Red Hat introduces new cross-portfolio edge capabilities

Red Hat, Inc., a provider of open source solutions, announced new capabilities and enhancements to its portfolio of open hybrid cloud solutions as part of the Red Hat Edge initiative, which aims to accelerate enterprise adoption of edge computing architectures. This set of new cross-portfolio edge features and capabilities will aid customers and partners in better adapting to edge computing by reducing complexity, speeding deployments, enhancing security capabilities, and increasing confidence in managing systems consistently from the data center to the edge.

Red Hat Edge represents Red Hat’s collective effort to integrate edge computing across the open hybrid cloud. The initiative includes a wide range of innovative technologies, with Red Hat Enterprise Linux and Red Hat OpenShift serving as a common foundation and infrastructure for otherwise disparate edge environments. Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform extends automation capabilities to edge deployments, while Red Hat Advanced Cluster Management for Kubernetes provides cloud-scale manageability with edge storage powered by Red Hat OpenShift Data Foundation.

“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,” said Francis Chow, vice president and general manager, In-Vehicle Operating System and Edge, Red Hat.

A streamlined, intelligent edge infrastructure

Red Hat OpenShift continues to focus on bringing applications closer to users and data at the edge while streamlining scale management. Red Hat OpenShift 4.10 now has zero-touch provisioning, which makes repeatable, automated edge provisioning easier and includes factory workflows for original equipment manufacturers (OEMs). Customers can receive a fully operational, pre-installed Red Hat OpenShift cluster after OEMs pre-load a relocatable Red Hat OpenShift cluster on their preferred hardware.

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