Today we are pleased to announce that Red Hat OpenShift Container Platform is generally available for IBM Z® and IBM LinuxONE™. Red Hat is a leader in hybrid cloud and enterprise Kubernetes, with more than 1,000 customers already using Red Hat OpenShift Container Platform. With the availability of OpenShift for IBM Z and LinuxONE, the agile cloud-native world of containers and Kubernetes is now reinforced by the security features, scalability and reliability of IBM’s enterprise servers.

“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 multicloud 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 today 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 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.

Learn more about developing applications for OpenShift in this blog post by Chief Developer Advocate Willie Tejada.

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 keys 1

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 which provides simplified infrastructure management in support of z/VM based Linux virtual machines on IBM Z and LinuxONE.

Stay tuned for more info

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

Stay tuned for many more discussions about the enterprise hybrid multicloud with Red Hat OpenShift and IBM Cloud Paks for IBM Z and IBM LinuxONE at a series of events during the first half of 2020, including SHARE, Red Hat Summit, and IBM Think.

We think this is an exciting time for both enterprise computing and hybrid multicloud as they come together with Red Hat OpenShift on IBM Z and LinuxONE.

1 Source: “Enabling pervasive encryption through IBM Z stack innovations”, IBM Journal of Research and Development, Vol 62, No 2/3, Paper 2, March/May 2018