Nutanix Inc. and Red Hat Inc. announced a strategic partnership today that will combine installation, management and interoperability of Red Hat OpenShift and Red Hat Enterprise Linux with Nutanix Cloud Platform, including Nutanix AOS and AHV.

The partnership will make OpenShift the preferred choice for enterprise full stack Kubernetes on Nutanix Cloud Platform, which will concurrently become the top selection for hyperconverged infrastructure on RHEL and OpenShift.

“What we’re hearing from our customers is they want this integration between Red Hat technologies and Nutanix solutions,” said Monica Kumar (pictured, right), senior vice president of marketing and cloud go-to-market at Nutanix. “This partnership that we’re announcing today is going to enable best-in-class solutions for building, scaling and managing containerized and virtualized cloud native applications in hyperconverged infrastructure environments.”

Kumar spoke with Dave Vellante, host of SiliconANGLE Media’s livestreaming video studio theCUBE. She was joined by David Farrell (pictured, left), senior vice president of global strategic alliances at Red Hat, and they discussed the benefits that certification will bring to customers and deployment of a joint engineering and field support solution. (* Disclosure below.)

Choice and consistency for hybrid

Certification of Nutanix’s built-in hypervisor – AHV – for RHEL and OpenShift will simplify full stack solutions for containerized and virtualized cloud native applications and provide Red Hat customers with additional options for hypervisor deployments, according to today’s announcement.

According to Vellante, who is also the Chief Analyst at SiliconANGLE sister company Wikibon, “many customers and industry watchers have looked forward to a partnership like this for a while because it gives buyers a more complete alternative to VMware’s vSphere and Microsoft’s Hyper-V. For Red Hat, this partnership adds an attractive hypervisor option that is not competitive to its mission and for Nutanix it puts the wood behind a leading container platform that makes a clear commitment to its customers.”

“It’s about choice and optionality and consistency, the verdict is in now for the industry that hybrid is the future,” Farrell said. “Certain applications and workloads are going to run on-prem; others are going to run on the public cloud, and customers need choice to be able to decide the right destination for those workloads. That’s what Red Hat is all about. That’s what RHEL is all about. That’s what OpenShift is all about.”

The companies also indicated that the partnership would include a joint engineering roadmap for continued interoperability between the two platforms and combined field support.

“We have integrated support so customers can contact Nutanix, they can contact Red Hat; having that seamless experience is really critical,” Farrell noted. “We’ll continue to work to make sure that our roadmaps are aligned and customers have assurance and continuity over to time so they can make investments they know are going to pay off and be safe and scalable over the long arc of their technology horizon.”

By bringing Nutanix’s hyperconverged offering to the open hybrid cloud, both firms anticipate continued interest on the part of customers in a wide range of solutions for scaling and managing cloud native applications and workloads.

“We know there’s a huge demand out there for this integrated solution between Red Hat and Nutanix,” Kumar said. “This is just the beginning of our relationship to help customers. The best is yet to come.”

Watch the complete video interview below, and be sure to check out more of SiliconANGLE’s and theCUBE’s CUBE Conversations. (* Disclosure: Nutanix Inc. sponsored this segment of theCUBE. Neither Nutanix nor other sponsors have editorial control over content on theCUBE or SiliconANGLE.)

Photo: SiliconANGLE