Home > APEX > Cloud Platforms > White Papers > Dell APEX Cloud Platform for Red Hat OpenShift > Architecture Overview
APEX Cloud Platform uses a two-layer architecture, with storage and compute separated for optimal usage. The architecture has two separate groups of nodes:
- Compute nodes
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Storage nodes
The compute nodes run the OpenShift software, and to ensure resiliency of the control plane, a minimum of 4 compute nodes are required. The compute nodes run OpenShift on bare metal, meaning that OpenShift is running directly on the hardware without the need of a hypervisor. By running in this manner, we can take advantage of all the OpenShift features including OpenShift Virtualization for running VMs and Knative for serverless compute.
The storage nodes run the Dell SDS software on Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) directly on the storage nodes. The management components related to Dell SDS are co-resident on the storage nodes and do not consume resources on the compute nodes. Currently, there is basic integration between OpenShift and the Dell SDS Element Manager. In future releases, primary storage operations will be available directly in the OpenShift Web Console. This will include creating volumes, replacing disks, and adding or removing nodes from the storage cluster. This will also incorporate lifecycle management of the Dell SDS components into the same update workflow that maintains OpenShift, the Cloud Platform Foundation Software, and the infrastructure hardware components.