Red Hat OpenShift and Skytap

Enterprises are moving towards a DevOps culture; they’re trying to retire the technical debt and move away from monolithic application management and support. To that end, OpenShift is fast becoming the defacto standard in container management and orchestration, partially because of Red Hat’s history of the goto operating system in enterprise applications and partly to ensure that customers avoid any hint of vendor lock-in with the hyperscale providers managed Kubernetes/Container offerings. When organisations look to modernise they’re looking at Kubernetes, and the clear choice for the enterprise is Red Hat OpenShift Container Platform.

When we look at this digital transformation, two things have been happening, transformation to the cloud and transformation of the datacentre.

The cloud: the challenge here is that when these plans were drawn up, it the cost business case was typically predicated on the basis that all the workloads could be migrated to the cloud, using the 6 Rs, and predominately that meant either Rehost or Replatform.

The gap with both of these approaches is the Power platform and legacy applications. Power runs 80% of the Fortune 100’s critical business applications; these are the ones that keep the lights on, staff paid, and shareholders happy. But in a cloud-first world, they create an unacceptable drag on business, keeping datacentres open, requiring a regular capital outlay for hardware refreshes and upgrades. They also tie up application owners, developers and operations teams in maintaining split cloud/on-prem equipment, processes and monitoring.

And, as for legacy applications, many of these do not work in the cloud. They have older service discovery approaches (typically broadcasts), or they rely on versions of operating systems not supported in the Hyperscale cloud (such as Windows Server 2012 or earlier).

Deliver a converged infrastructure capable of supporting your Power estate, legacy applications and your modern container platform Skytap is the only cloud overlay provider that lets you run IBM i, AIX, Linux on Power, Windows NT, Windows Server 2008+, Linux kernel 3 etc. on a single converged platform.

Using Skytap gives you the ability to completely lift and shift, with no refactoring, applications that keep the datacentre open. Moving these workloads into Skytap can free up vast amounts of capital and personnel to support the businesses’ modernisation agenda. Most importantly is that it gives the organisation the time to modernise, it allows staff to retrain in DevOps practices, it provides the business with the dynamism to compete in a changing marketplace and with young upstarts ready to ‘eat your sandwiches’. It also helps to attract new ‘born in the cloud’ talent who want to work with and on the latest and greatest technology.

This simplified converged architecture is massively scalable and repeatable in Skytap. We can convert what you saw above into a template, and that can be cloned in around about one minute. The clone is identical, down to the MAC addresses, to the template and this allows you to create dozens or even thousands of end to end environments for developers to work on. In roughly the time taken to walk to the coffee machine and back.