Dell Technologies Inc. today said it’s shipping the integrated application delivery platform combining Dell hardware and Red Hat Inc.’s OpenShift management platform for software containers that it announced in May.

Jointly engineered with Red Hat, and based on 4th Generation Intel Corp. processors, the Apex Cloud Platform is said to provide simplified installation and maintenance in on-premises and hybrid cloud environments. It delivers OpenShift on a Dell PowerEdge MC-660 or MC-760 bare-metal platform with automation that Dell said can reduce deployment and maintenance times by 90%.

OpenShift supports both software containers and virtual machines simultaneously to simplify the task of transitioning from VMs to containers. Automation toolsets, application program interfaces and Dell’s Container Storage Modules simplify agile DevOps practices, Dell said.

The software-defined storage in the APEX Cloud Platform is based on the same universal storage layer used in Dell’s public cloud storage offering to simplify data movement between on-premises and cloud platforms. Support for Amazon Web Services Inc.’s S3 object storage is not available in this release but is planned for a future version, said Caitlin Gordon, Dell’s vice president of multicloud product management.

“This is about marrying common building blocks from Dell into an OpenShift platform jointly developed with Red Hat,” she said. “It is simpler, faster and more integrated than anything before it. We’re treating this as an ‘easy’ button experience.”

Gordon said that deploying OpenShift on a bare-metal platform typically takes about 10 days. For the Apex Cloud Platform, “we measure it in hours.” Updates and patches are prevalidated to work with the entire operating stack to ensure they can be applied without disrupting other operations.

“That gives customers peace of mind,” Gordon said. “They don’t have to worry about validation or breaking something else in the stack.”

Unified control

A significant feature of the integrated platform is that it can be managed as part of the Apex control plane, she said. “You are now managing infrastructure natively within Red Hat OpenShift,” she said. “There is no separate console to learn and build in.”

Dell is positioning the platform as ready for artificial intelligence development with the option of adding in multiple graphic processing units. However, Gordon said the infrastructure is not intended for the large language model training tasks that are usually done on supercomputers.

“We hear from customers that AI is a huge initiative, but they don’t necessarily know how to get started,” she said. “This platform is not optimized for your A100 LLM tasks because of the power draw and because we’re trying to enable a mass market use case. This is all about simplifying operations and deploying AI using OpenShift on top of this new platform to dramatically simplify the experience.”

The A100 is a high-end GPU from Nvidia Corp. that is used for large-scale AI model training. Dell offers a choice of the less powerful, but more affordable, Nvidia A2, A16, A30 and A40 GPUs.

Dell is also announcing a Dell Validated Design for Red Hat OpenShift AI on the Apex Cloud Platform today. It’s a simplified guide to deploying a digital assistant based on an LLM using a retrieval augmented generation framework, which allows facts to be retrieved from an external knowledge base to ensure that the LLM model can access the most current information.

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