Red Hat OpenShift now available for IBM and LinuxONE

Red Hat OpenShift Container Platform is generally available for IBM Z® and IBM LinuxONE™.

“Containers are the next generation of software-defined compute that enterprises will leverage to accelerate their digital transformation initiatives,” says Gary Chen, Research Director at IDC. “IDC estimates that 71% of organizations are in the process of implementing containers and orchestration or are already using them regularly, and IDC forecasts that the worldwide container infrastructure software opportunity is growing at a 63.9% 5- year CAGR and is predicted to reach over $1.5B by 2022.”

The availability of OpenShift for Z and LinuxONE is a major milestone for both hybrid multi-cloud and for enterprise computing. OpenShift supports cloud-native applications being built once and deployed anywhere - and now extends this to on-premises enterprise servers such as IBM Z and LinuxONE. This offering is the result of the collaboration between the IBM and Red Hat development teams and discussions with early adopter clients.

Build once

Organizations are looking to bring business innovation to market faster and more efficiently. Containers enable applications to be packaged together with their software dependencies, and Kubernetes adds powerful tools to manage large numbers of containers and orchestrate the full application lifecycle.

OpenShift then brings together the core open source technologies of Linux, containers and Kubernetes, adds additional open-source capabilities such as developer tools and a registry, and hardens, tests and optimizes the software for enterprise production use.

Working with IBM Hybrid Cloud, we have also developed a robust roadmap for bringing the ecosystem of enterprise software to the OpenShift platform. IBM Cloud Paks containerize key IBM and open-source software components to help enable faster enterprise application development and delivery.

Today we are also announcing that IBM Cloud Pak for Applications is available for IBM Z and LinuxONE – supporting modernization of existing apps and building new cloud-native apps. In addition, as announced last August, it is our intention to deliver additional Cloud Paks for IBM Z and LinuxONE.

Deploy anywhere

By combining the agility and portability of Red Hat OpenShift and IBM Cloud Paks with the security features, scalability and reliability of IBM Z and LinuxONE, businesses will have the tools to build new cloud-native applications while also modernizing current applications. Deploying Red Hat OpenShift and IBM Cloud Paks on IBM Z and LinuxONE reinforces key strengths and offers additional benefits:

• Vertical scalability enables existing large monolithic applications to be containerized, and horizontal scalability enables support for large numbers of containers in a single IBM Z or LinuxONE system
• Designed to protect data from external attacks and insider threats, with pervasive encryption and tamper-responsive protection of encryption keys1
• Designed for 99.999% and more availability to meet service levels and customer expectations
• Integration and co-location of cloud-native applications on the same system as the data enables faster response times than depending on network access speeds

IBM z/OS Cloud Broker helps enable OpenShift applications to interact with data and applications on IBM Z. IBM z/OS Cloud Broker is the first software product to provide access to z/OS services by the broader development community.

Customers using OpenShift on IBM Z and LinuxONE can also license IBM Cloud Infrastructure Center to manage the underpinning cluster infrastructure. The Cloud Infrastructure Center is an infrastructure-as-a-service offering that provides simplified infrastructure management in support of z/VM based Linux virtual machines on IBM Z and LinuxONE.

To support this important release, IBM has organized a range of resources:

• Two announcement webcasts, including speakers from IDC, Red Hat, and IBM, on March 5 for IBM Z customers, and on March 17 for the wider Linux community
• An IBM-sponsored IDC white paper: Transforming a Corporate Datacenter into a Modern Environment: Kubernetes as a Foundation for Hybrid Cloud
• An IBM Systems Magazine article: Red Hat OpenShift, IBM Cloud Paks and more facilitate digital transformation