Open Source Redefines Data Platforms
Supporting modern workloads like AI, real-time analytics and cloud native applications creates a challenge for tech leaders who must optimize their infrastructure for performance, cost and scalability.
The balancing act is more difficult with conventional storage systems, where compromising one requirement for another is common. This is why many leading organizations are exploring open source and software-defined architectures.
A Forbes Insight survey revealed that less than a third (29%) of technology leaders and engineers say their data centers meet current business and technological requirements. This means there’s a clear need to embrace modernization as organizations seek to move beyond the limitations of their legacy infrastructures.
However, the most pressing issue is how to cost-efficiently store, manage and access massive amounts of data without sacrificing performance and flexibility at scale.
Open source technologies, such as OpenShift Virtualization, are gaining significant popularity in data centers, reflecting the need for greater flexibility, innovation and cost savings in handling today’s complex workloads.
As cloud native application development accelerates, so does the desire for on-premises cloud architecture and hybrid cloud strategies, where open source software is crucial in managing diverse environments and offering interoperability across different platforms.
Open source solutions like OpenShift-V allow tech leaders to build a more flexible infrastructure, offering greater control over how their tech stack is deployed and managed without being locked into a single vendor’s ecosystem.
The Open Source Revolution
Open source projects like OpenShift have revolutionized application deployment and orchestration. OpenShift Virtualization plays an important role in cloud computing by allowing you to adopt cloud native strategies without abandoning your existing virtualized infrastructure. It bridges the gap between traditional virtual machines (VMs) and modern containerized applications. This flexibility enhances operational efficiency, accelerates digital transformation and enables seamless management of mixed workloads across diverse environments.
OpenShift Virtualization is a feature of Red Hat’s Kubernetes-based OpenShift platform for container orchestration and management. OpenShift-V brings VMs into the Kubernetes environment, enabling you to run VMs alongside containerized workloads on the same platform. It leverages the KubeVirt project, an open source initiative designed to bring virtualization to Kubernetes.
OpenShift-V is an example of how open source technologies address issues of scalability, performance and resilience in modern data centers. By adopting Kubernetes-optimized software, enterprises can ensure their infrastructure evolves with their rapidly expanding needs while significantly reducing downtime.
Broad Sector Appeal
OpenShift Virtualization is particularly useful for tech leaders and engineers who are transitioning from traditional VM-based infrastructure to a modern, containerized and cloud native architecture. It offers flexibility, gradual modernization, efficient use of resources and unified management, making it a valuable tool for hybrid cloud, DevOps and multicloud strategies.
OpenShift-V is preferred over conventional systems in sectors where low latency and cost-efficiency at scale can offer a competitive advantage, such as financial services and e-commerce organizations that require systems capable of handling real-time data analysis and transactional workloads.
Similarly, organizations supporting machine learning (ML) and AI workloads need flexibility, performance and efficiency. In these instances, open source and container-based systems become a necessity. For their part, cloud service providers can securely manage customer data in a multitenant environment while maintaining performance and reducing operational costs.
Use cases for OpenShift-V:
- Optimizing infrastructure resources and costs: By running both VMs and containers on the same infrastructure, you can optimize resource utilization and reduce infrastructure costs.
- Containerizing monolithic applications: OpenShift-V allows monolithic applications to continue running in VMs while new services and microservices can be built around them using containers. This side-by-side deployment allows for modernization without disruption, with a future path to fully containerize the monolithic application when you’re ready.
- Managing Infrastructure as Code for VMs: You can define VMs as Kubernetes resources, which brings the advantages of Infrastructure as Code to VM management. This allows you to automate the deployment, configuration and scaling of VMs, making management more dynamic, and enabling better integration with modern cloud native practices.
- Test/Dev: In DevOps and CI/CD processes, developers often need access to multiple environments that include both VMs and containers for testing and development. OpenShift-V provides the flexibility to spin up VM-based test environments while maintaining consistent Kubernetes-based infrastructure for both containers and VMs. This is especially useful when legacy applications running in VMs need to be integrated or tested with new containerized services.
- Gradual modernization of legacy applications: OpenShift-V enables the coexistence of VMs and containers on a single platform, allowing you to gradually migrate your traditional applications to a cloud native, containerized architecture. This helps reduce the risks and costs associated with large-scale migration projects, letting you modernize applications incrementally.
- Hybrid cloud and multicloud flexibility: You can run a mix of VMs and containers across hybrid or multicloud environments, providing flexibility and ensuring that different workloads can coexist. By managing both VM-based and containerized applications using Kubernetes across different clouds (public or private), you can deploy workloads based on business needs without infrastructure constraints.
- Consolidation of VM and container workloads: Reduce infrastructure complexity and optimize your resources by consolidating VM and containerized applications onto a single platform. This consolidation simplifies infrastructure management, reduces operational overhead and improves resource utilization.
Software-Defined Storage Supercharges OpenShift-V
One of the key challenges in virtualized environments is maintaining consistent performance as you scale. This means that as your workload grows, you may run into performance bottlenecks or degraded user experience.
When modernizing your tech stack with OpenShift-V, don’t overlook your storage platform. Software-defined storage can supercharge OpenShift-V, enhancing application performance, scalability and cost-efficiency.
Lightbits block storage is one option, offering an open source Container Storage Interface (CSI) plug-in that integrates seamlessly with OpenShift-V. This plug-in allows you to easily provision and manage high-performance persistent storage for your VMs, making deployment and scaling a breeze. It delivers scalability to more than 75 million IOPS with consistent sub-millisecond latency.
If you want to learn more about supercharging your OpenShift Cloud with software-defined storage, download our whitepaper, which compares open source storage Ceph to Lightbits.
