Consistency of experience, operations and results is one of the most important factors in technology product success. However, while it is a commonplace issue in consumer tech, the subject is seldom highlighted in enterprise IT solutions and services. That makes last week’s announcement that Red Hat will transfer its data storage portfolio and teams to IBM Storage particularly interesting. Let’s take a look.

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The value of data center and storage consistency

Why is consistency so important? Consider it from a consumer perspective, where a consistent, simple, recognizable, reliable interface removes much of the pain and confusion out of what are often highly complex operations and interactions. Developing reliably consistent, easy to use interfaces is a primary reason for the success of solution providers, such as Microsoft, Apple and Google, as well as web-based companies, like Amazon, eBay and many others.

Those same benefits—reduced complexity and confusion, and increased efficiency and productivity—are clearly in the interest of businesses, as well. But the basic nature of enterprise IT is usually at odds with reliance on or adherence to single companies or platforms. Instead, organizations tend to engage specific vendors to support specific workloads, applications and business processes.

That can be further complicated by leadership changes. For example, new CTO or IT decision makers who prefer or are more familiar with specific vendors and platforms often choose new solutions and tools to replace or run alongside legacy systems and applications. That is further exacerbated by the general longevity of business computing hardware, which is why many enterprise IT infrastructures are hodgepodges of heterogeneous hardware and software.

Let’s add two other issues to the enterprise IT headache heap. First and foremost, all those systems and applications need to be able to successfully access and use organizations’ stored information resources, and to consistently support the creation, acquisition and management of new data. Second, those same on-premises systems, applications and data assets need to be consistently supported and managed across off-premises cloud platforms.

In other words, without the vital benefits that consistent experience, results and expectations provide, enterprise IT can find itself on a fast track to frustration and failure.

Also see: Why Cloud Means Cloud Native

Red Hat and IBM’s storage plan

How does the transfer of Red Hat’s storage assets and teams to IBM address this? First, it is important to consider the work that both have put into taming heterogeneous storage complexity. In IBM’s case, the company’s IBM Spectrum Storage Suite has been designed to support both IBM’s homegrown storage systems and scores of solutions from third party vendors.

For example, IBM Spectrum Control and IBM Storage Insights are designed to effectively monitor, analyze and manage complex enterprise storage environments. In addition, IBM Spectrum Virtualize focuses on block storage management and IBM Spectrum Scale can be used to manage unstructured data storage.

Finally, IBM Spectrum Fusion is a container-native file storage platform designed for Kubernetes applications running on Red Hat’s OpenShift Container Platform (OCP). All can be used with select offerings from Dell EMC, Hitachi Data Systems (HDS), Huawei, HP/3PAR, Lenovo, NetApp and Pure Storage.

Red Hat’s Ceph Storage is a highly scalable open-source software-defined storage solution designed to address enterprises’ block, file and object storage needs. It is deeply integrated with Red Hat’s OpenStack Platform and is at the center of the OpenShift Data Foundation (ODF).

Many enterprises are running Red Hat Rook as the Ceph operator in Kubernetes clusters. However, Ceph can run securely anywhere that OpenShift runs—on-premises and in the cloud—and is designed to help enterprises simplify operations and speed application developers’ time to market.

According to IBM, it will integrate the storage technologies from Red Hat ODF as the foundation for IBM Spectrum Fusion, thus combining the companies’ container technologies. In addition, IBM intends to offer new Ceph solutions to deliver a unified, software-defined storage platform that bridges the architectural divide between data centers and cloud providers.

As Denis Kenneally, GM of IBM Storage noted in a blog post about the announcement, “Today’s news means faster hybrid, multi-cloud deployments, with greater simplicity and expanded platform support backed by IBM’s global sales and lifecycle services. IBM will continue Red Hat’s commitment to existing customers and the open-source community, and we are accelerating our roadmap with new products and services to be announced in the coming months.”

Also see: Top Digital Transformation Companies

Final analysis

So what are the essential takeaways from this announcement? First and most practically, the combination of IBM and Red Hat’s storage assets and teams will support both companies’ existing solutions and initiatives. They should also result in a host of new storage offerings and services their customers can use to consistently manage and monitor their data resources. This is true no matter where they reside—on premises, off premises and in hybrid and multi-cloud environments.

Just as importantly, the announcement speaks to IBM’s continuing efforts to develop innovative heterogeneous storage solutions and to its ongoing commitment to support open-source projects and technologies. It also underscores the value of IBM’s acquisition of Red Hat, and the benefits that have accrued from that deal.

Overall, the combination of IBM and Red Hat’s storage assets and teams should benefit both organizations and their enterprise customers. It will also likely interest other large businesses that are struggling to capture consistent performance and benefits from their data storage investments.

Also see: Best Machine Learning Platforms 

IBM today is moving the code that underlies its WebSphere Liberty solution for development using Agile and DevOps methodologies to GitHub, where it will be available this week under the Eclipse Public License v1.

The Open Liberty project is working to create a new runtime for Java microservices that can be moved between different cloud environments, according to Ian Robinson, an IBM distinguished engineer and the chief architect of WebSphere. Open Liberty will be the basis the IBM’s continued development of its Liberty product – the codebase is the same — and will be fully supported in commercial WebSphere licenses. It can be downloaded at openliberty.io.

The Open Liberty code on GitHub will deliver developments the components they need to create Java applications and microservices, using the Java EE foundation from WebSphere Liberty and the work from the Eclipse MicroProfile community. MicroProfile defines common APIs and infrastructure to microservices applications can be created and deployed without vendor lock-in, Robinson wrote in his blog.

Along with being a founding member of the Eclipse MicroProfile project, IBM has collaborated with Google and Lyft on the Istio project to create an open service fabric for microservices integration and management, and would like to see MicroProfile integrate with Istio, Robinson said.

Further, IBM’s commitment to open source includes the contribution of IBM’s Java 9 VM to Eclipse as Eclipse OpenJ9, which – when combined with Open Liberty, Eclipse MicroProfile and Java EE at Eclipse – creates a fully open licensing model of a full Java stack for building, testing, running and scaling Java applications.

“We hope Open Liberty will help more developers turn their ideas into full-fledged, enterprise ready apps,” Robinson wrote in his blog. “We also hope it will broaden the WebSphere family to include more ideas and innovations to benefit the broader Java community of developers at organizations big and small.”

IBM Corp. is making some big changes to its data storage services, announcing today that it will bring Red Hat Inc.’s storage products and associates under the “IBM Storage” umbrella.

The aim, IBM said, is to deliver a more consistent application and data storage experience across on-premises and cloud infrastructures. It’s a big move that will see IBM Spectrum Fusion data management software adopt the storage technologies of Red Hat’s OpenShift Data Foundation as its new base layer.

Even more interesting, perhaps, is that the open-source Red Hat Ceph Storage offering will be transformed into a new IBM Ceph storage offering. IBM said this will result in a unified, software-defined storage platform that’s better able to bridge the architectural divide between data centers and cloud computing providers.

The computing giant said the move is in line with its software-defined storage strategy of a “born in the cloud, for the cloud” approach that will unlock bidirectional application and data mobility based on a shared, secure and cloud-scale solution.

IBM Systems General Manager of Storage Denis Kennelly said the shift is designed to streamline the two companies’ portfolios. “By bringing together the teams and integrating our products under one roof, we are accelerating IBM’s hybrid cloud strategy while maintaining commitments to Red Hat’s customers and the open-source community,” he insisted.

The company presented the changes as a big win for customers, saying they will gain access to a more consistent set of storage services that preserve data resilience, security and governance across bare metal, virtualized and containerized environments. More specifically, IBM is promising that customers will have a more unified storage experience for container-based applications running on Red Hat OpenShift, with the ability to use IBM Spectrum Fusion, which is now based on Red Hat OpenShift Data Foundation. Doing so will provide higher performance, greater scale and more automation for OpenShift applications that require block, file and object access to data, the company said.

As for IBM Ceph, the company said this will deliver a more consistent hybrid cloud experience with enterprise-grade scale and resiliency.

Furthermore, by unifying IBM’s and Red Hat’s storage technologies, customers will be able to build a single data lakehouse on IBM Spectrum Scale to aggregate all of their unstructured data in one place. Benefits will include less time spent on maintenance, reduced data movement and redundancy, and more advanced schema management and data governance.

Industry watchers were united in their belief that the changes would be of benefit to customers. Steve McDowell of Moor Insights & Strategy told SiliconANGLE that today’s move makes a lot of sense because it enables IBM to leverage the storage strengths of both companies.

McDowell explained that although IBM Spectrum is considered to be one of the most comprehensive data management platforms around, its foundation predates the rise of cloud-native technologies. On the other hand, he said, Red Hat OpenShift was built from the ground up to support cloud-native workloads.

“IBM is evolving Spectrum Fusion to take the best of Red Hat’s efforts, and is using Red Hat’s storage software as the base for its IBM-branded products moving forward,” McDowell said. “It makes a lot of business sense for IBM to leverage R&D from Red Hat into its more traditionally proprietary systems. It also gives IBM an easy path to better serve the needs of containerized workloads.”

International Data Corp. analyst Ashish Nadkarni said the two companies are now “speaking with one voice on storage” and finally delivering on the synergies between them that were mentioned when IBM acquired Red Hat in 2019.

“The combining of the two storage teams is a win for IT organizations as it brings together the best that both offer: An industry-leading storage systems portfolio meets an industry-leading software-defined data services offering,” Nadkarni said. “This initiative enables IBM and Red Hat to streamline their family of offerings, passing the benefits to their customers.”

IBM also moved to reassure users of Red Hat’s open-source technologies that it will remain fully committed to them following today’s announcements. As part of the deal, IBM will take over Premier Sponsorship of the Ceph Foundation and, along with Red Hat’s teams, continue to drive innovation and development. Both IBM Ceph and Red Hat OpenShift will remain 100% open-source, the company added, and will continue to follow an upstream-first development model.

McDowell said today’s move would likely make some users nervous about the prospect of Red Hat’s technology becoming more proprietary over time. “IBM has been very careful since it acquired Red Hat in 2019 to keep Red Hat’s open-source business segregated from IBM’s branded offerings,” he said. “This is the first time we’re seeing IBM cross that that line, and it’s natural to wonder how blurred those lines will become.”

Still, McDowell said, he’s inclined to believe IBM’s promises as it has been very deliberate about keeping Red Hat’s storage technologies open-source.

“Red Hat OpenShift Data Foundation and Ceph will still be available as they always have, though its evolution will undoubtedly be more strongly guided by the needs of IBM’s storage business,” the analyst continued. “Overall this is a net positive for IBM and its customers. It makes good business sense and there should be minimal impact to Red Hat’s existing community.”

IBM said the first storage solutions to launch under the new IBM Ceph Storage and IBM Spectrum Fusion banners will arrive in the first half of 2023, so users will have plenty of time to digest the changes.

Image: Red Hat

Newly expanded software-defined storage portfolio enables IBM to deliver a consistent experience from edge-to-core-to-cloud

ARMONK, N.Y., Oct. 4, 2022 /PRNewswire/ -- IBM (NYSE: IBM) announced today it will add Red Hat storage products and Red Hat associate teams to the IBM Storage business unit, bringing consistent application and data storage across on-premises infrastructure and cloud.

With the move, IBM will integrate the storage technologies from Red Hat OpenShift Data Foundation (ODF) as the foundation for IBM Spectrum Fusion. This combines IBM and Red Hat's container storage technologies for data services and helps accelerate IBM's capabilities in the burgeoning Kubernetes platform market.

In addition, IBM intends to offer new Ceph solutions delivering a unified and software defined storage platform that bridges the architectural divide between the data center and cloud providers. This further advances IBM's leadership in the software defined storage and Kubernetes platform markets.

According to Gartner, by 2025, 60% of infrastructure and operations (I&O) leaders will implement at least one of the hybrid cloud storage architectures, which is a significant increase from 20% in 2022.¹ IBM's software defined storage strategy is to take a "born in the cloud, for the cloud" approach—unlocking bi-directional application and data mobility based on a shared, secure, and cloud-scale software defined storage foundation.

"Red Hat and IBM have been working closely for many years, and today's announcement enhances our partnership and streamlines our portfolios," said Denis Kennelly, general manager of IBM Storage, IBM Systems. "By bringing together the teams and integrating our products under one roof, we are accelerating the IBM's hybrid cloud storage strategy while maintaining commitments to Red Hat customers and the open-source community."

"Red Hat and IBM have a shared belief in the mission of hybrid cloud-native storage and its potential to help customers transform their applications and data," said Joe Fernandes, vice president of hybrid platforms, Red Hat. "With IBM Storage taking stewardship of Red Hat Ceph Storage and OpenShift Data Foundation, IBM will help accelerate open-source storage innovation and expand the market opportunity beyond what each of us could deliver on our own. We believe this is a clear win for customers who can gain a more comprehensive platform with new hybrid cloud-native storage capabilities."

Story continues

As customers formulate their hybrid cloud strategies, critical to success is the emphasis and importance of infrastructure consistency, application agility, IT management and flexible consumption consistency as deciding factors to bridge across on-premises and cloud deployments.

With these changes to the IBM portfolio, clients will have access to a consistent set of storage services while preserving data resilience, security, and governance across bare metal, virtualized and containerized environments.  Some of the many benefits of the software defined portfolio available from IBM will include:

• A unified storage experience for all containerized apps running on Red Hat OpenShift: Customers can use IBM Spectrum Fusion (now with Red Hat OpenShift Data Foundation) to achieve the highest levels of performance, scale, automation, data protection, and data security for production applications running on OpenShift that require block, file, and/or object access to data. This enables development teams to focus on the apps, not the ops, with infrastructure-as-code designed for simplified, automated managing and provisioning.

• A consistent hybrid cloud experience at enterprise levels of scale and resiliency with IBM Ceph: Customers can deliver their private and hybrid cloud architectures on IBM's unified and software defined storage solution, providing capacity and management features. Capabilities include data protection, disaster recovery, high availability, security, auto-scaling, and self-healing portability, that are not tied to hardware, and travel with the data as it moves between on-premises and cloud environments.

• A single data lakehouse to aggregate and derive intelligence from unstructured data on IBM Spectrum Scale: Customers can address the challenges that often come with quickly scaling a centralized data approach with a single platform to support data-intensive workloads such as AI/ML, high performance computing, and others. Benefits can include less time and effort to administer, reduced data movement and redundancy, direct access to data for analytics tools, advanced schema management and data governance, all supported by distributed file and object storage engineered to be cost effective.

• Build in the cloud, deploy on-premises with automation: Customers can move developed applications from the cloud to on-premises services, automate the creation of staging environments to test deployment procedures, validate configuration changes, database schema and data updates, and ready package updates to overcome obstacles in production or correct errors before they become a problem that affects business operations.

"IBM and Red Hat speaking with one voice on storage is delivering the synergies derived from IBM's Red Hat acquisition," said Ashish Nadkarni, group vice president and general manager, Infrastructure Systems at IDC. "The combining of the two storage teams is a win for IT organizations as it brings together the best that both offer: An industry-leading storage systems portfolio meets an industry-leading software-defined data services offering. This initiative enables IBM and Red Hat to streamline their family of offerings, passing the benefits to their customers. It also helps accelerate innovation in storage to solve the data challenges for hybrid cloud, all while maintaining their commitment to open source."

Preserving commitment to Red Hat clients and the community

Under the agreement between IBM and Red Hat, IBM will assume Premier Sponsorship of the Ceph Foundation, whose members collaborate to drive innovation, development, marketing, and community events for the Ceph open-source project. IBM Ceph and Red Hat OpenShift Data Foundation will remain 100% open source and will continue to follow an upstream-first model, reinforcing IBM's commitment to these vital communities. Participation by the Ceph leadership team and other aspects of the open-source project is a key IBM priority to maintain and nurture ongoing Red Hat innovation.

Red Hat and IBM intend to complete the transition by January 1, 2023, which will involve the transfer of storage roadmaps and Red Hat associates to the IBM Storage business unit. Following this date, Red Hat OpenShift Platform Plus will continue to include OpenShift Data Foundation, sold by Red Hat and its partners. Additionally, Red Hat OpenStack customers will still be able to buy Red Hat Ceph Storage from Red Hat and its partners. Red Hat OpenShift and Red Hat OpenStack customers with existing subscriptions will be able to maintain and grow their storage footprints as needed, with no change in their Red Hat relationship.

Forthcoming IBM Ceph and IBM Spectrum Fusion storage solutions based on Ceph are expected to ship beginning in the first half of 2023.

Read more about today's news in this blog from Denis Kennelly, general manager of IBM Storage, IBM Systems: "IBM + Red Hat: Doubling Down on Hybrid Cloud Storage"

Statements regarding IBM's future direction and intent are subject to change or withdrawal without notice and represent goals and objectives only. Red Hat, Ceph, Gluster and OpenShift are trademarks or registered trademarks of Red Hat, Inc. or its subsidiaries in the U.S. and other countries.

About IBM 
IBM is a leading global hybrid cloud and AI, and business services provider, helping clients in more than 175 countries capitalize on insights from their data, streamline business processes, reduce costs and gain the competitive edge in their industries. Nearly 3,800 government and corporate entities in critical infrastructure areas such as financial services, telecommunications and healthcare rely on IBM's hybrid cloud platform and Red Hat OpenShift to affect their digital transformations quickly, efficiently, and securely. IBM's breakthrough innovations in AI, quantum computing, industry-specific cloud solutions and business services deliver open and flexible options to our clients. All of this is backed by IBM's legendary commitment to trust, transparency, responsibility, inclusivity, and service. For more information, visit www.ibm.com for more information.

Media Contacts: 
Ben Stricker, IBM 
ben.stricker@ibm.com

¹ Gartner, Market Guide for Hybrid Cloud Storage, Julia Palmer, Kevin Ji, Chandra Mukhyala, 3 October 2022

View original content to get multimedia:https://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/ibm-redefines-hybrid-cloud-application-and-data-storage-adding-red-hat-storage-to-ibm-offerings-301640078.html

SOURCE IBM

IDC Research hails the recently launched IBM Maximo Application Suite, which provides asset monitoring, maintenance and reliability applications in one single integrated platform, as a "bold move in the right direction for IBM". 

Read IDC's point of view on the new Maximo solution, with a particular focus on the flexibility of multi-cloud deployment as well as the new licensing model that helps businesses scale up by easily installing additional applications as needed. 

IBM announced it will add Red Hat storage product roadmaps and Red Hat associate teams to the IBM Storage business unit, bringing consistent application and data storage across on-premises infrastructure and cloud.

With the move, IBM will integrate the storage technologies from Red Hat OpenShift Data Foundation (ODF) as the foundation for IBM Spectrum Fusion. This combines IBM and Red Hat's container storage technologies for data services and helps accelerate IBM's capabilities in the burgeoning Kubernetes platform market.

In addition, IBM intends to offer new Ceph solutions delivering a unified and software defined storage platform that bridges the architectural divide between the data center and cloud providers. This further advances IBM's leadership in the software defined storage and Kubernetes platform markets, according to the vendor.

"Red Hat and IBM have been working closely for many years, and today's announcement enhances our partnership and streamlines our portfolios," said Denis Kennelly, general manager of IBM Storage, IBM Systems. "By bringing together the teams and integrating our products under one roof, we are accelerating the IBM's hybrid cloud storage strategy while maintaining commitments to Red Hat customers and the open-source community."

Benefits of the software defined portfolio available from IBM will include:

• A unified storage experience for all containerized apps running on Red Hat OpenShift: Customers can use IBM Spectrum Fusion (now with Red Hat OpenShift Data Foundation) to achieve the highest levels of performance, scale, automation, data protection, and data security for production applications running on OpenShift that require block, file, and/or object access to data. This enables development teams to focus on the apps, not the ops, with infrastructure-as-code designed for simplified, automated managing and provisioning.
• A consistent hybrid cloud experience at enterprise levels of scale and resiliency with IBM Ceph: Customers can deliver their private and hybrid cloud architectures on IBM's unified and software defined storage solution, providing capacity and management features. Capabilities include data protection, disaster recovery, high availability, security, auto-scaling, and self-healing portability, that are not tied to hardware, and travel with the data as it moves between on-premises and cloud environments.
• A single data lakehouse to aggregate and derive intelligence from unstructured data on IBM Spectrum Scale: Customers can address the challenges that often come with quickly scaling a centralized data approach with a single platform to support data-intensive workloads such as AI/ML, high performance computing, and others. Benefits can include less time and effort to administer, reduced data movement and redundancy, direct access to data for analytics tools, advanced schema management and data governance, all supported by distributed file and object storage engineered to be cost effective.
• Build in the cloud, deploy on-premises with automation: Customers can move developed applications from the cloud to on-premises services, automate the creation of staging environments to test deployment procedures, validate configuration changes, database schema and data updates, and ready package updates to overcome obstacles in production or correct errors before they become a problem that affects business operations.

"Red Hat and IBM have a shared belief in the mission of hybrid cloud-native storage and its potential to help customers transform their applications and data," said Joe Fernandes, vice president of hybrid platforms, Red Hat. "With IBM Storage taking stewardship of Red Hat Ceph Storage and OpenShift Data Foundation, IBM will help accelerate open-source storage innovation and expand the market opportunity beyond what each of us could deliver on our own. We believe this is a clear win for customers who can gain a more comprehensive platform with new hybrid cloud-native storage capabilities."

Under the agreement between IBM and Red Hat, IBM will assume Premier Sponsorship of the Ceph Foundation, whose members collaborate to drive innovation, development, marketing, and community events for the Ceph open-source project.

IBM Ceph and Red Hat OpenShift Data Foundation will remain 100% open source and will continue to follow an upstream-first model, reinforcing IBM's commitment to these vital communities, according to the company.

Red Hat and IBM intend to complete the transition by January 1, 2023, which will involve the transfer of storage roadmaps and Red Hat associates to the IBM Storage business unit.

Following this date, Red Hat OpenShift Platform Plus will continue to include OpenShift Data Foundation, sold by Red Hat and its partners.

Additionally, Red Hat OpenStack customers will still be able to buy Red Hat Ceph Storage from Red Hat and its partners. Red Hat OpenShift and Red Hat OpenStack customers with existing subscriptions will be able to maintain and grow their storage footprints as needed, with no change in their Red Hat relationship.

Forthcoming IBM Ceph and IBM Spectrum Fusion storage solutions based on Ceph are expected to ship beginning in the first half of 2023.

For more information about this news, visit www.ibm.com.

Amanda “Mandy” Long, most recently vice president of information technology automation at IBM (NYSE: IBM), has joined BigBear.ai (NYSE: BBAI) as CEO and a board member.

Long succeeds Reggie Brothers, who will stay as a company adviser and transition to the role of operating partner at BigBear’s private equity owner AE Industrial Partners, the Columbia, Maryland-based company said Tuesday.

Brothers, a two-time Wash100 Award winner, has led the analytics and cyber engineering services company since its founding in December 2020.

Peter Cannito, chairman of the board at BigBear.ai, said Long brings to the company her experience in mergers and acquisitions and software products and expertise in advancing the adoption of artificial intelligence platforms, building technology portfolios and driving revenue growth.

“With Mandy at the helm, we expect to accelerate BigBear.ai’s ability to bring AI-based products to both Commercial and Federal markets as the Company transitions from a premier services and solutions provider to a technology-led, multi-market leader in AI,” Cannito added.

Long spent five years at IBM and held roles of increasing responsibility, including VP of IBM integration and application platform, general manager for IBM Watson health provider analytics and chief product and strategy officer, AI for IBM Watson. She previously served as VP of product management at Modernizing Medicine and Experian Health.

The MarketWatch News Department was not involved in the creation of this content.

IBM Redefines Hybrid Cloud Application and Data Storage Adding Red Hat Storage to IBM Offerings

ARMONK, N.Y., Oct. 4, 2022

The MarketWatch News Department was not involved in the creation of this content.