IBM says its cloud portfolio would be modified to run on Red Hat’s OpenShift with specific Cloud Paks released. OpenShift is the industry’s most comprehensive enterprise Kubernetes platform, and Red Hat Enterprise Linux, the world’s leading enterprise Linux platform. 

IBM in July concluded its $34 billion purchase of Red Hat, the leader when it comes to open source Linux deployments. IBM said it will utilize the Red Hat’s open-source Linux expertise and capabilities to develop large hybrid cloud projects for its huge clientele. The Big Blue even reported that it would try to create an ecosystem of partnerships around Red Hat OpenShift so it can easily carry out the process. 

The integration has begun with IBM packaging Red Hat’s Kubernetes-based OpenShift Container Platform with more than 100 IBM pre-integrated solutions what it calls Cloud Paks. OpenShift allows users to deployment and manage containers on ony infrastructure, be it private or open cloud, including AWS, Microsoft Azure, Google Cloud Platform, Alibaba and IBM Cloud. 

“IBM is unleashing its software from the data center to fuel the enterprise workload race to the cloud. This will further position IBM the industry leader in the more than $1 trillion dollar hybrid cloud opportunity. We are providing the essential tools enterprises need to make their multi-year journey to cloud on common, open standards that can reach across clouds, across applications and across vendors with Red Hat,” said Arvind Krishna, senior vice president, Cloud and Cognitive Software, IBM. 

Also, IBM said it will bring the Red Hat OpenShift Container Platform over to IBM Z mainframe computers and IBM LinuxONE. Together these two platforms control around 30 billion transactions per day across the globe, according to IBM. The two platforms are trusted by industries which exchange the most sensitive data, including banking, government, healthcare and aviation. 

What IBM wants with Cloud Paks

Cloud Paks will have support for all kinds of enterprise cloud requirements, from hardware to software so business users can easily and securely update their critical applications no matter what cloud platform is being used. With the help of these Cloud Paks, businesses can move swiftly with design, test, build and deployment of new models and analytical applications.

The prepackaged Cloud Paks incorporates a Kubernetes container and containerized IBM middleware intended to let clients rapidly turn up big business ready containers, the organization said. IBM’s focus is to help its clients deploy hybrid cloud with using secured containers and leveraging the open source capabilities of Open Shift in doing so. By increasing the density of containers, IBM will help clients create containerized applications that can scale both horizontally and vertically. 

Cloud Paks will be delivered to customers as packages each of them crafted for a particular use case and charged using a consumption-based pricing model. Currently, there are five Cloud Paks in total at the moment: Cloud Pak for Data, Application, Integration, Automation and Multi Cloud Management. The Paks will at last incorporate IBM’s DB2, WebSphere, API Connect, Watson Studio, Cognos Analytics and according to IBM more of its infrastructure will be connected with the Red Hat assets in future. 

How customers are generating insights using IBM Red Hat Cloud Pak for Data 

Businesses are already leveraging IBM hybrid cloud platform and Red Hat OpenShift- enabled IBM software (Cloud Paks) to not only help modernize their mission-critical applications but also gain deep insights from data. 

For instance, US telecom operator Sprint deployed IBM Cloud Pak for Data to help understand and make itself ready for upcoming networking technologies like 5G. Using Cloud Pak for Data to make use Watson Studio, thus creating ML models on client-facing issues from diverse data sets. 

Similarly, Associated Bank in the US is adopting IBM Cloud Pak for Data System for swift setting up and scaling of AI. The bank wants to create a new Customer 360 system aiming to enhance client experiences as well as a new governed dashboard for data analytics. 

According to Associated Bank, the new integrated stack contains what it needs to improve data quality, catalog its data assets, enable data collaboration, and build data sciences.

Outlook

OpenShift is the most fundamental and widely-used Kubernetes and orchestration layer that supports containerized programming, and setting the Cloud Paks on Red Hat OpenShift gives IBM a wide reach right away. This is critical as far as IBM strategy goes as the ability to run enterprise grade, containerized solutions, is a key component of application modernization strategy for any enterprise. 

IBM-certified containerized software will create a uniform set of services using which security, logging and identity management can be achieved for all IBM customers using the various cloud platforms via their dashboards. With this integration, IBM will take the center stage of deployments of hybrid cloud environments.