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.