Expansion of the Dell APEX Cloud Platform family to include Red Hat OpenShift represents another important step toward operational consistency in the public and private cloud.

This was one of the conclusions drawn by theCUBE Research analysis of the joint collaboration. The two companies have engineered a platform optimized for bare metal that will sharply reduce application deployment time using OpenShift.

“The Dell perspective is that this is far more than an operating system on a bare metal server. It’s about creating an experience,” according to Rob Strechay, managing director and principal analyst at theCUBE Research, in his report on the subject. “Red Hat has been about hybrid for a while now, and this is an extension of that. Hybrid is no longer just about consistent technology; it’s more about the experience.”

In his full analysis, Strechay assessed the key trends and impact behind the Dell/Red Hat collaboration.

A shift in workloads to on-premises

The joint initiative followed a trend toward greater balance in the placement of enterprise workloads within public and private clouds. Survey data provided to SiliconANGLE by Enterprise Technology Research revealed a slowdown in usage share growth among public cloud providers. While it’s not reaching equilibrium yet, the balance is definitely tipping back toward on-prem.

“We believe this trend indicates the market is becoming more stable as workloads are being distributed more evenly between public and private clouds,” according to Strechay. ” The growth in cloud usage is primarily due to new workloads being added to existing cloud platforms rather than a lift and shift away from on-premises deployments. ”

With many new cloud-native workloads being split between on-prem and the public cloud, organizations are looking for platform-as-a-service solutions for a variety of deployment models, Strechay pointed out. Dell’s “Ground-to-Cloud” concept is to provide customers with a simpler cloud operating model that can be easily combined with Red Hat OpenShift deployments in hyperscaler environments.

“This solution includes Red Hat OpenShift, automatically deployed and maintained on top of the Dell Universal Storage Layer, which allows organizations to have storage endpoints in the public cloud combined with consistent and centralized management across a comprehensive set of storage services, such as block, file, and data protection,” according to Strechay.

In his final analysis, Strechay pointed out that the cloud operating model, heralded as the future of infrastructure management, is rapidly becoming the norm, facilitating organizations in their transition towards more dynamic, cloud-native workloads. These workloads, which straddle both on-prem and public cloud environments, necessitate a versatile platform-as-a-service that can operate across various deployment models — public cloud, on-premises, colocation, and edge.

The Dell-Red Hat collaboration is distinct in its approach, moving beyond mere replication of on-prem technology in the cloud to a comprehensive system that bridges private and public cloud deployments, embodying a unified cloud operating model.

“Dell Technologies and Red Hat have thoughtfully engineered a system that reimagines how private and public cloud deployments can work together seamlessly in one cloud operating model,” Strechay concluded.

Read the full analysis here.

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