Red Hat To Offer Pay-Per-Use OpenShift On HPE GreenLake

The OpenShift version of HPE GreenLake is part of a Red Hat on GreenLake joint development pact that also includes Red Hat Enterprise Linux and the Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform for GreenLake.

Open-source titan Red Hat is for the first time set to offer a pay- per-use on-premises version of its OpenShift Kubernetes container platform on the fast-growing Hewlett Packard Enterprise GreenLake cloud service.

The OpenShift version of GreenLake is part of a Red Hat on GreenLake joint development pact that also includes Red Hat Enterprise Linux and the Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform for GreenLake. Red Hat and HPE unveiled the joint development effort on the first day of the HPE Discover conference in Las Vegas.

The joint development effort is in response to customers that have been demanding a pay-per-use version of OpenShift on GreenLake, said Ryan King, senior director of the global hardware partner ecosystem for Red Hat, in an interview with CRN. “The first push is with OpenShift because that is where a lot of the interest is with hybrid cloud and pay-as-you-go with our joint customer base,” he said.

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Red Hat is seeing robust customer demand for Red Hat offerings on HPE GreenLake with joint sales teams already working with customers anxious to move to a pay-per-use on-premises OpenShift cloud services model, said King.

Red Hat has long had OpenShift pay-per-use on public cloud, but this deal for the first time brings that model to an on-premises cloud service, said King. “We are used to metering and billing in that model, but we are excited to see it in an on-premises and colo environment,” he said. “There is a great deal of growth in the market right now around edge, edge AI and telco and the 5G rollout. Those are all areas of growth that we are looking at with this model.”

Red Hat And HPE Working Together

It is anticipated Red Hat OpenShift on HPE GreenLake will be the first service offering available, followed by Linux and Ansible Automation Platform over the coming months.

Red Hat said it is already working closely with HPE to enable HPE partners with materials and training, as well as introducing future partner incentives, to promote Red Hat offerings as they become available on HPE GreenLake.

Red Hat is seeing growing interest among customers for hybrid cloud, pay-per-use models, said King. “Everybody is moving toward hybrid cloud and a pay-as-you-go model for a portion of their infrastructure, they are looking for that flexibility, so it just made great sense for us to align and deliver on this [with HPE],” said King. “We are super excited about it. We are already seeing customers demand quotes on it and salespeople starting to build out requests for it.”

Red Hat and HPE are already starting to work on engineering and integration aimed at providing the pay-per-use on-premises capability, said King. The two companies are also working on a joint development road map, he said.

“We know how to deliver this,” King said. “There is just a certain amount of engineering and operational work between the two companies to establish how you meter it and how that translates into a bill at the end of the month for the customer.”

Red Hat and HPE will work together to improve the pay-per-use experience via cloud management and pay-per-use consoles, said King. “As we get through our first set of customers on this, there is an opportunity to take this further and keep pushing the envelope on where customers are going with this,” he said. “We are investing through our partner ecosystem engineering team.”

Red Hat’s Commitment To Open Hybrid Cloud

The HPE GreenLake deal is another example of Red Hat’s commitment to open hybrid cloud, said King. “Working with partners like HPE allows us to deliver this in a way the customers want to consume it,” he said.

The Red Hat-HPE partnership makes it more cost-effective for customers to move to OpenShift with an on-premises pay-as-you-go model, said Maurice Martin, vice president of partner ecosystem for HPE GreenLake. “With OpenShift and HPE GreenLake together, customers can now buy the infrastructure they need as the size of the application grows,” he said. “That provides customers an on-prem full cloud experience.”

This means that customers no longer have to make a big up-front investment in a capital expenditure-based solution. “Customers can now start small and then pay as they grow for both the underlying cloud infrastructure with GreenLake and the Red Hat environment,” said Martin.

Ultimately, HPE is allowing customers to purchase OpenShift in any manner they like, whether it is a buy-your-own license or even embed the license, said Martin. “Depending on the architecture and what the customer is looking for, we can enable pretty much most anything to, through and with the channel,” he said.

Joseph George, global vice president of alliances, industry and product marketing for HPE, called the HPE-Red Hat deal a “game-changer” for partners.

“This has not been done before,” he said. “We’re working with Red Hat to figure out how we take technologies like OpenShift, Red Hat Enterprise Linux and Ansible to make our customers successful in an HPE GreenLake model and also how do we partner with our channel community to go make that possible for our customers,” he said. “The channel community brings so much depth and expertise when it comes to the customer and how they are trying to deploy this. Partners are a critical part of this.”