Red Hat Inc. reckons it has a solution for enterprises that struggle with big deployments of software containers: It’s teaming up with Hewlett-Packard Enterprise Co. to optimize its OpenShift Container Platform on HPE’s systems, in particular the composable infrastructure platform HPE Synergy.

Software containers are used by developers to abstract the hardware and operating system away from their applications, allowing them to write software that can run anywhere. They’re popular because they provide an agile way for developers to build next-generation applications.

Problem is, even though containerized apps are easy to deploy in test environments, bigger production deployments are a much bigger headache, since enterprises demand features such as scalability, persistent storage and easy manageability. Red Hat and HPE said that by pairing their technologies, they can easily provide all of these capabilities.

“Customers of both companies can now modernize their platform leveraging each of our services, support, and validated Red Hat OpenShift Container Platform technology stacks on HPE Synergy and HPE Nimble and 3PAR storage arrays,” said Neil MacDonald, vice president and general manager for HPE BladeSystem.

Red Hat’s OpenShift Container Platform is based on widely adopted standards such as Linux containers and Kubernetes, which is software used to manage container deployments. HPE Synergy is a hardware offering that combines storage, compute and network equipment in one chassis, along with management software that can quickly configure the hardware to provide just the resources needed to run an application.

Red Hat said the idea is to pair the OpenShift Container Platform with Synergy and other HPE products to deliver new capabilities such as composable infrastructure for containers, so developers no longer need to worry about configuring resources for their deployments. The companies will also create a new reference architecture for deploying the joint solution alongside HPE’s 3PAR and Nimble storage platforms.

“This partnership is a big win for HPE, RedHat and their joint customers,” said Holger Mueller, principal analyst and vice president of Constellation Research Inc. “Red Hat gets another vendor supported server base for its container platform, HPE gets server sales and CxOs get more deployment options for OpenShift containers. Now we have to see how much success this partnership will have with early adopters in fall of this year.”

The initiative will also involve HPE’s consulting division PointNext, which will provide additional services to help customers migrate to Red Hat’s platform. The new technology integration will be available starting in September.

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