Red Hat partners with IBM for easier access to hybrid cloud

IBM and Red Hat have joined forces to offer businesses greater choice when it comes to hybrid cloud, giving customers access to the benefits of the OpenStack platform while having the option to offload workloads to the IBM Cloud.

IBM has now become a Red Hat certified cloud service provider, which will allow customers to use the OpenStack platform, as well as Red Hat Ceph Storage, on the IBM Cloud when it launches for general availability at the end of March.

Radhesh Balakrishnan, general manager of OpenStack at Red Hat, said: "Our collaboration with IBM is aimed at helping enterprise customers more quickly and easily embrace hybrid cloud. Now customers, who don't have in-house expertise to manage an OpenStack infrastructure, can more confidently consume OpenStack Platform and Ceph Storage on IBM Private Cloud."

The new hybrid cloud infrastructure is designed to help enterprises run cloud applications more efficiently using OpenStack APIs. IBM is also offering a pay-as-you-go service for customers wishing to make use of IBM infrastructure ad-hoc.

The new agreement will also see Red Hat Cloud Access make its way to the IBM Cloud, scheduled for the end of Q2 2017. This, according to Red Hat, will allow customers to move unused Red Hat Enterprise Linux subscriptions from their own data centres to virtualised cloud environments found in IBM datacentres, providing an opportunity for businesses to scale globally. IBM recently introduced its fifty-first datacentre to China, which became its twentieth regional customer.

Zane Adam, VP of IBM Cloud, said: "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. 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."

IBM and Red Hat will jointly market the new capabilities for private cloud customers, which will also include disaster recovery services, opportunities for capacity expansion, and consolidation of data centres.

The new offerings are currently in a beta program, however they will be made available to the public generally by the end of the month.