NetApp & Red Hat enhance virtual environments flexibility

NetApp has announced an expanded collaboration with Red Hat to enhance the flexibility and management of virtual environments for enterprises.

The collaboration aims to streamline and accelerate the development and management of enterprise applications within virtualised environments by combining NetApp's data infrastructure with Red Hat OpenShift. This partnership seeks to offer businesses improved capabilities for managing applications both on-premises and through hybrid multicloud setups.

Red Hat OpenShift is a hybrid cloud application platform that utilises Kubernetes. It is relied upon by over half of the top 25 companies in the Global Fortune 500 for streamlining application lifecycles and fostering innovation, particularly in AI.

Jonsi Stefansson, Senior Vice President and Chief Technology Officer at NetApp, commented on the evolving demands on enterprises: "In today's ever-changing technology landscape, organisations need to embrace flexibility and agility so they can adapt and create a winning strategy. Developing, deploying, and managing modern enterprise applications requires high-performance and secure, persistent flash storage and advanced data management capabilities."

"NetApp intelligent data infrastructure with Red Hat OpenShift makes it simpler and faster for customers to adopt and manage their virtualised environments, as well as deliver performance, mobility and security for critical data managed on RedHat OpenShift AI."

The expanded collaboration introduces several new capabilities designed to give customers greater flexibility in deploying and managing virtual environments. These include innovations in NetApp's Trident and Cisco FlexPod offerings and enhanced integrations with Google Cloud solutions.

Trident now includes a container storage interface integration, allowing Red Hat users to access NetApp's ONTAP software capabilities more easily. A new version of Trident has been released, featuring added protection, migration, and disaster recovery capabilities without additional costs and extended support for Google Cloud NetApp Volumes.

NetApp has also introduced new validated Cisco FlexPod designs specifically for Red Hat OpenShift Virtualisation and AI deployments. This aims to assure customers that their AI workloads can run efficiently with a unified support mechanism that includes virtualisation, container management, network, server, and storage functions.

Additionally, a new integration allows the use of Red Hat OpenShift Dedicated with Google Cloud NetApp Volumes for containerised workloads. This integration offers enterprises a fully managed application platform, providing them the flexibility to exploit persistent storage built on NetApp's ONTAP within Google Cloud environments.

Stefanie Chiras, Senior Vice President of Partner Ecosystem Success at Red Hat, spoke on the alliance's benefits: "We believe in the power of open source software to help businesses access the latest features and capabilities to run their IT environments. At the core of the open-source philosophy is collaboration, and in that spirit, we are expanding our collaboration with NetApp to help empower customers with the flexibility they need to drive innovation in their virtualised environments."

"Intelligent data infrastructure from NetApp provides a solid foundation for Red Hat OpenShift customers to further modernise and protect the applications running in their virtual deployments and Kubernetes containers."