Dell APEX Cloud Platform for Red Hat OpenShift Arrives

The future is cloud-native, built on a modern container architecture

The next wave of IT modernization is here. Organizations are quickly adopting cloud-native strategies to accelerate AI adoption and supercharge application delivery. Gartner® predicts that more than 95% of global organizations will be running containerized applications in production by 20281. Organizations need to modernize their applications and that requires a modern infrastructure platform that’s simple to deploy and manage.

APEX Cloud Platform for Red Hat OpenShift modernizes your infrastructure

It’s for these reasons that we’re happy to announce the availability of Dell APEX Cloud Platform for Red Hat OpenShift. Dell APEX Cloud Platform is the first fully integrated application delivery platform purpose-built for Red Hat OpenShift. Jointly engineered with Red Hat, and powered by 4th Generation Intel processors, the APEX Cloud Platform transforms how organizations deploy, manage, and run containers, alongside virtual machines, on-premises.

We know you need to be flexible, agile, and purposeful about how, and where, you develop and run applications so together with Red Hat, a Leader in the 2023 Gartner® Magic Quadrant™ for Container Management,2 we’re excited to bring the first integrated application delivery platform for Red Hat OpenShift to market.

“Innovation has always been at the center of our collaboration with Dell, and today, we’re bringing that innovation to life with a transformative way to run Red Hat OpenShift on-premises. Dell APEX Cloud Platform for Red Hat OpenShift offers a streamlined cloud-native experience by leveraging the best of our technologies in a unified application platform. I look forward to seeing how our customers use this platform to bring their own innovation to life.” – Stefanie Chiras, senior vice president, Partner Ecosystem Success, Red Hat.

A Platform for Modern Application Innovation, Deployment and Management

APEX Cloud Platform for Red Hat OpenShift transforms everything you thought you knew about operating OpenShift, the industry’s leading hybrid cloud application platform powered by Kubernetes, on-premises with a solution that helps simplify multicloud, accelerate application delivery, and optimize workload placement.

Figure 1: APEX Cloud Platform for Red Hat OpenShift based on common building blocks

Simplify multicloud. In a multicloud environment, customers need the consistency, performance, reliability and security capabilities of on-premises infrastructure without sacrificing the agility and flexibility of public cloud.  Gone are the days of the complex "do-it-yourself" approach to deploying and managing Kubernetes.  APEX Cloud Platform for Red Hat OpenShift delivers everything you need to rapidly deploy and run Red Hat OpenShift on a turnkey, integrated bare metal platform. APEX Cloud Platform Foundation Software automates Red Hat OpenShift deployment, making it 90% faster3 than a manual approach. We perform over 21,000 hours4 of testing and validation on full stack updates resulting in a 90% decrease in the time required to perform updates.5 Imagine what you could do with 90% more free time! 

Accelerate Application Delivery. What could your IT teams achieve if they spent less time wrestling with infrastructure management? Our application delivery platform, bolstered by high-performance infrastructure including high-performance Intel AMX acceleration, and modern container orchestration, along with advanced DevOps automation tools, gives your IT teams the gift of time and freedom.

APEX Cloud Platform for Red Hat OpenShift is built on next generation PowerEdge servers and Dell’s high performance, linearly scalable software-defined storage based on PowerFlex technology. Together they help you meet stringent enterprise SLAs for performance, scalability and resilience, across a broad set of workloads.

“With Dell APEX Cloud Platform for Red Hat OpenShift, organizations can now realize the full performance potential of next generation PowerEdge servers with 4th Gen Intel Xeon Scalable processors delivering 2x performance compared to previous generations.” – Jeremy Rader, general manager, Xeon Market Readiness, Intel

Red Hat OpenShift brings together tested and trusted services to reduce the friction of developing, modernizing, deploying, running, and managing applications to deliver a consistent experience across public cloud, on-premises, hybrid cloud, or edge architecture. Red Hat OpenShift supports containers and virtual machines (VMs) simultaneously, helping simplify the transition from VMs to containers. Extensive automation toolsets, including open APIs and Dell’s Container Storage Modules simplify DevOps processes and make IT more efficient.    

Figure 2: APEX Cloud Platform Foundation Software integration into Red Hat OpenShift console

Optimize Workload Placement. Application portability in a multicloud world is essential. We’ve made it easier for you to move applications and datasets more seamlessly across multicloud environments. The SDS in the APEX Cloud Platform is based on the same universal storage layer in our public cloud storage offering, so your storage on-premises is compatible with storage services from Dell in the public cloud. This agility shouldn’t come at the cost of security. Close engineering collaboration between Dell and Red Hat helps ensure that customers have rapid access to new patches, helping to mitigate security vulnerabilities.

“Customers are frequently asking us how to accelerate application development and adopt cloud-native strategies,” said John Cole, general manager, AHEAD. “Dell APEX Cloud Platform for Red Hat OpenShift is the first fully integrated on-premises infrastructure platform designed to make it easier than ever for companies to adopt hybrid cloud, speed application delivery and optimize workload placement.”

A Refined Approach to AI Differentiation

Organizations of all sizes have embraced an AI-enabled future to create more value for customers, employees, and shareholders. While AI offers enormous potential, there is also tremendous complexity as data scientists turn to multicloud to optimize application and data portability. With 82% of ITDMs preferring an on-prem or hybrid model for Generative AI (GenAI)6, it’s more important than ever to have a multicloud architecture that maximizes the value of your data while minimizing complexity.

Today we’re also announcing a new Dell Validated Design for Red Hat OpenShift AI on APEX Cloud Platform which offers organizations a simplified guide on how to deploy a digital assistant utilizing a Large Language Model (LLM) and the Retrieval Augmented Generation (RAG) framework. This integrated multicloud solution illustrates how you can use RAG with your own data securely on-prem.

APEX Cloud Platform and Red Hat OpenShift AI gives data scientists much-needed agility, flexibility, portability, and scalability to design, build and deploy AI-enabled applications at scale. Along with the right AI application platform, many organizations will also need the right partner to realize the full potential of AI applications for their business.

Figure 3: Dell Validated Design for Red Hat OpenShift AI on APEX Cloud Platform

World Class Services to Deliver AI Value and Accelerate Container Adoption

Dell Services, recently recognized by Forbes7, helps customers drive their businesses forward.  Organizations looking to create a winning strategy for Generative AI can leverage the proven methodology of advisory services to define their ideal future state and develop an actionable roadmap aligned to high value AI use cases. And with the help of Dell’s extensive data science expertise and newly-announced Data Preparation Services, we will accelerate the power of AI for your data, helping you obtain a clean, accurate data set in the right format to enable AI projects.  

Infrastructure services provide best practices to deploy, support, and assist with OpenShift deployment and configuration. Consulting services offer deep expertise covering people, processes, and workloads, designed to accelerate the utilization of Red Hat OpenShift.  Managed Services will help overcome the complexities of managing and maintaining a containerized platform needed by development teams, freeing up your IT organization to manage the workloads that are developed or migrated to APEX Cloud Platform for Red Hat OpenShift.

Modern Consumption for Modern Apps

Modern applications need modern infrastructure, and your consumption should be just as agile. Utilization can be difficult to predict, so Dell APEX flexible consumption options provide elastic capacity. For ultimate agility, customers have immediate access to buffer capacity, should they need it, while only paying for what they use. Dell APEX Flex on Demand offers additional peace of mind by capping total monthly billing at 85% usage of total installed capacity.