We are excited to share the news: IBM and Red Hat are planning to deliver Red Hat OpenShift Container Platform for IBM Z and IBM LinuxONE in early first quarter 2020.

This brings together the industry’s most comprehensive enterprise container and Kubernetes platform with the enterprise server platforms of IBM Z and LinuxONE, combining cloud native application development and deployment with a highly secure, scalable and resilient server infrastructure.

The combination of Red Hat OpenShift and IBM enterprise servers will enable IBM Z and LinuxONE to be full participants in the hybrid multicloud world.

Red Hat OpenShift on IBM Z and LinuxONE

Back in August, Ross Mauri announced our direction for Red Hat OpenShift for IBM Z and LinuxONE in a blog post.

Since then, the IBM and Red Hat teams have been working together to help realize the dream of providing a flexible, open, hybrid multicloud platform for mission-critical workloads building on containers and Kubernetes.

This will help enable our joint clients to develop, deploy and manage cloud native applications faster and more efficiently, modernize applications using containers to achieve greater portability and agility, and integrate cloud native applications with existing data and applications to accelerate business insights.

Why Red Hat OpenShift?

OpenShift brings together the core open source components of Linux, containers and Kubernetes. It adds additional capabilities such as a registry and developer tools and optimizes the software for enterprise use.

Red Hat OpenShift is also available across the hybrid multicloud, including Microsoft Azure, Google Cloud, and Amazon Web Services in addition to the IBM Cloud and on-premises data centers.

In May, Red Hat announced that more than 1,000 customers are using Red Hat OpenShift Container Platform, solidifying Red Hat as a hybrid cloud and enterprise Kubernetes leader.

Why IBM Z and LinuxONE?

IBM Z and LinuxONE offers on-demand compute with horizontal scalability that can grow to thousands of Linux guests and millions of containers, and vertical scalability that can non-disruptively grow databases without requiring any partitioning or sharding while maintaining response times and throughput.

In addition, IBM Z and LinuxONE provide advanced security for confidential cloud computing, including FIPS 140-2 Level 4 certification. IBM Linux on Z hyper protect technology is used in the IBM Cloud for blockchain and HyperProtect-as-a-service offerings, enabling programmatically enforced data privacy in a public cloud setting.

Why Red Hat OpenShift on IBM Z and LinuxONE?

OpenShift on IBM Z and LinuxONE takes advantage of the underlying enterprise capabilities of the IBM Z and LinuxONE server platforms, including advanced security, vertical and horizontal scalability, and 99.999% availability. These capabilities were highlighted with the recent announcement of the IBM z15 and IBM LinuxONE III.

Running Red Hat OpenShift on IBM Z and LinuxONE also enables cloud native applications to easily integrate with existing data and applications running on these platforms, enabling latency to be reduced by avoiding network delays.

IBM Cloud Paks and Red Hat OpenShift

IBM Cloud Paks build on Red Hat OpenShift to deliver containerized offerings which bring together IBM and open source software for various workloads such as data, application development, and multicloud management.

In August, IBM announced that they are planning to bring IBM Cloud Paks to IBM Z and LinuxONE.

New IDC white paper about containers, Kubernetes, and IBM Z and LinuxONE

IBM asked IDC to explain the benefits of running containers and Kubernetes on IBM Z and LinuxONE, and the result is the sponsored IDC white paper “Transforming a Corporate Datacenter into a Modern Environment: Kubernetes as a Foundation for Hybrid Cloud”.

The IDC white paper reviews the cloud marketplace and provides an introduction to containers and Kubernetes, then moving on to discuss multi-architecture containers, application portability, Red Hat OpenShift and IBM Cloud Paks.

Summary

As organizations accelerate their digital transformation, there is a need for a cloud native development and deployment platform that spans across the hybrid multicloud. Red Hat OpenShift for IBM Z and LinuxONE is able to take advantage of IBM enterprise servers built for running mission-critical workloads.

With the planned availability of Red Hat OpenShift for IBM Z and LinuxONE in early first quarter 2020, we look forward to working with our customers and business partners to make the first deployments a reality.

Discover more here about the hybrid multicloud with Red Hat OpenShift, IBM Z, and IBM LinuxONE.