Over the past five years there has been a strong trend of Fortune 500 enterprises moving away from traditional virtualization infrastructures to modern container environments for production workloads. While these large enterprise customers initially deployed containers in development labs for evaluation purposes, they have quickly adopted DevOps tools and modern container infrastructure with leading application development platforms, like Red Hat OpenShift. Infinidat, a Red Hat Certified Ecosystem Partner, released its CSI driver in April 2021 to provide these Global Fortune 500 customers with the same enterprise storage features in a containerized environment that they were accustomed to in their traditional bare metal and virtualized environments.
Red Hat and Infinidat have had a long history together, given the prevalence of Red Hat Enterprise Linux, OpenShift and even Red Hat OpenStack in our mutual large enterprise customer base. With the introduction of OpenShift Virtualization in 2020 and the changing landscape of enterprise virtualization, Infinidat saw a broader need to collaborate even closer with Red Hat to ensure the success of customers adopting this as their next-generation virtualization solution based on a modern Kubernetes foundation.
The Infinidat CSI driver was built on the principle that containers + Infinidat = a simplified, seamless and rapid integration of persistent storage to your Kubernetes environment. It is freely available in OpenShift via the OperatorHub and it offers many advanced features.
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Mike Jochimsen is the Director of Alliances at Infinidat, a Lenovo company, where he manages the technology ecosystem and works with global system integrators (GSIs). Mike has more than two decades of experience developing and managing partnerships and leading teams in enterprise storage, networking and enterprise applications. Prior to joining Infinidat in 2022, Mike held roles at EMC, Kaminario and Emulex. He also spent time building and managing partnerships and teams in the enterprise application space with PeopleSoft and business process automation leader Worksoft.