Hyperconverged infrastructure maker Maxta Inc. will support Red Hat Inc.’s OpenShift Container Platform, giving users who want to migrate from VMware Inc. vSphere virtualized environment to Red Hat the ability to do so without disrupting their container environment.

Containers are lightweight, self-contained environments that enable  applications to be easily moved between different underlying platforms. Maxta said its private cloud infrastructure enables customers to run a mix of hypervisors and containers on the same hyperconverged platform and to run containers natively without a virtual machine, which provides better resource utilization. Support for multiple hypervisors enables customers to easily migrate from vSphere to OpenShift, the company said.

“This gives customer an open source platform that includes the Red Hat ecosystem for functions like backup and monitoring with no issues from the operating system point of view,” said Kiran Sreenivasamurthy, vice president of product management at Maxta.

Containers are still in their early stages of adoption, and most organizations run them within virtual machines, but Maxta maintains that users will soon want the flexibility to deploy containers everywhere. Maxta’s hypervisor-independent software converges compute, storage and storage networking tiers into a single system that runs on a variety of hardware platforms. It can run multiple applications on a single cluster, in contrast to vertically integrated hyperconverged stacks that generally support only one application.

Maxta also permits users to upgrade server power and storage capacity without buying a new hypervisor software license. “Since Maxta is software, you avoid all the upgrade taxes when refreshing,” Sreenivasamurthy said.

Red Hat OpenShift Container Platform is based upon Kubernetes, which has emerged as the de facto orchestration layer for enterprise container deployment. “Kubernetes has won the container orchestration war and Red Hat enables enterprise Kubernetes deployments with OpenShift,” Maxta founder and Chief Executive Yoram Novick said in a prepared statement.

Founded in 2009, Maxta has raised $35 million in venture funding, an amount that should see it through to profitability, Sreenivasamurthy said. The Red Hat support is provided as a no-charge enhancement to the company’s software, which is also sold in preconfigured bundles on most brands of server hardware.

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