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The news from IBM InterConnect keep on coming, with Big Blue announcing a strategic partnership with Red Hat at the event in Las Vegas.
Dubbed a ‘strategic collaboration’, the two companies will work to help enterprise clients extend on-premises workloads to Red Hat OpenStack Platform and Red Hat Ceph Storage on IBM Private Cloud.
The hope is that this tie-up will help clients to realise the speed and economic benefits of OpenStack, while also extending their existing Red Hat virtualized and cloud workloads to the IBM Private Cloud. Adding the rubber stamp of approval, while also seeking to boost customer confidence, IBM has been named a Red Hat Certified Cloud and Service Provider as part of the deal.
A second offering resulting from the tie-up will be the Q2 2017 launch of Red Hat Cloud Access for IBM Cloud. This will give Red Hat customers the ability to move eligible, unused Enterprise Linux subscriptions from their data center to a public, virtualized cloud environment in IBM Cloud Data Centers worldwide. This enables companies to better preserve and extend their Red Hat software investments while providing the global scale and efficiency of IBM Cloud.
“Our collaboration with IBM is aimed at helping enterprise customers more quickly and easily embrace hybrid cloud,” said Radhesh Balakrishnan, General Manager of OpenStack, Red Hat. “Now, customers who don’t have in-house expertise to manage an OpenStack infrastructure can more confidently consume Red Hat OpenStack Platform and Red Hat Ceph Storage on IBM Private Cloud.”
While the Red Hat Cloud Access for IBM Cloud is set for launch in Q2, Red Hat OpenStack Platform and Red Hat Ceph Storage on IBM Private Cloud will be available at the end of March 2017. The plan is for both companies to jointly market and sell the new offerings for private cloud deployments, including workload migrations, disaster recovery, capacity expansion and data center consolidation.
“A cloud-first strategy has become the new normal for a majority of our enterprise clients worldwide who are leveraging IBM Cloud as a key driver for digital transformation,” said Zane Adam, vice president, IBM Cloud.
“The strategic collaboration between IBM and Red Hat is designed to enable clients to more easily adopt open source products and OpenStack cloud software while preserving their existing investments and creating new business opportunities.”
The Red Hat partnership has been one in a long line of announcements made by the tech giant at it’s InterConnect event in Las Vegas. In a morning geared towards the FS market segment, IBM announced new developer tools for Financial Services, as well as blockchain as a service on Hyperledger Fabric.
Working with SecureKey Technologies, IBM will deliver a network for attribute sharing and digital identity based on IBM Blockchain Hyperledger Fabric.
The central goal of the project is to make the process of consumer verification easier and more efficient, while also enhancing privacy and security.