Red Hat Makes OpenShift Container Storage 4 Easier to Use, Install, Manage

Red Hat’s latest OpenShift Container Storage 4 platform has been revamped with a wide range of important upgrades, including improved management and installation as well as all new object storage and multicloud capabilities, all designed to help channel partners and customers better use the open source company’s enterprise Kubernetes orchestration platform.

The new Red Hat OpenShift Container Storage Platform 4 incorporates several new underlying components that have made the platform easier to use and manage compared to earlier versions, including a multicloud object gateway that came from Red Hat’s 2018 acquisition of NooBaa, which now allows users to span their Kubernetes storage across multiple clouds. Adding easier deployment and greater automation for users are the platform’s new Rook storage orchestration capabilities, which use the Rook.io Operator to streamline the deployment, packaging and expansion of storage on Red Hat OpenShift.

Karena Angell, principal product marketing manager for Red Hat OpenShift container storage, told Channel Futures that the latest version of the platform incorporates feedback received from partners and customers, especially requests for easier use, management, installation, better scalability and support for emerging workloads.

Red Hat’s Karena Angell

“This is something that we’ve heard from customers and partners for a long time, that we needed to make it easier to use and deploy,” said Angell. “We took all that feedback and took a hard look at the business.”

Many of the improvements were incorporated by adding components from Rook and from the open source Ceph project, which provides object storage and other enterprise features such as high availability, data protection and scalability, she said.

The new version makes multicloud use possible through a consistent Amazon S3 API that enables users to access data in multiple clouds as well as on premises, said Angell.

Also getting attention from Red Hat after getting customer feedback was a plan for a migration path for the new product, said Angell.

“Some customers in the past were concerned with this new technology change and they asked how they would be able to migrate from version 3 to version 4. We provide a simple migration tool through OpenShift container platform to help customers do that,” she said.

Jan Kappert, a senior Red Hat OpenShift consultant for Red Hat partner HCS Company, a Netherlands-based consultancy, said the new multicloud support in the platform is welcome and will help make deployments easier for partners to help their customers. He said he also is pleased that encryption capabilities are now included by default.

HCS’ Jan Kappert

“Using the multicloud support, we can now make storage solutions available over multiple clouds, which was not easy to do in the earlier versions,” said Kappert. “It’s all about storage for customers.”

Another partner, Philippe Bürgisser, a solution architect for Red Hat premier partner Camptocamp in Switzerland, said the most welcome new features are the inclusion of object storage and the easier installation and management capabilities.

“The inability to have object storage in earlier versions was difficult and it had heavy management needs,” said Bürgisser. “The old versions were quite demanding in terms of resources so scalability was difficult to maintain. The new version will help with these things.”

Bürgisser just installed the new version for a customer and found the process …

… much easier than in the past.

Camp to Camp’s Philippe Bürgisser

“Even the installation of the product is improved,” he said. “It took me less than an hour to deploy it onsite for a customer. I was quite impressed by that improvement. Earlier versions were harder to install and took longer. Here with the Operator you just specify what you want to do and then wait a few minutes and you are good to go.”

Rob Enderle, principal analyst with Enderle Research, said the upgraded Red Hat OpenShift products will offer sales and service opportunities for partners.

“The market hasn’t yet moved to one cloud offering and [customers] often have multiple offerings available onsite,” said Enderle. “So the support for this existing market reality will remove some existing barriers to close potentially increasing sales volumes. The other enhancements are also important but it’s the multicloud support that was likely the critical path that needed correcting.”

The new offerings will likely also get a boost from Red Hat’s new relationship with IBM since its 2019 acquisition, he said.

“These advancements, coupled with Red Hat’s IBM connections, should significantly help Red Hat’s competitive position,” said Enderle.

The company also announced the related new Red Hat OpenShift Container Platform 4.3, which is the latest version of its enterprise Kubernetes platform, which now includes new security capabilities, including FIPS (Federal Information Processing Standard) compliant encryption (FIPS 140-2 Level 1) and encryption of the etcd data store to provide additional protection for secrets at rest. Also included in the latest Red Hat OpenShift Container Platform 4.3 are additional capabilities that support private clusters.