Red Hat is collaborating with IBM and SAP on a joint initiative to bring SAP’s managed services on-premises by validating private deployments of SAP Cloud Platform and related backing services on Red Hat OpenShift.
The solution is planned to provide additional flexibility and choice to how enterprises can gain new insights into their operations, find new revenue streams or simply maintain operations in dynamic conditions.
Red Hat VP and CTO Chris Wright said that, as part of this project, SAP is planning to adapt the SAP Cloud Platform public offering so it can run from a customer’s location, using the customer’s datacenter resources to address specific needs for security, control, speed, agility and end-to-end development.
Wright said that by combining SAP Cloud Platform capabilities with Red Hat’s open source technologies, the solution, when available, will help customers innovate and become digitally enabled, while still running more securely behind the firewall in their own data centres.
“The integration of SAP’s open source project ‘Gardener’ and Red Hat OpenShift’s new virtualisation capabilities are crucial components to allow smooth and scalable on-premise deployments,” said Wright. “Through OpenShift virtualisation, customers can host SAP’s managed services on a more secure, dedicated virtual infrastructure.”
At the same time, customers can use OpenShift’s identity management and service discovery to drive cleaner integration with existing systems. For operations teams, managed services become just another OpenShift workload that can be implemented, maintained, resource managed and monitored through familiar Kubernetes primitives and tooling.
Built on the KubeVirt community project, OpenShift virtualisation offers a more consistent development experience across VMs, containers and serverless functions. For SAP Cloud Platform containerisation through SAP’s open source project Gardener and future on-premise deployments, OpenShift virtualisation acts as a plugin to enable virtual infrastructure and support for services beyond public cloud environments in a customer’s own datacenter.
“Together with IBM and SAP, Red Hat aims to continue to open new doors for customers and jointly drive a common approach to hyperscale Kubernetes cluster management,” said Wright. “This community-oriented collaboration looks to tap into trends such as virtualisation and Kubernetes as a means to modernise IT landscapes for customers, thereby supporting their journey to become an intelligent enterprise.”
