If you take a behind-the-scenes look at what drives the competitive edge of the world’s most innovative enterprises, you’ll see the rise of containers and cloud-native technologies. Containers are at the heart of a massive IT transformation that is reshaping the way software is architected, developed, and deployed. More and more organizations are investing in cloud-native IT strategies, which pave the way to gains in business agility, efficiency, and time-to-market.

Fortunately for developers and IT operations teams, there is an abundance of open-source tools, platforms, and community resources. At the center of this expanding cloud-native ecosystem is Red Hat® OpenShift®, which has become a top choice in Kubernetes/Docker-based platforms-as-a-service (PaaS) for the enterprise. OpenShift is built on proven open-source technologies, and delivers automation and orchestration capabilities that accelerate software development while reducing IT overhead.

While OpenShift comprises a key component of the overall container stack, organizations seeking to build their own on-prem container environments still must build and deploy the underlying infrastructure. Unfortunately, legacy server, storage, and network isn’t architected for how containers use those IT resources. Therefore, a do-it-yourself approach to bare-metal container infrastructure is time-consuming and resource-intensive.

Diamanti D10 Bare-Metal Container Platform

Diamanti was founded on the vision of delivering bare-metal container infrastructure at the speed of containers, complete with true open-source compatibility, plug-and-play configuration, and end-to-end control of compute, storage, and network resources. Based on the Diamanti D10 appliance, its scalable platform can be up and running in 15 minutes from the time the D10 is racked, and stateful application containers can be deployed with full network and storage QoS.

Customers have asked us about running OpenShift Enterprise on the Diamanti D10, so naturally we sought to partner with Red Hat with the goal of developing a complete on-premise container stack. For starters, we saw that our joint support of the Container Network Interface (CNI) spec allows enterprises to add networking endpoints without creating costly network overlays–compatible with any existing VLAN or L2 Switch. Diamanti and OpenShift similarly leverage the Kubernetes FlexVolume plugin–a storage standard that was created by Diamanti and contributed to Kubernetes, which offers storage quality of service (QoS) features.

We also discovered that the Diamanti platform with Red Hat Enterprise Linux and OpenShift is well-suited for infrastructures supporting CI/CD use cases, with benefits that map directly to rapid development-to-production rollouts:

OPERATIONAL AUTOMATION
OpenShift and Diamanti allow rapid hands-off network and storage configuration for high-volume test scenarios through an API, rather than manually configuring infrastructure or relying on fixed configurations.

WORKLOAD PRIORITIZATION AND GUARANTEED PERFORMANCE
Diamanti simplifies workload prioritization, keeps tests isolated from each other, and guarantees that long-running tests are not interrupted by short-running tests.

RAPID SIMULATION OF STORAGE AND NETWORKING CONFIGURATIONS
Diamanti enables organizations to quickly emulate many different networking and storage variables in their CI pipeline. Rather than having to build out a massive hardware lab, organizations can virtualize the network and storage environments using Diamanti.

We believe that a joint Diamanti and OpenShift solution will be a valuable addition to the container ecosystem, and we plan to announce general availability in Q1 2019. The combination of Diamanti, Red Hat Enterprise Linux, and OpenShift will enable enterprises to gain the agility and performance of containers — from development through to production-scale deployment — with the simplest path to deploys fully containerized environment in 15 minutes.

For more information, email [email protected].