Red Hat Inc. is targeting developers with a new dedicated cloud platform for coders.

The new service isn’t exactly cheap, which suggests it’s aimed at squarely at the larger enterprises. The new platform costs $48,000 a year, and provides companies with a high-availability cluster featuring 48TB of bandwidth, five nodes, four application nodes, premium support and 100GB of data. Additional nodes are available at $12,000 each, with an extra 500GB of data available for $3,000.

Red Hat is calling the new service OpenShift Dedicated, and it becomes the third platform available under the OpenShift banner. The other two options are OpenShift Enterprise, which hosts the system on-premise, and OpenShift Online, which runs on a shared cloud platform.

OpenShift Dedicated comes with both the Docker container and Kubernetes orchestration technologies that were incorporated in OpenShift Enterprise 3.1, and its Jboss Middleware services are also available. The service is also accessible through a VPN, offers configurable admin and security options, and runs Amazon Virtual Private Cloud (VPC) functions.

Red Hat’s play seems to be aimed at grabbing a larger slice of the platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) market that’s led by Amazon Web Services, Microsoft and Salesforce.com, Inc. PaaS is becoming more popular with enterprises as it allows them to develop and test applications without worrying about the system/admin side of things. And Red Hat does have some room for maneuver here, thanks to its reputation for providing solid support and its existing customer base, which may help encourage some organizations to ditch competitor services for its own.

“Red Hat continues to advance its portfolio of solutions for the hybrid cloud,” said Larry Carvalho, research manager, Platform as a Service, International Data Corp. (IDC). “OpenShift Dedicated adds to that, giving customers the choice of a hosted offering in the public cloud for its container application platform. This brings a true multi-cloud offering to end-users, who can use OpenShift in the environment that best suits their needs.”

Red Hat offered the following testimonial from one of its early access customers in the hope of convincing enterprises to take a look.

“We were able to quickly receive access to our cluster and not worry about building our own platform,” said Dean Peterson, solutions architect at the State of Minnesota. “Red Hat provided a excellent hosting experience and proactive support, enabling us to focus on building our applications.”

The company said OpenShift Dedicated is generally available from today.