Dell and Red Hat Forge Strategic Partnership for AI and Cloud-Native Innovation

Virtualization and AI: Unpacking the Dell/Red Hat partnership - SiliconANGLE

Dell and Red Hat partner to deliver advanced virtualization for the AI era The virtualization and AI worlds are converging, bringing both challenges and opportunities for organizations and IT teams. The Dell Technologies Inc. and Red Hat Inc. partnership sits at the heart of this shift, offering solutions to simplify operations for enterprises navigating AI-driven complexities, according to Alyson Langon (pictured, right), director of product marketing for multicloud and HCI at Dell Technologies. "With the complexity out there right now between the virtualization landscape and the pace of AI, there's more pressure than ever to keep pace and invest in solutions that keep [a company's] path forward in the future in mind," Langon said. "A good example of this is container adoption. With 67% of organizations having container-based production applications today, and another 18% looking to have deployed container-based applications within the next 12 months, it's imperative to have a container management strategy in place." Langon and Stu Miniman (left), senior director of market insights, hybrid platforms at Red Hat, spoke with theCUBE Research's Rob Strechay at the "Build Now and for the Future With Dell & Red Hat" event, during an exclusive broadcast on theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media's livestreaming studio. They discussed both companies combining containerization, virtualization and AI into a single, flexible platform, empowering enterprises to meet today's challenges while positioning themselves for future success. (* Disclosure below.) With its OpenShift container orchestration platform, Red Hat has evolved considerably over the past decade. However, a significant challenge for the company has been integrating virtual machines into modern architectures centered on containerization. Having Dell as a partner has been key to chiseling away at that challenge, according to Miniman. "When we launched this update to the partnership with Dell, we started with that containerization because while we've been on this journey with OpenShift for over a decade ... it's always, how do I make that simpler?" he said. "Dell has such a great track record at building those solutions, working on those joint integrations, everything from that day one through the entire life cycle. We try to take that cloud-native ecosystem, curate it, integrate it and maintain it for you. But with partnering with Dell, we get all the way down to the hardware level, that entire piece." OpenShift Virtualization, now part of the Dell APEX solution, allows VMs to coexist with containerized applications within the same environment. This convergence represents a major step forward in simplifying IT operations by ensuring that cloud-native and traditional workloads can be managed within the same architecture, Miniman added. "We want to make sure it all works -- storage, networking and compute all need to have those underlying components," he said. "The big change here is how do we bring virtual machines into this environment? Now we can bring virtual machines into that modern architecture with OpenShift Virtualization, and now that's part of the Dell APEX for OpenShift solution." This innovation allows companies to balance containerization, virtualization and AI, with a clear path for those hesitant to fully embrace cloud-native solutions. The partnership ensures that VMs can be transitioned into a containerized world, eliminating the need for separate infrastructures and management systems, according to Miniman. A marked transformation is underway in the virtualization space, as more organizations pivot to looking beyond traditional solutions such as VMware. This shift has opened up new opportunities for platforms such as APEX Cloud Platform for Red Hat OpenShift, which offers both containerized and virtualized workloads within a unified cloud operating model, according to Langon. "The APEX Cloud Platform for Red Hat OpenShift was built with simplicity and ease of use in mind," she said. "Being able to run OpenShift on-prem and getting cloud-like agility and efficiency on bare metal, with built-in software automation and full-stack lifecycle management, provides you the flexibility and choice to set you up for running your applications today and into the future. It's really 'build now and for the future' on a unified platform that can consolidate." As more organizations seek to integrate gen AI into their operations, the ability to manage both VMs and containers within a single platform will become increasingly important. The partnership between Dell and Red Hat ensures that customers have the tools they need to navigate virtualization and AI while maintaining the simplicity, reliability and automation needed to stay competitive, Langon added. Here's the complete video interview, part of SiliconANGLE's and theCUBE Research's coverage of the "Build Now and for the Future With Dell & Red Hat" event:

Dell and Red Hat: Cloud-native applications with AI at the edge - SiliconANGLE

AI at the edge: Dell and Red Hat team to elevate cloud-native workloads Dell Technologies Inc. and Red Hat Inc. are partnering to address the increasing demand for cloud-native applications infrastructure and virtualization within hybrid cloud environments. This latest collaboration between the two companies focuses on addressing the increasing demands of AI infrastructure and virtualization within hybrid cloud environments. According to the announcement, Dell and Red Hat are providing high performance and flexibility for enterprise workloads by enabling Dell's PowerEdge servers to support cloud-native applications running on Red Hat's AI-optimized Linux platform. This collaboration aims to streamline the deployment of AI and cloud-native applications, addressing the challenge of navigating complex enterprise IT environments. The partnership is designed to eliminate the complexities often associated with do-it-yourself solutions, according to Rob Strechay (pictured, left), principal analyst at theCUBE Research, highlighted that . "You see that a lot of this 'easy button' stuff has really been put into that, and a lot of thought has gone into the APEX underlying foundational software as well to make it easy," he said. "This is not like, 'Hey, you just slap it on top.' There is a lot that goes into it versus a DIY-type solution." Strechay joined Dave Vellante (right), chief analyst at theCUBE Research, at the Build Now and for the Future With Dell & Red Hat 2024 event. During this exclusive broadcast on theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media's livestreaming studio, Strechay and Vellante explored how Dell's APEX Cloud Platform, combined with Red Hat OpenShift, helps enterprises manage cloud-native and AI workloads. (* Disclosure below.) AI's escalating adoption across industries has prompted enterprises to shift from traditional virtualization to cloud-native containerized applications, according to Strechay and Vellante. The surge in containerization, driven by AI workloads, reflects this trend. Dell and Red Hat's recent collaboration aims to simplify the management of containerized applications and provide a more efficient AI infrastructure. "It's safe to say that the two topics that are very hot in the community are AI infrastructure and, of course, virtualization," Vellante said. "Containers is the simplifying infrastructure." As enterprises increasingly adopt AI and machine learning, there is a notable shift toward using container technology. This approach enhances the portability and governance of AI models, streamlining their integration and management. "A lot of what is being built from an AI and machine learning perspective is actually in containers," Strechay said. "What they're doing for ease of use and being able to bring the portability of these models [is] containerizing those so that they can actually do governance on some of those models. There's a lot of containers technology and Kubernetes technology being put into this AI/ML." By integrating Red Hat OpenShift with Dell's APEX Cloud Platform, enterprises can gain the flexibility and scalability required to support AI and ML workloads, according to the analysts. This approach helps IT departments transition from legacy virtualization environments to more dynamic, cloud-native applications built on container-based solutions that are optimized for handling modern workloads and data processing demands. "I think everybody's leaning into the cloud-native containerized applications for these AI/ML applications," Strechay said. "We think we've seen another uptick in AI/ML, and people are really trying to get to AI/ML succinctly." It's increasingly important for AI applications to be run in edge computing environments, where real-time decision-making is crucial, according to Strechay. Dell's PowerEdge servers, equipped with Red Hat's AI-optimized Linux platform, deliver low latency for AI-driven tasks by bringing AI inference to the edge. "It seems like a perfect fit to put OpenShift AI on this platform because inference and being at the edge really is where a lot of the inference is going to run," Strechay said. "Having these applications that can grow either in height or depth of storage or across with processing power really brings together some very interesting AI use cases." The ability of Dell's technology to scale both storage and processing power ensures that AI workloads at the edge can keep pace with growing demand. This is particularly important for use cases that require low-latency responses to function effectively. "I think looking at things like digital assistants performing speech recognition, doing that all at the edge where latency is really a key and critical factor for the success," Strechay explained. "Because what we've been seeing is that you have to get the return on investment of AI out there, and how you get your return on AI is really a big piece of the factors that go into building these new applications." In addition to addressing AI and edge computing, Dell and Red Hat's solution also enhances data mobility across hybrid infrastructures, optimizing how cloud-native applications handle data and scale, according to Strechay. Virtualization is central to many enterprises, and the combination of the APEX cloud platform with OpenShift AI makes it easier for companies to manage data mobility and scale across complex environments. "The mobility of data, especially if you're going to use other services in a cloud on top of the Red Hat stack ... maybe SageMaker with OpenShift AI ... you can do that," he said. "You can actually move that data with that entire stack underlying because of the Dell APEX platform solution." This level of integration allows enterprises to take advantage of cloud services while keeping control over their on-premises data. Virtualization, paired with cloud-native solutions, helps businesses optimize their infrastructure for flexibility and scalability. "One of the most intriguing capabilities that they've added ... is OpenShift Virtualization," Strechay noted. "Because a lot of times, things don't fit nicely into a container or into a micro-services architecture. You may have something that is already virtualized that you need to have with that application because locality of data is important." Here's the complete analyst conversation, part of SiliconANGLE's and theCUBE Research's coverage of the Build Now and for the Future With Dell & Red Hat 2024 event: