Maxta today introduced a Hyperconverged "(Un)Appliance" for Red Hat Virtualization, a pre-configured system of Red Hat Virtualization software and Maxta Hyperconvergence software bundled together on Intel Data Center Blocks hardware. This joint solution provides all the advantages of appliance-based hyperconvergence without any of the disadvantages - there's no refresh tax, no upgrade tax, no VMware tax, and no proprietary virtualization.

Hyperconverged (Un)Appliances collapse servers, storage, and networking into a single server tier that is used to run virtual machines and containers. Storage is configured automatically when VMs or containers are created allowing administrators to focus on managing applications rather than storage. The combination of Intel Data Center Blocks, Red Hat Virtualization and Maxta Hyperconvergence Software provides the operational and capital expense reductions desired by organizations, but in a way that is less expensive to procure, refresh and expand when compared to appliance-based hyperconvergence.

"With an ever-increasing number of workloads running on cloud architectures, the time is right to help customers transition to software-defined infrastructures that are automated, resilient and programmatically extensible," said Phil Harris, Data Center Group Vice President, Datacenter Solutions Group General Manager Systems Business of Intel. "Having Intel Data Center Blocks serve as the hardware server foundation of a pre-configured solution with Red Hat Virtualization and Maxta can make it easier for companies to buy and manage vs. integrating disparate systems on their own."

Hyperconverged (Un)Appliances are different than appliance-based hyperconvergence as they enable organizations to increase capacity by adding drives to existing (Un)Appliances, replace smaller drives in existing (Un)Appliances with larger drives, or of course adding new (Un)Appliances. Since organizations own the Maxta hyperconvergence software license for the life of the organization, there is no need to repurchase the software license when refreshing hardware. The Hyperconverged (Un)Appliance also provides support for Red Hat Virtualization and Red Hat OpenShift on the same server platform.

"Red Hat's goal is to help organizations run any application on any IT footprint, from bare metal to the public cloud, through open, flexible solutions that provide a path to digital transformation," said Joe Fernandes, vice president, Cloud Platforms Products at Red Hat. "Through the combination of our virtualization offering, Maxta's hyperconvergence software and Intel's Data Center Blocks, customers can achieve a powerful, cost-effective solution to support their virtualized and containerized workloads in an easier-to-manage, scalable package that can meet both current and future needs."

Organizations of all sizes want to take advantage of the flexibility provided by hyperconvergence software, but also want to simplify ordering, installation, and configuration of hyperconverged solutions. Unlike appliance vendors that offer software for the benefit their financial reporting instead of benefiting their customers, Hyperconverged (Un)Appliances provide the benefit of software to customers all while providing the ordering and configuration simplicity inherent with an appliance-based approach to hyperconvergence.

"Hyperconverged (Un)Appliances with Red Hat and Maxta software pre-configured on Intel Data Center Blocks provide the management simplicity and scale-out ability desired by organizations, but in a way that is less expensive initially and long-term when compared to hyperconverged appliances," said Yoram Novick, Maxta founder and chief executive. "These (Un)Appliances are also designed to enable organizations to support virtualization and containers with Kubernetes on the same platform so that customers do not have to deploy two separate storage infrastructures deploying containers."