OPENSTACK SUMMIT – Red Hat, Inc., the world's leading provider of open source solutions, today announced that Produban, the IT services arm of the Spanish banking leader Grupo Santander, has picked Red Hat as its technology partner to create a modern cloud infrastructure with Red Hat OpenShift Container Platform on Red Hat OpenStack Platform, marking what is believed to be one of the world’s first production deployments of Kubernetes and containers on OpenStack.

Produban’s global footprint includes 10 datacenters across four countries that support all of Grupo Santander’s businesses, including Banco Santander, S.A., one of Europe’s largest banks and among the largest banks globally by market value. It specializes in Infrastructure and IT Operations, priding itself on providing reliable and modern IT services that can keep the bank at the forefront of innovation.

Produban wanted to create a private cloud platform to provide cloud services across Grupo Santander’s businesses, aiming to increase its agility and reduce costs. It sought an open source platform that would enable it to create cloud-native applications via an agile approach with a high degree of automation and strong security, and which would work across Produban’s global, multi-site deployment.

After evaluating other Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS), container, Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS), and hybrid cloud management offerings, Produban selected Red Hat as its technology partner. They found Red Hat OpenShift Container Platform on Red Hat OpenStack Platform best-suited to support its needs for a modern and agile platform to create cloud-native applications in a standardized IaaS environment.

Red Hat OpenShift Container Platform is the first and only container-centric, hybrid cloud solution built from the Docker, Kubernetes, Project Atomic and OpenShift Origin upstream projects and based on the trusted backbone of the world’s leading enterprise Linux platform, Red Hat Enterprise Linux. Red Hat OpenShift Container Platform provides a more secure, stable platform for container-based deployments without sacrificing current IT investments, allowing for mission-critical, traditional applications to coexist alongside new, cloud-native and container-based applications.

And, Red Hat is an OpenStack leader - both in contributions to the upstream OpenStack community and its work in delivering a production-ready OpenStack platform to enterprise customers. Red Hat OpenStack Platform, a highly scalable, production-ready IaaS solution, has emerged as an open source cloud platform of choice for a growing number of global organizations. Co-engineered with Red Hat Enterprise Linux and backed by Red Hat's support lifecycle, Red Hat OpenStack Platform offers an open foundation for cloud deployments.

Prior to creating its hybrid cloud infrastructure, Produban deployed Red Hat Enterprise Linux for its operating platform and Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization as its traditional scale-up virtualization platform. Produban also deployed Red Hat Ceph Storage, a massively scalable, software-defined storage solution, in hyperconverged mode with Red Hat OpenStack Platform, providing Produban with a single, efficient platform to support the demanding storage needs of its OpenStack-based cloud. Its deployment is believed to be the first hyperconverged OpenStack architecture solution in Spain, and among the first in the world, using Ceph.

Working with Red Hat Consulting on the project, Produban has met its goal of creating a modern cloud platform to support the bank’s global business. With its Red Hat-based platform, Produban has created a reliable, production-ready and controlled IaaS environment, while reducing its technology footprint and costs. With its cloud platform, Produban reports that it has not only increased agility, but reduced time-to-market for different services, including big data analytics. It now has a standardized and efficient IaaS environment with consistent management and deployment across its hybrid cloud services, including dedicated availability zones by region.

Radhesh Balakrishnan, general manager, OpenStack, Red Hat

“In many respects, Produban has created a blueprint deployment with one of the world’s first production deployments of Kubernetes and containers on OpenStack, and one of the first hyperconverged OpenStack architecture solutions using Ceph. We are thrilled that they selected Red Hat as their technology partner for this significant global deployment, and are excited to collaborate with Produban to help keep it at the forefront of innovation.”