IBM and Redhat in the Cloud Computing Space

No matter where you are in your digital journey, cloud technology has the power to help you succeed. To ensure competitiveness, you need to automate and revolutionize your organization. But just as every company is different, so are your cloud computing requirements. Thanks to IBM and Red Hat's combined expertise, we have access to two industry heavyweights that can keep our data secure, applications up to date and efficient.

In 2019, International Business Machines announced its largest acquisition when it agreed to purchase Red Hat, an open-source business software firm, for a staggering $33 billion.

Detractors ridiculed the acquisition as an overpaid gamble, even for a titan like IBM. The acquisition also marked IBM's decision to make a one-way transition and focus on being a provider of open-source software.

The foundation of Red Hat's enterprise was the sale of services and support for software that was freely available for download and deployment. The growing acceptance of open-source software meant that Red Hat would probably continue to play a crucial role in business computing.

With a successful financial report for the quarter on October 19, IBM quietened the naysayers. It was partly due to the tremendous commercial development of its Red Hat division, which Big Blue has kept primarily independent from the rest of the industry.

The Need for Consistency for Businesses

A significant factor in the success of web-based businesses like Amazon, eBay, and many others, as well as solution providers like Microsoft, Apple, and Google, is the development of reliable and user-friendly interfaces.

The same advantages—reduced complexity and ambiguity, as well as enhanced effectiveness and productivity—clearly serve the interests of enterprises. But relying on or adhering to a single company or platform runs counter to the fundamental nature of corporate IT most of the time. Organizations instead frequently collaborate with certain suppliers to serve particular workloads, apps, and business processes.

What is IBM Cloud's Red Hat OpenShift?

A managed Red Hat OpenShift cloud service, Red Hat OpenShift on IBM Cloud enables businesses to create and deploy applications with the security of IBM Cloud while reducing operational complexity. As a result, you can concentrate on creating and maintaining your applications and creating workloads based on Red Hat OpenShift on a managed public cloud service to improve responsiveness, scalability, and dependability.

Integration of IBM and Red Hat Technologies

• The integration will bring together IBM and Red Hat's container storage technologies to provide data services. It will assist IBM's skills in the Kubernetes platform market advance.
  
  
• IBM will also give new Ceph solutions to create a single, software-defined storage platform that spans the gap in architecture between data centers and cloud service providers. It will strengthen IBM's position as the industry leader in the Kubernetes framework and program-defined storage markets.
  
  
• Clients will benefit from a uniform set of storage services thanks to these enhancements, which also maintain data safety, management, and robustness across bare metal, hosted, and container-based systems.

According to the VP of hybrid technologies, Joe Fernandes:

"With IBM Storage taking stewardship of Red Hat Ceph Storage and OpenShift Data Foundation, IBM will help accelerate open-source storage innovation and expand the market opportunity beyond what each of us could deliver on our own.” 

IBM Acquiring Red Hat's Storage Assets and Teams

It is crucial first to consider both parties' efforts to manage the complexities of heterogeneous storage. In the instance of IBM, the company's IBM Spectrum Storage Suite was created to handle the company's in-house storage systems and a wide range of options from outside suppliers.

For effective monitoring, analysis, and management of complex enterprise storage settings, see, for instance, IBM Spectrum Control and IBM Storage Insights. Additionally, IBM Spectrum Scale may handle unstructured data storage, whereas IBM Spectrum Virtualize concentrates on block storage management.

IBM Spectrum Fusion is a native container file storage platform created for Kubernetes applications operating on Red Hat's OpenShift Container Platform (OCP). Select products from Dell EMC, Hitachi Data Systems (HDS), Huawei, HP/3PAR, Lenovo, NetApp, and Pure Storage may all be utilized with them.

Ceph Storage from Red Hat is an open-source, highly scalable software-defined storage system created to meet businesses' block, file, and object storage demands. It is essential to the OpenShift Data Foundation and closely integrates with Red Hat's OpenStack Platform (ODF).

In Kubernetes clusters, Red Hat Rook is frequently used by businesses as the Ceph operator. However, Ceph is made to assist businesses in streamlining operations and reducing the time to market for application developers. It can run safely everywhere OpenShift can, both on-premises and in the cloud.

Benefits of IBM and Red Hat Reimagine Hybrid Cloud Storage

All containerized programs running on Red Hat OpenShift will have a shared storage perspective: For production applications operating on OpenShift that require block, file, and object access to data, customers may utilize IBM Spectrum Fusion to deliver the most outstanding performance, scalability, management, information security, and digital security. Infrastructure-as-code was created for more accessible, automated management and provisioning, allowing development teams to concentrate on the apps rather than the operations. 

Using IBM Ceph, a unified hybrid cloud environment can be offered at corporate size and resilience: Customers may use IBM's integrated and software-driven storage service, which offers scalability and management features, to offer their private and mixed cloud infrastructures. Sensitive data security, recovery plans, high reliability, security, auto-scaling, and self-healing are just a few of the capabilities that can move with the data between on-premises and public clouds.

A solitary IBM Spectrum Scale data lakehouse for aggregating and extracting information from unstructured data: Customers may use a single platform to serve data-intensive workloads like AI/ML, high-performance computing, and other applications, addressing the difficulties that frequently arise with growing a centralized data strategy fast. Direct access to data for analytics tools, minimal data transportation, redundancy, enhanced schema management, and data governance are just a few advantages that may be realized with distributed file and object storage designed to be cost-effective.

According to Gartner, a considerable increase from 20% in 2022 to 60% of infrastructure and operations (I&O) executives implementing at least one of the hybrid cloud storage systems by 2025.

Denis Kennelly, general manager of IBM Storage, stated that:

“We are speeding IBM's hybrid cloud storage strategy while retaining promises to Red Hat customers and the open-source community.”

Getting ready to containerize!

Do you want OpenShift Kubernetes-ready applications? The new Red Hat Marketplace has several programs from Red Hat and IBM. Together, IBM and Red Hat provide a software-defined data services offering and a portfolio of storage devices that will streamline their product lines and benefit their clients. The combination will eventually contribute to accelerating innovation in storage to address the data concerns for hybrid clouds while upholding a commitment to open source. The software-defined portfolio offered by IBM offers advantages such as a unified storage expertise for containerized applications running on Red Hat OpenShift, a coherent hybrid cloud awareness at corporate levels of scale and reliability with IBM Ceph, and a particular data lakehouse to gather and generate intelligence from unstructured information on IBM Spectrum. Other advantages include scale and the ability to create in the cloud and implement on-premises with automated processes. 

Are you planning to leverage your cloud strategy using Redhat and IBM technologies, we have Redhat and IBM certified experts to assist you in your journey. Get in touch with us to discuss further.

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