The enterprise database gone cloud-native: SQL Server 2019 on Red Hat’s hybrid cloud portfolio

Four years ago, we announced a new era of collaboration with Microsoft, intended to drive the future of enterprise computing across the hybrid cloud. Since then, we’ve seen the world’s leading enterprise Linux platform, Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL), serve as a reference Linux platform for SQL Server workloads and the launch of the first jointly-managed Red Hat OpenShift offering on the public cloud with Azure Red Hat OpenShift. Today, we’re pleased to continue this alliance and our commitment to open choice in enterprise IT with the availability of SQL Server 2019 across Red Hat’s portfolio of technologies, including OpenShift.

SQL Server 2019 delivers many innovative database security and compliance features, along with industry-leading performance, mission-critical availability and advanced analytics to power many of the world’s most critical enterprise workloads.  

SQL Server 2019 on RHEL: It starts with Linux
The mission-critical nature of many SQL Server workloads necessitates a foundation that is more secure, reliable and highly-available. RHEL helps to meet these needs of SQL Server 2019 at the operating system level, delivering enhanced security, resiliency and consistency to IT operations professionals and database administrators. Through collaboration between Red Hat and Microsoft, both RHEL and the Red Hat High Availability add-on for RHEL are optimized to deliver higher performance and “always-on” availability for SQL Server, even in the most demanding physical and virtual environments.  

Additionally, RHEL comes with Red Hat Insights, a predictive analytics cloud-based service distilled from Red Hat’s decades of expertise in production Linux environments. Based on our continued work with Microsoft, Red Hat Insights is now able to analyze systems running SQL Server 2019 on RHEL and more quickly remediate issues around performance, availability and security. 

Designed for today's hybrid cloud deployments, SQL Server 2019 on Red Hat Enterprise Linux delivers a more consistent experience from the edge to the datacenter, and on the public cloud infrastructure of Microsoft Azure.

SQL Server 2019 on OpenShift: Enterprise Kubernetes for enterprise databases
As enterprises across the globe look to digitally transform through containerized applications and microservices, having a production-grade container orchestration platform upon which to deploy these workloads is a key need. Red Hat OpenShift provides a production-ready Kubernetes platform for even the most critical workloads, and is a preferred platform for SQL Server 2019 workloads across the hybrid cloud.

Red Hat OpenShift provides a consistent experience across the hybrid cloud, making it easier to shift containerized SQL Server 2019 workloads across bare metal, virtual environments, private cloud infrastructure and Microsoft Azure public cloud deployments. Built around Kubernetes Operators, where complex operational knowledge is delivered as code, Red Hat OpenShift makes it easier to manage and maintain modern, cloud-native services, including SQL Server 2019. 

With the need for a persistent storage layer to support stateful applications using SQL Server 2019, Red Hat OpenShift Container Storage provides a fully integrated storage solution deployed with OpenShift. Delivering persistent volumes that are scalable, highly available across Azure availability zones and dynamically provisioned and managed, OpenShift Container Storage offers developers, data engineers and operations a common, robust user experience.

Additionally, Red Hat OpenShift integrates with a variety of machine-learning (ML) frameworks, empowering data scientists to build on the advancements of Kubernetes to more easily create, reproduce and share ML modeling results to inform critical business decisions. Red Hat OpenShift can also be deployed on Red Hat OpenStack Platform, bringing even more scalability to hybrid cloud operations for SQL Server 2019.

SQL Server 2019: Across the breadth of the hybrid cloud with Red Hat
Starting with RHEL and expanding to include Red Hat OpenShift, Red Hat’s entire portfolio of open hybrid cloud technologies is optimized for SQL Server 2019, helping organizations across industries and geographies to use the power of SQL Server on flexible open infrastructure. This includes:

• Red Hat Virtualization virtualizes both Linux and Windows workloads on an open, software-defined platform, providing a stable, future-ready foundation for consolidating disparate SQL Server 2019 workloads.

• Red Hat Storage offers a modern, hybrid cloud storage platform with Red Hat Ceph Storage for SQL Server 2019 that is massively scalable and built with modern workloads like big data and artificial intelligence (AI) in mind.

• Red Hat Ansible Automation enables SQL Server 2019 workloads to be integrated with existing Ansible Playbooks, making it easier to remove the element of human error from complex, routine management and maintenance tasks.

Finally, Red Hat Global Services, including Red Hat Consulting, Red Hat Open Innovation Labs and Red Hat Training and Certification, project the strategic advisory capabilities, human-centered engagements and skills validations needed to get the most out of SQL Server 2019 on Linux investments.

We see the future of enterprise IT as one of hybrid IT deployments, stretching from existing, on-premise datacenter technologies extending out to embrace the power of public cloud infrastructures such as Microsoft Azure. With SQL Server 2019 available and supported across Red Hat’s hybrid cloud technology, we’re pleased to bring our customers the scale of hybrid paired with the power of one of the world’s leading database technologies.

To learn more about Red Hat and SQL Server 2019, visit https://www.redhat.com/en/explore/microsoft-sql-server-rhel for more information.