Big Blue’s Red Hat shift towards containers

Redshift and blueshift astronomical diagram

A red shift for astronomers occurs when light from distant objects shifts from the blue side of the spectrum towards the red end. That’s happening with Big Blue as its Spectrum storage products tilt towards Red Hat, the company it bought last year.

IBM Storage yesterday took the wraps off a storage software family for Red Hat OpenShift (RHOS). It also proclaimed its intention to deliver a software-defined, container-native, storage solution for Red Hat OpenShift and Kubernetes container environments. This could take two years to develop.

Eric Herzog

Eric Herzog, IBM CMO and VP for w-w storage channels, blogged: “With container-native offerings for block, file, object, modern data protection and data discovery, IBM Storage is designed to help simplify storage for hybrid cloud and container deployments.”

Shift to OpenShift

There are seven Red Hat OpenShift product announcements. What we see here are IBM’s storage software products adding full support for containerisation via the Red Hat OpenShift environment. Big Blue is using its Red Hat shift to drive deeper into enterprise containerisation developments.

  • Spectrum Scale adds containerised client and run-time operators on Red Hat OpenShift.
  • Storage Suite for Cloud Paks adds more support for container-native data access on Red Hat OpenShift.
  • IBM Cloud Object Storage adds support for the open source s3fs file to object storage interface bundled with Red Hat OpenShift.
  • Spectrum Protect Plus gets expanded container-native and container-ready storage support.
  • Spectrum Protect Plus server can be deployed as a container using a certified Red Hat OpenShift operator in 4Q 2020, with ability to protect metadata so as to recover applications, namespaces, and clusters to a different location. 
  • Spectrum Discover support for Red Hat OpenShift Container Storage (OCS).
  • Hybrid Cloud business continuity blueprint for the Red Hat OpenShift Container Platform (OCP) so OCP containerised applications can migrate with persistent storage between on-premises and public cloud for disaster recovery and workload migration scenarios.