IBM debuts integrations and consulting services for Red Hat’s OpenShift container platform

IBM only last month closed its $34 billion acquisition of open source software developer Red Hat, but the Armonk, New York company wasted no time synergizing the two businesses’ offerings. It today revealed that it’s revamped its software portfolio to run on public clouds like AWS, Microsoft Azure, Google Cloud Platform, Alibaba, IBM Cloud, and Red Hat’s OpenShift, and it took the wraps off of Red Hat OpenShift on IBM Cloud, a fully managed service running on IBM’s cloud platforms.

“IBM is unleashing its software from the data center to fuel the enterprise workload race to the cloud. This will further position IBM as an industry leader in the more than $1 trillion dollar hybrid cloud opportunity,” said IBM senior vice president of cloud and cognitive software Arvind Krishna. “We are providing the essential tools we think 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.”

IBM’s new cloud-native capabilities come in the form of Cloud Paks (formerly IBM Cloud Private for Data), which comprise certified and containerized models, accelerators, and services. The use cases range from identity management and security to monitoring, logging, and auditing, and the Paks’ components are configurable through a unified dashboard across cloud environments and hosts.

Over 100 products across IBM’s extensive software library form the basis of Cloud Paks, all of which are optimized to run on OpenShift. They’re delivered as packages tailored to specific scenarios, and each provides built-in support for migrating and integrating apps and Kubernetes-based workloads.

Here’s a sampling of the Cloud Paks currently available:

• Cloud Pak for Data: Automates how organizations deliver insights from data and provides an extensible architecture to virtualize said data.
• Cloud Pak for Applications: Helps build, deploy, and run apps.
• Cloud Pak for Integration: Integrates apps, data, cloud services, and APIs.
• Cloud Pak for Automation: Transform business processes, decisions, and content.
• Cloud Pak for Multicloud Management: Provides multicloud visibility, governance, and automation.

As for the aforementioned Red Hat OpenShift on IBM Cloud, it’s an extension of IBM’s Cloud Kubernetes Service, where IBM orchestrates OpenShift Container Platform plans for businesses. Clients can manage both community Kubernetes and OpenShift clusters with the same IBM Cloud Kubernetes Service API, CLI, and console, and they gain access to Red Hat packaged open source tools, including app runtimes, frameworks, and databases.

Separately, as previously announced, IBM said today that it’ll bring Red Hat OpenShift to its IBM Z and LinuxONE server platforms, its enterprise server platforms that power more than 30 billion transactions a day globally. And it announced that it’ll launch consulting and technology services for Red Hat to help customers move, build, and manage their workloads in cloud environments.

“Red Hat is unlocking innovation with Linux-based technologies, including containers and Kubernetes, which have become the fundamental building blocks of hybrid cloud environments,” said Jim Whitehurst, president and CEO of Red Hat. “This open hybrid cloud foundation is what enables the vision of any app, anywhere, anytime. Combined with IBM’s strong industry expertise and supported by a vast ecosystem of passionate developers and partners, customers can create modern apps with the technologies of their choice and the flexibility to deploy in the best environment for the app — whether that is on-premises or across multiple public clouds.”