Announcing a Modern, Open-Source-Based, Private Cloud Solution

Last week, at Red Hat Summit 2019, we announced a new solution developed in conjunction with Red Hat: NetApp^® HCI for Private Cloud with Red Hat. It’s a really exciting solution because it delivers a modern, open-source-based, true cloud on premises to enable modern agile software DevOps activities. Plus, because it’s based on NetApp HCI, it actually works at enterprise scale, with real performance, delivered predictably and consistently. This solution, nicely packaged as a NetApp Verified Architecture, is production-grade cloud for the enterprise. It takes advantage of the full TripleO-based deployment of the Red Hat OpenStack Platform with OpenShift running on top of that to facilitate cloud-native workloads.

There was much interest and excitement about this announcement at Red Hat Summit. I had many a conversation with people who had tried to implement a private cloud, with varying levels of success, on a full open-source stack with software-defined storage. From the people I spoke with, it seemed like one of the main stumbling blocks was getting block storage right. (No pun intended!) Sure, they could get it to “work,” but there’s a big difference between a lab setting and a production-grade cloud. With scale, a bunch of things tend to fall down. First of all, the ongoing work necessary to keep the software-defined storage going as things scale, adding nodes and so forth to support growth, can become onerous, depending on the architecture used. Even more painful, however, is what happens to performance at scale—not only the raw aggregated performance, but the predictability of performance per workload as more workloads get deployed on the cloud. This typically is a big problem in building a large-scale, production-capable private cloud.

The promise of our new solution, based on NetApp HCI, is that it solves just this problem. Judging from Red Hat Summit, people already seem to see it. You get easily scalable block storage and automated deployment for both compute and storage—but, unlike many HCI solutions, you have actual guaranteed performance at scale. I’m excited to see NetApp partnering so closely with Red Hat to bring a real end-to-end solution to market that can be readily deployed, solve for the cloud pieces we all need to bring to our organizations, and also perform at scale for production workloads.

For details about NetApp^® HCI for Private Cloud with Red Hat, take a look at the NetApp and Red Hat solutions webpage, the solution brief, and the design guide. The implementation guide is still in the works—we’ll post it soon!