Red Hat Intros New Cross-Portfolio Edge Capabilities

May 11, 2022

Red Hat touted new capabilities and enhancements across its portfolio of open hybrid cloud solutions aimed at accelerating enterprise adoption of edge compute architectures through the Red Hat Edge initiative. This set of new cross-portfolio edge features and capabilities will focus on helping customers and partners better adapt to edge computing by limiting complexity, speeding deployments, enhancing security capabilities and increasing confidence in managing systems consistently from the datacenter to the edge.

Francis Chow, Vice President and General Manager, In-Vehicle Operating System and Edge, Red Hat said, "Edge computing is no longer an emerging concept for the business, as IT and OT teams look to move edge deployments from project to production but, at the same time, must address an entirely new set of challenges. The enhancements to the Red Hat Edge initiative, from the comprehensive edge management of Red Hat Enterprise Linux 9, the holistic and scalable capabilities of Ansible Automation Platform and the zero-touch capabilities of both Red Hat Advanced Cluster Management for Kubernetes and Red Hat OpenShift, are designed to help overcome these production roadblocks and drive broader adoption of edge computing across the open hybrid cloud."

Red Hat Edge represents Red Hat’s collective drive to integrate edge computing across the open hybrid cloud. The initiative encompasses a broad set of innovative technologies, with Red Hat Enterprise Linux and Red Hat OpenShift forming a common foundation and infrastructure across otherwise disparate edge environments. Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform adds automation capabilities to span edge deployments, while Red Hat Advanced Cluster Management for Kubernetes delivers cloud-scale manageability with edge storage driven by Red Hat OpenShift Data Foundation.

A streamlined, intelligent edge infrastructure

Red Hat OpenShift continues to focus on helping shift applications closer to users and data at the edge while streamlining manageability at scale. Newly available zero-touch provisioning for Red Hat OpenShift 4.10 helps make repeatable, automated edge provisioning easier, and includes factory workflows for original equipment manufacturers (OEMs). OEMs can pre-load a relocatable Red Hat OpenShift cluster on their preferred hardware, which customers can then receive as a fully operational, pre-installed OpenShift cluster.

Customers can use this pre-configured Red Hat OpenShift to more quickly deliver radio access networks (RAN) for next-generation mobile networks, error detection for manufacturing facilities, and other edge computing applications in nearly any distributed location. This helps to simplify the often complex process of integrating edge devices with existing platforms and makes it easier to stand up remote operations, even with limited IT staff.

Additional edge capabilities announced today to Red Hat OpenShift services include:

Management of OpenShift edge topologies by Red Hat Advanced Cluster Management, including single-node OpenShift clusters, remote worker nodes and 3-node compact clusters. A single Red Hat Advanced Cluster Management hub cluster can deploy and manage 2,000 single-node OpenShift clusters and customers can deploy and manage these at the edge using zero touch provisioning. Customers can then enforce policies and deploy them at scale and automate remediations with Ansible Automation Platform.

Support for single-node OpenShift with OpenShift Data Foundation 4.10 as a technology preview and the addition of block storage with dynamic provisioning to simplify access and improve consistency of data and storage services at scale.

For IT teams who need to build edge architectures quickly, new Red Hat Edge validated patterns contain the necessary code to more quickly build edge stacks, providing a faster transition from conceptualizing to proof-of-concept.

These new patterns include:

Medical Diagnosis which uses GitOps to help healthcare providers more efficiently and quickly ingest, analyze and act upon medical images and data.

Multicloud GitOps, tailored for organizations that seek to run workloads on different clusters on different clouds, both public and private.

A common foundation from core to edge to cloud

Building on the mission critical role that the world’s leading enterprise Linux platform serves, Red Hat Enterprise Linux 9 further extends the consistency, flexibility and innovation of a trusted platform to edge deployments. Today, Red Hat announces a comprehensive edge management feature set, enabling centralized controls for the oversight and scaling of edge deployments, and intelligent roll-back for Podman to help increase edge device uptime.

Red Hat sees hardware diversity and customer choice as crucial to open hybrid cloud and edge ecosystems. To further expand customer choice in underlying architectures, two new edge-centric partners have joined the Red Hat partner ecosystem:

OnLogic brings Red Hat certified systems that can span from small, fanless industrial devices to high-powered, ruggedized computers capable of advanced artificial intelligence and machine-learning (AI/ML) workloads.

Intel NUCs have become a cross-industry staple technology, with the latest NUC Element modules now certified for both Red Hat Enterprise Linux 8 and 9. This provides a powerful option for organizations using Red Hat Enterprise Linux and Red Hat OpenShift at the edge.

Automation at-scale, from the hybrid cloud to the edge

Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform solves the management and automation needs to drive visibility and consistency across an organization’s edge deployments. Ansible Automation Platform’s recent rearchitecture is designed to simplify deploying automation at massive scale across hybrid clouds and edge environments. The recent introduction of automation mesh, along with the newly added automation mesh visualization, provides a clear picture of where automation runs. This enables IT teams to more flexibly scale automation wherever needed, with the capability to expand capacity as edge environments grow to bring automation closer to edge workflows.

Israel Defense Forces (IDF) lieutenant colonel, head of Edge Cloud Platform R&D, Center of Computing and Information Systems (Mamram), J6 and Cyber Defense Directorate commented, “Red Hat offers the right combination of people and products to address our business and technical challenges, including a roadmap for edge computing. With Red Hat’s hybrid cloud technologies underpinning our edge computing efforts, we’re now able to push applications and services to edge deployments in hours instead of weeks, without sacrificing the stability of our mission-critical applications.”

Jeff Winterich, DoD chief account technologist, HPE said, “HPE has a long-standing collaboration with Red Hat and we look forward to continuing by enhancing edge solutions and accelerating adoption for customers. By combining the HPE Edgeline Converged Edge systems, which are compact, ruggedized and optimized for harsh environments, with Red Hat OpenShift’s new zero-touch provisioning capabilities, we can quickly operationalize solutions to enable customers to run and manage edge applications across their networks and fuel innovative experiences using real-time, edge-driven data.”

Dave McCarthy, research vice president, Cloud and Infrastructure Services, IDC added, “As edge computing continues to become a mainstream staple in more and more enterprises, Red Hat is well positioned to emerge as a leading vendor in the space. According to IDC’s EdgeView 2022 global survey of buyer trends, the rate of edge adoption is accelerating with 74% of organizations planning to increase their spending on edge solutions over the next two years. Red Hat’s strategy of building edge-specific features into its existing technology portfolio allows its customers to treat edge deployments as an extension of their datacenters, reducing complexity and maintaining consistency, regardless of where the infrastructure resides.”

Michael Kleiner, vice president, Engineering and Product Management, OnLogic concluded, “Edge computing is a critical component to the future of open hybrid cloud, as customers increasingly aim to deploy workloads closer to end users and data points for optimized business results. OnLogic hardware devices certified for use at the edge on Red Hat Enterprise Linux 9 will enable customers a more streamlined path to scale hybrid cloud capabilities with reliable edge devices.”