IBM and Red Hat collaborate to boost hybrid cloud adoption

IBM and Red Hat, a provider of open source solutions, has announced enhancements and growth in their long-standing alliance to better help clients embrace hybrid cloud. The move will help position IBM Power Systems as a featured component of Red Hat’s hybrid cloud strategy spanning platform infrastructure located both on and off premises.

IBM and Red Hat have a long tradition of innovation to advance product offerings across IBM platforms. Through expanded collaboration both in upstream technologies and product development, the companies aim to enable greater compatibility between their respective platforms, bringing Red Hat’s offerings to clients who previously worked in distributed environments.

"Red Hat believes that the next generation of applications and hybrid cloud services will be powered by modern, hyperscale hardware and software that span both public clouds, like IBM Cloud, and on-premise platforms," said Jim Totton, VP and GM, Platforms Business Unit, Red Hat. “Red Hat and IBM are expanding their long-standing alliance to address this opportunity. Through joint engineering and deeper product collaboration, we are excited to deliver world-class solutions built on Red Hat’s portfolio of enterprise open source solutions and IBM’s Power Systems platform."

The two companies plan to deliver solutions built on key components of Red Hat’s portfolio of open source products, including Red Hat Enterprise Linux, Red Hat Virtualization, and Red Hat Enterprise Linux High Availability offerings. Specifically, IBM and Red Hat are working together to build functionality and jointly engineer solutions across IBM Power Systems and productised in the Red Hat portfolio by:

• Enabling Red Hat solutions on IBM’s next-generation Power Systems;
• Introducing new high-performance computing (HPC) capabilities for leading edge research deployments;
• Developing high availability capabilities for Power Systems.

"Clients choose open source capabilities to achieve new levels of agility and flexibility in their hybrid cloud environments, but they need access to optimal support,” said Scott Crowder, CTO, IBM Systems. “Clients have long turned to Red Hat and IBM to support their enterprise computing needs. Now, we are expanding that relationship with Red Hat to provide new systems designed for enterprise-grade open source solutions that go far beyond what commodity infrastructure has offered.”

The news follows another partnership announcement between Veritas, the information management provider, and Red Hat. The two are collaborating to support business critical enterprise applications on OpenStack, offering predictable quality of service to OpenStack applications and workloads, regardless of scale.

Red Hat OpenStack Platform is a scalable infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) solution that enhances OpenStack with advanced features needed for cloud environments. It integrates Red Hat Enterprise Linux with Red Hat's OpenStack technology to form a stable, high-performing and production-ready cloud environment.

Veritas has selected Red Hat OpenStack Platform to build OpenStack solutions that provide a highly predictable quality of service to meet the requirements of business critical workloads with cost-effective direct-attached storage (DAS) using Veritas storage management technologies. Through the collaboration, Veritas aims to bring the ability to execute data protection tasks through integration with backup software without impacting production operations to Red Hat OpenStack Platform environments.

“Red Hat OpenStack Platform is a leading production-ready OpenStack distribution for enterprises for their private cloud infrastructure. We are working with Red Hat so that organisations can confidently adopt OpenStack for their most demanding enterprise workloads,” said Mike Palmer, SVP, Solutions for Data Insight and Orchestration, Veritas.

According to the 2016 OpenStack User Survey, production use of OpenStack is at 65%, up from 33% two years ago. Executing traditional, Mode 1 enterprise workloads on OpenStack can still be challenging due to the high performance and reliability requirements. Effective storage management that offers the necessary quality of service—regardless of scale—and is a key part of successfully adopting OpenStack for such enterprise production workloads.

“Red Hat OpenStack Platform is in production across hundreds of customers, spanning multiple verticals. We are delighted to collaborate with Veritas to bring enterprise customers more choice and draw on their long legacy of enterprise storage management, resiliency and data protection to help our customers address the performance and reliability requirements of traditional tier 1 workloads running on Red Hat OpenStack Platform,” commented Radhesh Balakrishnan, GM, OpenStack, Red Hat.

“The quality of service or ‘noisy neighbour’ challenge is one of the key issues enterprises face as they look to deploy workloads on OpenStack. Veritas’ ability to address this can give customers the confidence to deploy their mode 1 apps on OpenStack knowing that they can have the performance and resiliency they need,” Scott Sinclair, Senior Analyst, ESG.