Red Hat, Nutanix Team for an Open Hybrid Multicloud Platform

A recently launched partnership between Red Hat and Nutanix will help enterprises build, scale and manage cloud native applications on-premises and in hybrid cloud environments.

The pairing brings Red Hat OpenShift and Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) together with the Nutanix Cloud Platform, including Nutanix AOS hyperconverged infrastructure (HCI) and AHV virtualization manager. OpenShift becomes the preferred enterprise full stack Kubernetes offering on Nutanix Cloud Platform with AHV.

“This deal makes a lot of sense as what both companies make fit together really well,” said Gary Chen, an analyst with IDC. “Nutanix provides the core cloud compute, storage, and networking infrastructure that OpenShift and RHEL then run on. Red Hat has a leading position in the market with enterprise Linux and an enterprise container platform, which is in high demand today. So Nutanix infrastructure customers will be able to get a supported and certified Red Hat environment and Red Hat users have another infrastructure option to deploy on.”

The partnership means that Nutanix AHV is now a Red Hat certified hypervisor with support for RHEL and OpenShift on Nutanix Cloud Platform, said Greg Muscarella, vice president of product at Nutanix. Indeed, the certification of the Nutanix built-in hypervisor, AHV, for Red Hat Enterprise Linux and OpenShift provides enterprises with a simplified full-stack platform for their containerized and virtualized cloud native applications, said Ron Pacheco, director of product management at Red Hat.

“The benefit to customers is a complete stack that goes all the way from the hypervisor, which would be Nutanix, to the operating system, which would be RHEL, and then to the container platform, which would be Red Hat OpenShift,” said Ashish Nadkarni, an analyst at IDC. “So, you could think of the entire stack as a single certified stack.”

A key goal of the partnership is to enable enterprises to deploy virtualized and containerized workloads on a hyperconverged infrastructure, building on the companies’ combined offerings.

“We believe this relationship will unlock new hosting and deployment options for VM and container-based workloads,” said Ritch Houdek, senior vice president for technology at Kohl’s, in a statement. “These new options will support our goals of being fast, efficient and friction-free as we deliver new experiences to our customers.”

Nutanix Cloud Platform provides an environment for enterprise users to deploy Red Hat OpenShift at scale, as Nutanix Cloud Platform is now a preferred choice for hyperconverged infrastructure for Red Hat Enterprise Linux and Red Hat OpenShift.

Both companies said the partnership came out of customer demand to bring the Nutanix and Red Hat technologies together and to provide support for them.

“What they’re really looking for is a certified and fully supported solution that gives them the confidence to run their production workloads,” Muscarella said of the companies’ joint customers.

Customer support will play a major role in this partnership.

“Our support teams will be fully engaged to do root cause analysis on things,” Muscarella said. “So, if someone calls Nutanix with an issue and we discover that maybe it’s something with Red Hat products then we can engage directly with Red Hat, and vice versa.”

Customers can contact either company for support.

“We will continue to build muscle and strength and knowledge about each other’s products…to resolve customer issues even faster,” Pacheco said.

Also, a core focus of the partnership is on developers, as developers will use whatever platform that is convenient to them that meets their needs.

“So, when I look at the combination of the Red Hat portfolio with Nutanix, particularly OpenShift, OpenShift delivers all of the languages and frameworks that developers want or want to use as they create their container solutions,” Pacheco said.

“From a developer’s perspective, the last thing they want is challenges with interoperability,” Nadkarni said. “And the last thing they want is unknowns when it comes to supportability between different vendors.”

Moreover, developers can benefit from the advanced functionality Red Hat delivers with its products.

“For developers, cloud native and Kubernetes development is where the trend is today,” Chen said. OpenShift will offer them not just Kubernetes, but a lot of other things that Red Hat has built around Kubernetes like CI/CD pipelines, GitOps, service mesh, serverless, and IDEs to help them develop software faster.

Meanwhile, the companies are working on a joint roadmap for combining their technologies. Their near-term joint engineering roadmap will focus on delivering continuous testing of Red Hat Enterprise Linux and Red Hat OpenShift with Nutanix AHV.

This will not only benefit existing customers but is expected to attract new ones, the companies said.

“The insurance industry is in the midst of a transformation to rapidly adapt to customers’ demands,” said Gautam Roy, chief technology officer at employee benefits provider Unum, in a statement. “We protect 39 million lives around the world with our products and services. As we work to modernize our IT infrastructure to support a seamless digital experience for our customers and employees, Nutanix and Red Hat help simplify our technology stack and advance our cloud transformation.”