IBM announced a “milestone” of its Red Hat integration that will transfer the Red Hat storage portfolio and its associated teams to IBM storage, including Red Hat Ceph Storage, OpenShift Data Foundation (ODF), Rook, and NooBaa. The move aims to build a stronger software-defined storage portfolio for hybrid-cloud needs.

After closing the $34 billion acquisition in 2019, IBM continues to integrate the open source provider’s Kubernetes-based OpenShift platform. The company has standardized on Red Hat OpenShift as its hybrid cloud platform and modernized its software portfolio to run on the platform, IBM CFO Jim Kavanaugh noted in an earlier earnings call. 

Now, IBM took another step to combine the container storage technologies by weaving the Red Hat OpenShift Data Foundation (ODF) into IBM Spectrum Fusion, which the company claims will accelerate its data service development in the Kubernetes platform market.

In addition, IBM also will assume premier sponsorship of the Ceph Foundation. Red Hat Ceph Storage will now become IBM Ceph, a software-defined storage platform that brings consistent application and data storage across hybrid cloud environments, according to IBM. 

“Our clients are rapidly embracing a hybrid cloud strategy, and one of the key linchpins of a successful hybrid cloud deployment is uniform access to data,” IBM Storage GM Denis Kennelly wrote in a blog post. 

“Red Hat Ceph Storage is tightly integrated with Red Hat OpenStack Platform, and it’s at the core of OpenShift Data Foundation, with many clients today running Rook as the Ceph operator,” he explained. “Ceph runs securely anywhere OpenShift runs on-premises and in the cloud, simplifying operations with tremendous scale and speeding time to market for application developers.”

That means the Red Hat storage transition will help IBM quicken its hybrid and multi-cloud deployments, Kennelly claims. 

Rook is a Kubernetes-native automated support platform for deploying, packaging, and expanding storage on Red Hat’s OpenShift. Red Hat introduced the Rook-Ceph Operator in early 2019. NooBaa provides a hybrid cloud data management service which was acquired by Red Hat in 2018. 

IBM intends to complete the transition by January 1, 2023, and expects no impact on how customers consume the products. IBM Ceph and IBM Spectrum Fusion storage services based on Ceph are forecasted to ship starting in the first half of 2023.

The company emphasized that the Ceph and Red Hat OpenShift Data Foundation will remain open source.