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Having trouble bringing containers into production? Red Hat and Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE) have an answer. They're optimizing Red Hat OpenShift Container Platform (RHOCP), Red Hat's Kubernetes container orchestration platform, on HPE platforms, including HPE Synergy.

Sure, it's easy to deploy containerized applications in development and test environments, but it's not so easy in enterprise-sized production environments. Enterprises often require container scalability, added security features, persistent storage, and manageability to deploy containers in production. To help speed up container application delivery, HPE and Red Hat are collaborating in what HPE calls the industry's "first composable infrastructure".

In addition, the two companies are also collaborating to offer services to help customers adopt RHOCP with HPE platforms from proof of concept to production.

"Deploying large-scale container environments to the enterprise data center is not simple," said Neil MacDonald, HPE Blade System's VP, in a statement. "Through our long-standing collaboration with Red Hat, we're aiming to accelerate the adoption and deployment of the RHOCP with HPE solutions from proof of concept to large-scale deployment. Customers of both companies can now modernize their platform leveraging each of our services, support, and validated RHOCP technology stacks on HPE Synergy and HPE Nimble and 3PAR storage arrays."

"DevOps and agile application development are helping customers to deliver on the promise of digital transformation with accelerated application development and microservices architectures," added Ashesh Badani, Red Hat's OpenShift VP. "Together, Red Hat and HPE aim to deliver a container-based solution that enables customers to not only build new cloud-native apps and microservices, but also to modernize legacy applications."

This jointly engineered container solution is optimized for continuous integration and continuous delivery (CI/CD) by RHOCP and for running cloud-native microservices applications alongside existing traditional and stateful applications. Red Hat Ansible Tower, Red Hat's DevOps tool, and HPE Synergy Composer will automate container deployment in a highly available environment, so organizations can take advantage of container benefits sooner and with less risk.

Specifically HPE will pair key components of its hybrid IT products and services portfolio with the following Red Hat OpenShift Container Platform capabilities:

Containerization services. Helps customers adopt and migrate to RHOCP with containerization services through HPE Pointnext.
Reference architecture. This will provide best practice blueprints for deploying scalable container platforms from development to operations using RHOCP on HPE Synergy design with HPE 3PAR and HPE Nimble Storage.
Composable Infrastructure for containers. This leverages HPE Synergy as a single platform to run containers on virtual machines or on bare metal, and traditional non-containerized applications side-by-side.
Persistent storage for containers. Enables developers to provision and manage storage volumes on demand with RHOCP's persistent volume framework, making it easier to provision container volumes, protect container data, and set Quality-of-Service (QoS) on HPE 3PAR and Nimble storage arrays.
Faster deployment and automation. Offers a complete set of Ansible DevOps playbooks along with step-by-step deployment guides to automate deployment of the HPE Synergy with RHOCP including high availability, networking, load balancing, persistent storage, container data protection policies, and operating system security. This API-driven, programmatic control of physical infrastructure can deploy a production-ready RHOCP environment to less than two hours.
Container data protection. Improves backup and restoration of RHOCP data from public clouds using HPE Cloud Volumes and/or HPE Cloud Bank Storage.
Stronger security. Leverages various security tools designed to protect the complete stack. In addition, HPE offers its Gen10 Silicon Root of Trust security at the processor firmware level, which ensures servers do not execute compromised firmware code, and HPE Workload Aware Security for Linux (WASL) to further improve security from the OS level and below.

This hardware and software stack will be available in September 2018.

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