Dell Extends Managed Services Reach to Red Hat OpenShift and K8s Storage

Dell Technologies announced it extended its alliance with Red Hat to include an instance of Red Hat OpenShift delivered as a managed service.

In addition, at its Dell Technologies World conference, the company announced an available bare metal edition of its managed service, dubbed Dell APEX Compute, that provides IT teams with the option of deploying any virtual machine or Kubernetes cluster of their choice.

Finally, Dell Navigator, a software-as-a-service (SaaS) platform for managing services such as data replication, has been extended to Kubernetes.

Caitlyn Gordon, vice president of multi-cloud product management for Dell Technologies, said the managed service alliance with Red Hat will enable Dell to provide faster time-to-value in any data center environment where organizations have decided to run cloud-native applications on Kubernetes clusters.

Many of those workloads are also increasingly stateful, which means they also require access to persistent storage along with advanced data management capabilities that Dell provides as part of its managed APEX services portfolio, she added.

Dell is betting that as organizations deploy more complex cloud-native applications, many of them will opt to rely more heavily on external services to manage the underlying infrastructure. That approach is intended to enable IT organizations to devote more resources to building and deploying applications.

It’s not clear whether organizations will prefer to rely on Dell to manage their IT rather than managing it themselves or relying on a third-party IT services provider. Kubernetes environments tend to be more complex than legacy IT environments, and most organizations don’t have much internal expertise available to manage them, so it may turn out that relying on an external services provider to manage those clusters is a viable option for many organizations. That can be especially true for organizations that, in addition to managing fleets of Kubernetes clusters, must master all the nuances of providing persistent storage for those applications.

Of course, many internal IT organizations are not inclined to cede control over IT infrastructure and applications to a single IT vendor, especially if they employ IT infrastructure from multiple vendors.

Regardless of approach, there are now more organizations that prefer to treat IT as an operational expense. In effect, Dell is enabling a cloud operating model to be applied to all IT infrastructure regardless of where applications are deployed. In the meantime, at the very least, IT teams deploying cloud-native applications in production environments should project their future IT infrastructure requirements. After all, it’s not just about determining what approach makes the most financial and operational sense when it comes to managing IT infrastructure, but also where cloud-native applications are deployed, everywhere from the network edge to the cloud and data centers in between.

Mike Vizard

Mike Vizard is a seasoned IT journalist with over 25 years of experience. He also contributed to IT Business Edge, Channel Insider, Baseline and a variety of other IT titles. Previously, Vizard was the editorial director for Ziff-Davis Enterprise as well as Editor-in-Chief for CRN and InfoWorld.

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