Red Hat, Inc., the world’s leading provider of open source solutions, has announced that it has signed a strategic collaboration agreement (SCA) with Amason Web Services (AWS) to scale availability of Red Hat open source solutions in AWS Marketplace, building upon the two companies’ long-standing relationship.
Red Hat intends to help empower organizations with leading hybrid cloud platforms, including Red Hat Enterprise Linux AI (RHEL AI), Red Hat OpenShift AI and Red Hat OpenShift Virtualisation, on AWS infrastructure to address critical business needs for application modernization, virtual machine (VM) migration and artificial intelligence (AI) deployments.
“AWS and Red Hat share a common vision: empowering organisations to make strategic decisions today that will fuel innovation tomorrow. Our collaboration is focused on supporting customers throughout their cloud journeys, addressing both immediate infrastructure needs and future-facing technologies like AI” comments Chris Grusz, managing director, Technology Partnerships, AWS.
Powering Virtualised Workloads on Modernized Infrastructure
As many organizations today face uncertainty and rising costs in the management of their virtual infrastructure, they are navigating significant migrations for Virtual Machines (VMs) across complex IT landscapes. At the same time, organizations are increasingly prioritizing AI to maintain differentiation and stay competitive.
To help address these needs, Red Hat is providing a unified experience for customers to more easily migrate VMs and containerized workloads side-by-side to the cloud with greater consistency and scalability, while also providing the modern platforms and infrastructure to support next-generation AI workloads.
This effort includes bolstering support for Red Hat OpenShift Service on AWS, a fully managed turnkey application platform, to help customers more seamlessly use OpenShift Virtualisation in their AWS environments.
In addition, Red Hat OpenShift will run as a self-managed offering on AWS EC2 bare metal instances to offer customers greater flexibility in deploying virtualised and containerised workloads.
Red Hat OpenShift, with the inclusion of OpenShift Virtualisation and the migration toolkit for virtualisation, allows for easier migration of VMs. The solution is designed with the cloud in mind for full automation from day one deployments and includes auto-healing and reconciliation, applied to both containers and VM workloads.
By running OpenShift Virtualisation on AWS EC2 bare metal instances, VM workloads can maintain similar levels of performance and redundancy while running on a more modern platform, allowing VMs and containers to interact directly with underlying hardware and infrastructure to minimise administrative overhead and eliminating the need for a traditional hypervisor layer.
Lastly, when migrating at scale, Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform can work with the migration toolkit for virtualisation to reduce the time it takes for large migrations. Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform Service on AWS, available in AWS Marketplace, makes automation quicker and easier, allows migration at scale and automates day 2 operations for the VM workloads after migration.
Unlocking the next generation of AI innovation
As part of this collaboration, Red Hat is enhancing the availability of solutions such as RHEL AI and Red Hat OpenShift AI in AWS Marketplace, including “bring your own subscription” (BYOS) and private offers, supporting NVIDIA accelerated computing and software, including the validation of NVIDIA AI Enterprise software platform and NVIDIA NIM, a set of easy-to-use microservices designed for secure, reliable deployment of high-performance AI model inferencing. Red Hat has offerings for additional AI accelerators and GPUs from leading chip providers like AMD and Intel. This will help provide organisations with ready-made AI capabilities that can then more easily be scaled using Red Hat OpenShift AI on AWS, either self-managed or through the services’ built-in capabilities.
“Enterprises must begin to think beyond just managing clusters of virtual machines. CIOs and IT leaders must consider how to optimise their virtualised infrastructure as an engine for modernisation that supports their artificial intelligence roadmaps, modern applications, and prepare for the next generation of IT” comments Gary Chen, research director, Software Defined Compute, IDC.
This collaboration will be driven by a go-to-market roadmap developed by Red Hat and AWS to bring these solutions to customers as well as additional activities to further demonstrate how these offerings can be used across cloud environments to meet an organisation’s business needs.
