IBM infused its storage with tighter integration for Red Hat OpenShift and CoreOS platforms. New additions to the IBM Storage Suite for Cloud Paks are designed to address block, file, and object storage as well data protection and disaster recovery.

While no one could’ve predicted what 2020 had in store, the Kubernetes and container train left the station long before pandemic’s arrival. In that vein, Chris Saul, director of product marketing for IBM Storage said the company is seeing “rapid growth in container deployment by our clients.”

“As they deploy containers, they need container-ready and container-native storage for Red Hat OpenShift and Kubernetes environments, but they also need to optimize their use of existing storage infrastructure since they will continue to use other platforms for many years,” Saul added.

According to Saul, IBM’s approach avoids “rip-and-replace” while proving “a comprehensive solution to hybrid cloud and container storage needs.”

Today’s announcement builds on a container storage journey that IBM began in 2017.

IBM Spectrum Scale, which creates large data lakes, now features a container client and runtime operator software, and it introduces container-native storage access for Red Hat OpenShift. This simplifies containerized applications’ access to data lakes on any Red Hat OpenShift cluster within IBM Storage Suite for Cloud Paks. 

Cloud Paks ties IBM’s legacy software portfolio into its acquired Red Hat assets and offers services that rely on Red Hat’s Kubernetes-based OpenShift a platform to use that software across any public or private cloud environment. It runs on Red Hat’s OpenShift and offers pre-integrated containerized packages conveniently called IBM Cloud Paks. 

The Cloud Paks tap into more than 100 IBM software products designed to run on OpenShift. They provide software support and help protect the entire stack so users can more easily migrate, integrate, and modernize their applications on any cloud like Amazon Web Services (AWS), Microsoft Azure, and Google Cloud Platform (GCP), and on private cloud deployments.

And since this is IBM, the company made these Cloud Paks available to work on its extensive bare metal portfolio, which includes its IBM Z and LinuxONE systems. OpenShift is already available on IBM’s Power Systems and Storage platforms.

IBM Spectrum Protect Plus, which uses snapshot technology to provide backup, recovery, and data management for virtual machines (VMs), will soon support containers, too. This will enable disaster recovery and data protection in Red Hat OpenShift environments using a container that can be deployed with Operator software. It will offer protection for metadata and offer data mobility and recovery. A beta version of IBM Spectrum Protect Plus will be available on Microsoft Azure Marketplace.

As organizations continue making accelerated leaps from largely on-premises environments to the cloud, systems administrators are turning their attention toward organizing and protecting data.

“Organizing data is a key part of the IBM AI journey,” Saul said. IBM’s existing container-native Spectrum Discover product automatically ingests and catalogs the data regardless of location and provides users with tools to organize it depending on the use case. It also has a policy engine to automate organization for analysis and data optimization. 

In addition, IBM Spectrum Scale extends its Spectrum Discover to support IBM Cloud Object Storage, Dell-EMC Isilon and PowerScale, NetApp. The update adds two new sources: Red Hat OpenShift Container Storage and IBM Cloud Digest Storage File Access.

With enterprises high-tailing it to the cloud, either using entirely cloud-native storage or a hybrid cloud strategy, it will require them to change their architectures to utilize object storage.

IBM Cloud Object Storage offers an integrated high-speed data upload option that allows rapid data transfer for huge amounts of data moving to and from the cloud. It now includes support for the open source S3fs file to object storage interface bundled with Red Hat OpenShift.

The latest quarter witnessed IBM’s Red Hat operations division post a 17% year-over-year increase in revenues, which helped IBM’s overall cloud revenues surge 19% to $6 billion in the latest quarter.

That Red Hat growth was also the center of IBM’s decision earlier this month to spin off its legacy services business so that it could continue CEO Arvind Krishna’s mission of re-focusing IBM on its hybrid cloud operations. That move will see IBM’s Managed Infrastructure Services and Global Technology Services (GTS) business units deposited into their own public company currently dubbed “NewCo.”

“As our CEO has expressed, we are completely focused as a company on accelerating our growth strategy and seizing the $1 trillion hybrid cloud opportunity,” Saul said. “The NewCo announcement was a strategic move aimed to help IBM sharpen our focus on our open hybrid cloud platform and AI capabilities. Our advancements across the IBM Storage portfolio further solidifies our commitment to the hybrid cloud, Red Hat OpenShift, and helping our clients unlock the value of the hybrid cloud through infrastructure designed for their container needs.”