Container-based architectures are being rapidly adopted by nearly every DevOps team and enterprise IT organization making the transition to cloud-native and automated environments. By making this move, these developers realize greater application agility and better business outcomes. At the same time, developers get to focus more on applications and microservices and less on the underlying infrastructure through the use of platforms like Google Cloud’s Anthos.
However, selecting a modern infrastructure that supports a move toward containers remains paramount, whether on-premises, in multi-cloud environments, or hybrid scenarios. As container deployments mature and scale, bare metal architectures offer additional choice and flexibility, while maintaining support for orchestration tools such as Kubernetes. Also, the ability to run on bare metal allows organizations to achieve the full performance potential of containerized applications.
Bare Metal Deployment for Anthos
Today, we are announcing that Dell EMC PowerFlex, PowerMax and PowerStore now offer bare metal deployment options supporting Google Cloud’s Anthos. In addition to supporting virtualized deployments of Anthos via VMware vSphere, these offerings bring additional flexibility and choice to our customers. Customers can now increase their agility by including more apps and workloads under Anthos hybrid-cloud management, regardless of physical location.
“Anthos on bare metal provides customers with more options and control over their Anthos deployments, and our collaboration with Dell Technologies enables customers to extend the convenience of cloud-native solutions on their existing Dell hardware,” said Rayn Veerubhotla, Director, Partner Engineering at Google Cloud. “Additionally, Dell’s support for Kubernetes Container Storage Interface drivers enables customers to extend Anthos across multiple environments using Dell storage solutions.”
With these solutions, customers can choose to utilize bare metal or hypervisor-based deployments that can co-exist with non-container workloads for fast, easy application management across legacy and cloud-native environments.
In addition to bare metal optimizations, this new Anthos update provides support for the Kubernetes Container Storage Interface (CSI) drivers. That enables storage products to provide their respective unique capabilities to stateful workloads that need persistent storage. Our customers can run Kubernetes on-prem or in the cloud, expanding their use cases to help them compete for the future, while benefiting from the best features our products offer in container application deployments.
Validated Approaches for On-Premises Modernization
Dell EMC PowerFlex, PowerMax and PowerStore are Google Anthos-qualified options. They provide flexibility for stateful applications that require enterprise-quality results without compromise, using qualified CSI drivers with Anthos on bare metal. These are the latest enhancements extending our previously announced PowerFlex support for Anthos.
As a trusted Anthos Ready Partner, we have worked closely with Google Cloud to qualify solution ingredients that meet Anthos requirements. So, customers get rapid time to value without the risk of faulty architectural results. Customers can focus on creating agile container applications instead of worrying about crafting the systems that make them deployable. PowerFlex, PowerMax and PowerStore have been qualified for the following:
- Supporting Anthos for compatible deployment and scale
- Interacting successfully for optimal computing, networking, and storing capabilities
- Deploying and exposing a workload through a supported load balancer on Anthos
- Emphasize resiliency, scalability, performance, flexibility, etc.
- Inherent, security considerations include integrated encryption protection for workloads
Furthermore, PowerFlex, PowerMax and PowerStore make deploying Anthos easy. The PowerFlex rack, an engineered software-defined solution, comes fully configured with integrated networking for customers ready to run Anthos and start deploying containers. Once it’s installed, they are ready to deploy Kubernetes applications from the Google Cloud Console. For customers who want a more traditional three-tier architecture, PowerMax and PowerStore are the perfect storage options to use with Anthos.
The Market Advantages
With these engineered, qualified solutions, Dell Technologies and Google Cloud take the risk out of the implementation, while offering customers more choices in their operating environments and the capabilities to modernize their infrastructure. By using Anthos on bare metal with PowerFlex or PowerMax, customers will enjoy these advantages:
Flexible configuration: Dell Technologies customers can configure their infrastructure with total control. With PowerFlex, PowerMax and PowerStore solutions, customers can mix any combination of bare metal, virtualized, container, and mixed-hypervisor platforms in a way that’s scalable and simple to manage. We provide all the freedom without the guesswork for customized hybrid on-prem solutions.
Simplified containerization: Varied SLAs make some apps and workloads more difficult to containerize in VMs. Now, with bare-metal container architectures, customers can have choice, flexibility, and performance. Customers may also want to deploy Anthos container applications along with existing Windows and Linux applications that aren’t ready to be containerized. Our solutions can support any of these applications without requiring physical partitioning. That way, customers get the most value from their PowerFlex, PowerMax and PowerStore systems.
Total security and control: Bare metal implementations also help customers keep their data secure. With a bare metal architecture, customers have full control over hardware components and can quickly manage how servers and storage are accessed and utilized. Even as a customer’s network becomes more decentralized, they can trust their data is secure.
Robust protection for data and workloads: Dell Technologies’ extensive portfolio of data protection solutions for Google Cloud is ideal for enterprise Anthos deployments. These solutions efficiently replicate to, from, and between hybrid cloud environments for maximum data mobility. They also leverage our industry-leading deduplication tools for low cost-to-protect and total cost of ownership.
Scalability for the future: Whether you want to start small or grow to thousands of nodes, PowerFlex, PowerMax and PowerStore have proven track records of providing linear scalability for millions of IOPS while retaining low latency. We provide large-scale performance even for availability-sensitive workloads.
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