Cloud computing is transforming the way businesses function, as it has become a popular technology over the past decade. It’s changing how companies store, manage and examine data, adopt new applications and technologies, and enhance resiliency, flexibility, and cost-effectiveness. To adapt to these rapid changes, companies need to embrace cloud computing based on open standards and create an architecture that supports existing and new workloads across several platforms such as public, private, and on-premise infrastructure. Red Hat, the open-source software company behind Red Hat Enterprise Linux and OpenShift, a Kubernetes-based container platform is one such company that is rising to this challenge.
Red Hat’s OpenShift is being touted as the best option for migrating to the cloud. While all hypervisors have similar tools for migrating applications to the cloud, Red Hat argues that OpenShift stands out for being more open than other solutions and able to address a wider range of use cases. As a Kubernetes-based container platform, OpenShift supports both stateless and stateful applications, including traditional applications, microservices, and cloud-native applications, across multiple cloud providers. Companies can leverage the same platform across their entire IT estate with OpenShift, thus avoiding vendor lock-in.
The open and hybrid strategy of Red Hat refers to the company’s commitment to open source and open standards. Red Hat does not rely solely on proprietary cloud software, which enables the company to offer customers more comprehensive cloud computing solutions that are compatible with multiple environments. Embracing open-source infrastructure is a trend in modern IT shops, making Red Hat’s open strategy in sync with the industry. This approach serves as a foundation for Red Hat to create and enhance its software products for the benefit of its clients.
Completion of the First Phase of Red Hat’s Open Hybrid Cloud
Recently, Red Hat completed the first phase of its Open Hybrid Cloud initiative, which involves an internal IT migration that aims to mirror the standard digital hybrid architecture of the future. The first phase involved shutting down four data centers in North America and consolidating the company’s internal applications in one data center on-premises in Raleigh. This consolidation dramatically reduced the company’s technical debt as they were able to retire 150 legacy applications, thereby reducing their maintenance costs.
Retiring legacy applications to reduce technical debt
Legacy applications are expensive to maintain. They tie up critical IT resources and make it difficult to innovate. However, the process of retiring these applications can be challenging, especially if staff doesn’t know the architecture’s ins and outs. In the case of Red Hat, it wisely leveraged its expertise in OpenShift, which made the migration to new infrastructure relatively easy. Thanks to the consolidation, Red Hat estimates that it was able to reduce the number of server racks it maintains from about 150 across multiple data centers to between 30 and 35 racks in a single data center, leading to more efficient use of infrastructure resources.
Cost-saving benefits of Open Hybrid Cloud
One of the significant benefits of Open Hybrid Cloud for Red Hat has been the cost savings it has enabled. By consolidating data centers, shutting down legacy applications, reducing its maintenance costs and running more efficiently, the company was able to save millions of dollars. These cost savings are increasingly important as companies are facing an uncertain economic climate.
Red Hat has used its popular product OpenShift to move its business-critical workloads to the AWS cloud, where about 75% of the company’s internal applications, including Oracle ERP, Salesforce, and Workday, are now hosted. OpenShift, built on Kubernetes, provides major advantages as it incorporates open-source tools and components and is easy to use.
The versatility of Open Hybrid Cloud lies in its ability to move workloads to any public cloud. Since Open Hybrid Cloud is based on OpenShift, Red Hat can move these workloads to any public cloud, which enables the company to extend the benefits of the hybrid cloud model further. Red Hat’s commitment to an open architecture makes it more manageable to move workloads between different cloud providers, creating flexible, scalable, and cost-effective hybrid cloud solutions.
Red Hat has the ability to benefit from its hybrid cloud-enabling software. With Open Hybrid Cloud, a software by Red Hat that enables hybrid cloud, the company can now reap the benefits of hybrid cloud itself. Through its internal IT migration, Red Hat demonstrates that it can walk the talk and lay the foundation for its hybrid cloud strategy. As Red Hat looks to adopt services to run its infrastructure more efficiently, it is also demonstrating that services built using OpenShift can move workloads to the cloud without requiring much customization.
Uncertainty remains over the popularity of hybrid IT architectures in the future. While some analysts believe that the shift towards public cloud may eliminate capital expenditures entirely, others suggest that as companies strive for greater efficiency and cost reduction, hybrid cloud may still play a significant role. This is especially true for organizations that need to meet strict data and regulatory requirements.
Red Hat’s Open Hybrid Cloud is a powerful example of how companies can modernize their IT infrastructure in the cloud era. By consolidating data centers, retiring legacy applications to reduce maintenance costs, and running more efficiently, companies can save millions of dollars. With OpenShift, Red Hat is providing companies with the means to migrate business-critical workloads to the cloud and create a versatile, scalable, and powerful hybrid cloud architecture. Regardless of the uncertain future, Red Hat is demonstrating that companies that embrace open architecture and hybrid cloud technology are better equipped to meet the challenges of the future.