Red Hat, Inc. and Juniper Networks have announced an initiative to provide a unified solution for enterprises designed to manage and run applications and services on any virtual machine (VM), any container, and any cloud environment by more extensively integrating Red Hat OpenShift Container Platform and Red Hat OpenStack Platform with Juniper, Contrail, Enterprise Multicloud.

In an effort to move faster, reduce costs and become more agile, many companies have moved their workloads to the cloud and container-based applications, which can be portable across hybrid or multicloud environments. IT teams are facing pressure to support new applications, while simultaneously maintaining security, compliance and cross-organizational efficiencies for a consistent user experience.

At the same time, administrators often need to provide innovative environments for developing or hosting applications, delivering automation and visibility for application workloads regardless of where they reside. Modern, agile solutions can be used by customers to fully address current and future requirements, but this can be stymied by existing proprietary technologies, which can be slow to respond to change and can lock customers into a monolithic, expensive and difficult to maintain environment. These new IT realities have resulted in an industry gap for open source-based solutions that can address these challenges with not only a multicloud infrastructure and container platform, but also a consistent networking solution to help simplify operations and introduce efficiencies.

“The transition to the cloud is increasingly complex, but having a unified, automated platform can deliver a more seamless process with greater visibility. We are thrilled to deepen our relationship with Red Hat so that together we can provide an open and unified solution designed to allow enterprises to simply and more securely manage their applications and services across any and all kinds of environments,” said Bikash Koley, chief technology officer, Juniper Networks.

Red Hat and Juniper Networks are aiming to alleviate these challenges with a joint solution that can manage IT teams’ connectivity, security and visibility all in one. By integrating Red Hat OpenStack Platform, a highly scalable Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) platform, and Red Hat OpenShift Container Platform, the industry’s most comprehensive enterprise Kubernetes platform, with Contrail Enterprise Multicloud, a multicloud-ready networking, security, orchestration and monitoring platform designed for any workload and any cloud across multivendor environments, Red Hat and Juniper aim to enable enterprises to more easily manage their full stack in hybrid or multicloud environments with a unified solution, while enabling enterprises to avoid unnecessary vendor lock-in and hasten innovation.

Contrail Enterprise Multicloud orchestrates end-to-end policy and control with virtual network overlay designed to unify and centralize network traffic management and policy controls with VM management. By providing a packaged software-defined networking (SDN) platform with strong security capabilities and monitoring, Contrail Enterprise Multicloud is designed to simplify and eliminate deployment and operation complexities, while maintaining an open and more secure cloud environment. By offering a solution that brings together Juniper’s Contrail Enterprise Multicloud, Red Hat OpenShift Container Platform and Red Hat OpenStack Platform, the companies are working to deliver an open source-based, multicloud alternative to proprietary platforms.