It’s becoming clear that the technologies and capabilities provided through an open hybrid cloud platform are critical to helping organizations modernize as they work to fortify their environments during the pandemic and emerge more quickly.
Indeed, the pandemic is compelling more organizations to advance their digital transformation projects earlier than planned. According to a new study by IBM’s Institute for Business Value, COVID-19 and the future of business, the virus has sped digital transformations at 59 percent of organizations surveyed.
For many, the value of an open, secure hybrid cloud – one that integrates on-prem and cloud operations intelligently and infuses AI throughout – is incredibly strong. This is the heart and soul of the IBM Hybrid Cloud, an open, secure and highly managed platform that’s well-suited to handle all critical and highly regulated workloads. At the center of it is our family of Cloud Paks, integrated packages of containerized software and tools, all running on top of Red Hat OpenShift, the leading enterprise container orchestration platform.
With Cloud Paks, clients can do everything from modernize existing applications for cloud and discover critical data across the enterprise, to build AI models automatically, and much, much more.
This week we’re advancing one of our leading IBM Cloud Paks, Cloud Pak for Data. The integrated data and AI platform enables companies to run AI anywhere, on any cloud configuration: public and/or private, or on-premises. The platform has been updated with enhanced automation capabilities, which help drive down costs; updated data virtualization to help break down data silos; and the ability to conduct analytics at the edge in real-time. We’re also announcing an exciting expansion of our hybrid cloud ecosystem. Beginning today, IBM Cloud Pak for Data is available on Tech Data’s Stream One Marketplace, as well as the new Red Hat Marketplace, making the platform more accessible to more businesses.
Automation Made Easier
The updated version comes with a number of automation enhancements built-in to make everything from provisioning software to managing business processes.
A new tool, called IBM Cloud Pak for Data Operator, for example, simplifies software installations and lifecycle management. It includes an array of capabilities, like automated provisioning, configuration management, seamless patching, upgrade and scaling with operational knowledge baked in, and even auto-pilot management.
In addition, the platform’s Quick Scan capability has been upgraded to perform more scalable automatic data discovery for deeper analytic insights. And, unlike with other tools, the results of the analysis can be published to one or more catalogs directly from the results page, speeding the process.
A new Workflow management page has also been included in the new version of IBM Cloud Pak for Data to help users more easily manage and automate business processes. For example, when installing Watson Knowledge Catalog, users can select from predefined workflow templates to use to better control the process of creating, updating, and deleting governance artifacts. Users can also define and configure the types of workflows that you need to support your business processes.
In addition to all these updates, a new Deployment Spaces dashboard enables users to monitor and manage production workloads in multiple deployment spaces. This makes it easier for Operations Engineers, for example, to manage jobs and online deployments regardless of where they are running. People can assess the status of workloads, identify issues and manage workloads. As a result, users can quickly identify issues as they arise and accelerate problem resolution.
Building Out the Ecosystem
Along with these great enhancements, we have expanded the ecosystem of partners and products for IBM Cloud Pak for Data. For example, IBM Cloud Pak for Data is now available on IBM System z. Starting today, System z users can run IBM Db2 within IBM Cloud Pak for Data as containers, for rapid deployment and provisioning of Db2 databases on private or public clouds on Z. In addition, IBM Cloud Pak for Data is now available through the new Red Hat Marketplace, as well as the Tech Data StreamOne Marketplace, dramatically broadening the availability of this data and AI platform.
For a full view of all the new updates and enhancements to IBM Cloud Pak for Data 3.5, read Hemanth Manda’s blog or join us for the webinar on November 18 to hear directly from the experts on the value of this new release, or read our product overview.
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