Red Hat embraces hybrid cloud for internal IT
Step
1:
Reducing
data
center
sprawl
Palermo
and
team
began
project
Open
Hybrid
Cloud
roughly
18
months
ago.
Step
1:
Reducing
data
center
sprawl
Palermo
and
team
began
project
Open
Hybrid
Cloud
roughly
18
months
ago.
They
recently
finished
the
first
phase,
which
involved
shutting
down
four
data
centers
in
North
America
and
consolidating
the
company’s
internal
applications
in
one
data
center
on
premises
in
Raleigh.
Several
benefits
came
with
that
consolidation.
Red
Hat,
for
instance,
was
able
to
retire
150
legacy
applications
—
about
10%
to
15%
of
its
total
portfolio
of
applications
—
thus
vastly
reducing
the
company’s
technical
debt,
Palermo
says.
Cost
saving
was
another
major
benefit.
The
company
cut
down
the
number
of
server
racks
it
maintains
from
about
150
across
multiple
data
centers
to
between
30
and
35
racks
in
the
single
data
center.
“Because
we
were
able
to
implement
an
entirely
new
workload
architecture,
we
were
able
to
reduce
our
infrastructure
footprint
significantly,”
Palermo
says.
“It’s
a
massive,
massive
opportunity
to
reduce
your
total
cost
of
ownership.
“
Step
2:
Going
hybrid
For
the
project’s
second
phase,
Red
Hat
has
employed
its
cash
cow
product,
OpenShift,
to
abstract,
containerize,
and
migrate
many
of
its
business-critical
workloads
to
the
AWS
cloud,
where
roughly
75%
of
Red
Hat’s
internal
applications
now
run,
including
Oracle
ERP,
Salesforce,
and
Workday,
Palermo
says.
But
because
Open
Hybrid
Cloud
finds
its
foundation
in
OpenShift,
Red
Hat
can
package
up
and
move
any
of
those
workloads
to
any
public
cloud,
the
CIO
adds.
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