As we navigate the global pandemic and economic disruption, nearly every organization is pursuing a digitally-driven business model. The need to scale while freeing up cash flow is now driving hybrid cloud adoption.

However, scaling digital workflows across multiple clouds that run on multi-architecture environments requires a hybrid cloud platform that can provide consistent capabilities across different types of clouds and entire IT infrastructures.

IBM’s hybrid cloud platform with Red Hat solutions at its core is designed to enable organizations to accelerate innovation with automation and modern apps that bring out the best of what multi-arch multicloud infrastructure can provide. A pragmatic hybrid cloud strategy requires an innovative, low-risk application modernization approach that extends core business applications in VMs with co-resident Red Hat OpenShift-enabled containerized workloads.

To that end, I am excited to announce the availability of Red Hat OpenShift 4.6 across IBM Power Systems, IBM Z, and IBM LinuxONE infrastructure alongside x86. The support for Red Hat OpenShift on IBM Power Systems Virtual Server co-located with IBM Cloud is also coming in December 2020. With Red Hat OpenShift available across these environments, customers get the flexibility to modernize and deploy their applications where it makes sense.

Where do you deploy?

IBM Power Systems is purpose-built to deliver secured and reliable cloud infrastructure that efficiently scales mission-critical and data-rich applications. These are applications that cannot go down and need to scale on demand. Power Systems delivers industry-leading scalability for both VM-based and containerized applications.

Case in point: Among the certified platforms for Red Hat Enterprise Linux, Power has the highest memory and processor scalability (64TB and 1536 logical CPU) respectively. With Red Hat OpenShift on IBM Power, which is built from highly scalable RHEL, Power can pack up to 3.2X containers per core vs. compared x86 systems[1]. Customers can now co-locate their containerized applications alongside their AIX and IBM i environments in an on-premises private cloud on Power Systems. We are also working on delivering support for Red Hat OpenShift on IBM Power Systems Virtual Server co-located with IBM Cloud. 

IBM hybrid cloud platform

Red Hat’s solutions are the foundation of IBM’s hybrid cloud platform. The recent Forrester Wave report on Multicloud Container Development Platform has identified Red Hat + IBM as a leader. Red Hat OpenShift, the industry’s leading enterprise Kubernetes platform, enables developers to modernize apps, simplifies distributed infrastructure operations across hybrid cloud and expands enterprise value with a rich app and partner ecosystem.

Many customers on Power run their business-critical applications on AIX and IBM i environments. They can establish a consistent enterprise-wide automation of hybrid cloud operations across AIX, IBM i and Linux environments with Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform. This can help customers improve IT admin productivity, leveraging their existing Ansible skills to automate these environments. In the last five months Ansible community content has been downloaded over 2500+ times!

Innovative and low-risk application modernization approach 

As we go up the stack, the cloud-native or containerized software layer delivers critical components to modernize the applications for hybrid cloud. IBM Cloud Paks are designed to provide enterprise-ready containerized software solutions for modernizing existing applications and developing new cloud-native apps that run on Red Hat OpenShift.

When you modernize enterprise applications, you can ease the transition to a hybrid cloud environment by gaining the flexibility to run apps wherever you want, whenever you want. Modernizing on IBM Power Systems enables new cloud-native microservices to coexist and connect with existing enterprise applications running on AIX, IBM i and Red Hat Enterprise Linux on Power, while still leveraging the inherent scalability, reliability and security benefits of the Power platform.

You can thus address barriers to productivity and integration to create new user experiences, develop new applications and ultimately unlock new business opportunities. However, the key to a low-risk approach is to modernize incrementally. I encourage you to take a look at this ebook that lays out an innovative and low-risk application modernization approach on IBM Power Systems.

Statements regarding IBM’s future direction and intent are subject to change or withdrawal without notice and represent goals and objectives only.