In early July, IBM and Red Hat officially closed their most significant acquisition of 2019–an important milestone combining the power and flexibility of Red Hat’s open hybrid portfolio and IBM’s technology and deep industry expertise.

The feedback from our clients and partners is clear. A recent IBM report found that 80 percent want solutions that support hybrid cloud, including containers and orchestration. Today IBM is announcing plans to bring Red Hat OpenShift and IBM Cloud Paks to the IBM Z and LinuxONE enterprise platforms*. Together these two platforms power about 30 billion transactions a day globally. Our goal is for you to harness the scalability and security of IBM Z and LinuxONE alongside the flexibility to run, build, manage and modernize cloud-native workloads on your choice of architecture.

For more than 20 years, IBM Systems and Red Hat have worked to drive open source systems innovation, make Linux enterprise-grade, and help joint customers like MetOffice and Techcombank with mission-critical workloads to build, deploy and manage next-gen apps and protect data through advanced security.

Today, IBM supports Red Hat Enterprise Linux on IBM Power Systems, IBM Z and LinuxONE, as well as Red Hat OpenShift on IBM POWER. IBM will also support Red Hat OpenShift and Red Hat OpenShift Container Storage across IBM’s all-flash and software-defined storage portfolio.

The combination of Red Hat OpenShift with IBM Z and LinuxONE reflects our shared values: to provide a flexible, open, hybrid, multicloud and secured enterprise platform for mission-critical workloads.

Our goal for Red Hat OpenShift for IBM Z and LinuxONE will be to help clients enable greater agility and portability through integrated tooling and a feature-rich ecosystem for cloud-native development to:

Deliver containerized applications that can scale vertically and horizontally;

Accelerate deployment and orchestration of containers with Kubernetes;

Help IT to support rapid business growth;

Optimize workloads to take advantage of pervasive encryption; and

Increase container density that can make systems management easier which should help reduce total cost of ownership.

“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 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.”

This is also exciting news for our business partners and ecosystems. This offering will provide an enterprise platform for hybrid multicloud that can help ISVs and others develop the next generation of applications. They will have the benefit of flexibility of a microservices-based architecture to deploy containers on infrastructure of their choice. For ISVs not currently running on Red Hat Enterprise Linux on IBM Z and LinuxONE enterprise platforms, this is an opportunity to bring your software to these two platforms, where the most critical workloads are run.

For more information, please visit www.ibm.com/linuxone and www.ibm.com/redhat, or contact your local IBM sales representative.

*Offerings not yet available in Brazil.

[1] (IBM Sponsored Primary Research, MD&I Systems and Cloud NDB 2019)

[2] https://www-03.ibm.com/press/uk/en/pressrelease/52824.wss