Apex is custom-designed for OpenShift, the same platform also has been customized previously for Microsoft Azure.

Gordon said that the Apex-OpenShift package helps optimize the placement of workloads in physical data centers or in single or multiple cloud deployments.

This features the same software-defined storage as Dell public cloud storage offerings, so devs and IT teams can easily move their applications between on-premises and public cloud environments, Gordon said.

Key features

The availability of Dell Apex Cloud Platform for Red Hat OpenShift comes at a time when enterprises are planning to modernize their IT environments so that they can make application development and workload placements more efficient.

This move toward containers has been a trend for several years. IT researcher Gartner estimates that more than 95% of global enterprises will be running containerized applications in production alone or alongside virtual machines by 2028. This is from A CTOs Guide to Navigating the Cloud-Native Container Ecosystem, published May 31, 2023.

Dell Validated Design for Red Hat OpenShift AI on APEX Cloud Platform is expected to be available as of Oct. 31, the company said.

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Dell GA's APEX Cloud Platform for Red Hat OpenShift - The New Stack