Red Hat and Dell are joining forces once again to realize the promise of the open hybrid cloud, which the Linux distributor has been touting for the last couple of years and already made quite a bit of progress towards delivering on its own. This time around, the firms are introducing a set of jointly developed solutions designed to take some of the hassle out of integrating OpenStack into large-scale enterprise environments.

The launch marks the first milestone in a collaboration the pair originally announced last December and, according to Red Hat virtualization and OpenStack general manner Radhesh Balakrishnan, builds on nearly 15 years of partnership.

“When Linux was trying to become RHEL [Red Hat Enterprise Linux], Michael Dell himself voted with his wallet to partner with Red Hat. We saw history repeating itself in December at Dell World when Michael Dell said ‘hey look, we’re picking Red Hat for OpenStack’,” Balakrishnan told SiliconANGLE in an interview at the recently concluded Red Hat Summit, shortly after the new products were announced. “We all worked with Dell in one way or another in our history, it’s reinvigorating to be engaging with Dell today.”

The new family of co-engineered systems rolled out this week is designed to simplify the deployment of OpenStack-based private clouds running RHEL. The Proof of Concept Configuration, one of the two offerings available at launch, combines five PowerEdge R720 servers with Dell networking equipment and allows customers to try out the capabilities of OpenStack on their own without committing to a major infrastructure investment.

The design is joined by Pilot Configuration, a beefier setup featuring the same hardware that can support upward of six OpenStack compute and three storage nodes. It can be scaled up as needed and enhanced with high-availability (HA) for additional controllers.

The companies’ OpenStack collaboration also extends to the public cloud. In conjunction with the debut of test systems, the pair revealed plans to develop a hybrid solution that will provide interoperability between on-premise environments and OpenShift, Red Hat’s OpenStack-based platform-as-a-service stack. The goal behind the upcoming product is to enable the development of containerized applications that work seamlessly across both the private and public cloud. Dell said that it would eventually provide this functionality across its entire enterprise portfolio.