IBM and Red Hat Collaborate to Accelerate Hybrid Cloud Adoption with OpenStack

Clients can quickly and easily extend on-premises workloads to Red Hat OpenStack Platform and Red Hat Ceph Storage on IBM Private Cloud

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IBM

Mar 20, 2017, 10:00 ET

LAS VEGAS, March 20, 2017 /PRNewswire/ -- IBM InterConnect -- IBM (NYSE: IBM) and Red Hat, Inc. (NYSE: RHT) today announced a strategic collaboration designed to help enterprises benefit from the OpenStack platform's speed and economics while more easily extending their existing Red Hat virtualized and cloud workloads to the IBM Private Cloud.

As part of this new collaboration, IBM has become a Red Hat Certified Cloud and Service Provider, giving clients greater confidence that they can use Red Hat OpenStack Platform and Red Hat Ceph Storage on IBM Private Cloud when the offering launches for general availability at the end of March 2017.

Additionally, as part of the agreement, Red Hat Cloud Access will be available for IBM Cloud by the end of Q2 2017, allowing Red Hat customers to move eligible, unused Red Hat 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."

Leading hybrid cloud application management company Cloudsoft is already using the service in beta and has deployed its Red Hat Enterprise Linux workloads in the IBM Private Cloud.

"Deploying our Cloudsoft Application Management Platform (AMP) on IBM Bluemix Private Cloud with Red Hat has been effortless for us," said Duncan Johnston-Watt, CEO of Cloudsoft Corporation. "We're getting cost and efficiency benefits of running on the public cloud with added security features, control and performance of a leading private cloud environment."

Additional key benefits that customers can expect from the joint offerings include:

IBM and Red Hat will provide the hybrid cloud infrastructure to help customers more efficiently run cloud applications using OpenStack APIs.
Clients will have the ability to more quickly provision cloud infrastructure and, via Red Hat Cloud Access, migrate existing workloads and Red Hat subscriptions to IBM Cloud or use the software and infrastructure on a pay-as-you-go basis.
Companies can have additional reach and scale to more easily start locally and scale globally with cloud capabilities and to more easily comply with data residency and other regulatory mandates.

IBM and Red Hat plan 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."

InterConnect is IBM's cloud and cognitive conference where more than 20,000 developers, clients and partners are being introduced to the latest advancements in cloud computing through 2,000 sessions, labs and certifications. IBM is positioning both enterprise and startup clients for success with a complete portfolio of cloud services and marquee partnerships, supporting a wide range of applications including: big data, analytics, blockchain and cognitive computing.

For more information, visit: https://www.ibm.com/cloud-computing/. For the IBM InterConnect Press Kit, visit: www.ibm.biz/IBMInterConnect2017. Engage in the conversation through @IBMCloud and #ibminterconnect.

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Red Hat is the world's leading provider of open source software solutions, using a community-powered approach to provide reliable and high-performing cloud, Linux, middleware, storage and virtualization technologies. Red Hat also offers award-winning support, training, and consulting services. As a connective hub in a global network of enterprises, partners, and open source communities, Red Hat helps create relevant, innovative technologies that liberate resources for growth and prepare customers for the future of IT. Learn more at http://www.redhat.com.

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Red Hat, Red Hat Enterprise Linux, the Shadowman logo and Ceph are trademarks or registered trademarks of Red Hat, Inc. or its subsidiaries in the U.S. and other countries. Linux® is the registered trademark of Linus Torvalds in the U.S. and other countries. The OpenStack Word Mark is either a registered trademark/service mark or trademark/service mark of the OpenStack Foundation, in the United States and other countries, and is used with the OpenStack Foundation's permission. Red Hat is not affiliated with, endorsed or sponsored by the OpenStack Foundation, or the OpenStack community.

Contacts:

Priya Ramesh
IBM Media Relations
(703) 674-9981
[email protected]

Stephanie Wonderlick
Red Hat Media Relations
(571) 421-8169
[email protected]

SOURCE IBM