When IBM acquired Red Hat in Q3 of this year, it was very clear to IT leaders why IBM did this and what new synergies the two companies were going to create. Over the last 20 years, IBM has invested heavily in application infrastructure starting with large acquisitions like Tivoli in 1996.dwv

IBM software like WebSphere, DB2, Netcool, and Maximo power the world’s largest enterprises. Over the last 5 years, the adoption of containers, orchestration, microservices, and DevOps methodology has formed the basis of enterprise digital transformation. The modern IoT and mobile connected world requires enterprises to create digital products that are secure, always available, scale, and constantly offer new features.

Many CIOs are now finding themselves caught between two initiatives, modernizing their existing mission critical IBM based applications and developing net new applications for a digital economy. Infrastructure platforms designed 10 years ago using static virtualization for monolithic applications simply can’t keep up. 

To help customers with their DevOps transition, IBM introduced IBM BlueMix in 2014 as a way for developers to quickly build applications by taking advantage of orchestrated and containerized IBM and open source runtimes. This gave IBM customers their first scalable way to leverage DevOps application development using IBM technology. 

To further the Bluemix innovation,  IBM introduced IBM Cloud Private in October 2017 as a way for customers to have all the features of BlueMix, but with the flexibility of choosing a hybrid on premise and public cloud hybrid architecture based on security and regulatory requirements.  

The final innovation IBM made prior to the Red Hat acquisition was the development of Cloud Paks in 2019. While IBM has always offered a library of trusted container versions applications, Cloud Paks are preconfigured bundles of trusted containers that enable developers to deploy all the required software and runtimes to develop specific sets of applications. Developers no longer have to build their environments and solve for missing dependencies. Current Cloud Pak offerings are organized by function: applications, data, integration and multi-cloud management. 

IBM’s acquisition of Red Hat further demonstrated foresight and strategic thinking. The Red Hat acquisition provided IBM with OpenShift, Ansible, and JBoss. These 3 technologies form the core of what is becoming the most popular DevOps enabled hybrid cloud infrastructure for the Fortune 2000. When coupled with SoftLayer, IBM customers truly have unlimited options on how to deploy their next generation digital products. 

By offering best of breed trusted applications from IBM and cloud infrastructure from Red Hat, enterprise IBM customers can now move massive workloads quickly and efficiently to a cloud platform at scale. 

The following are 3 considerations to migrate to IBM Cloud Private on OpenShift. 

Migrate Legacy IBM Based Applications 

Many enterprises still run Java applications powered by WebSphere and DB2 on bare metal or virtualized instances. These are large workload footprints that are so mission critical, that it is very difficult for a CIO to even consider moving them. The issue is that these workloads have outgrown their footprint. Adding more infrastructure takes weeks, and supporting hardware and operating systems are at end-of-life (EOL).

By moving to IBM Cloud Private on OpenShift, CIOs can eliminate the hardware constraints of bare metal and hypervisors and the EOL risk of software versions. By leveraging OpenShift, CIOs have the most powerful workload orchestration tools powered by Kubernetes. Workloads can be distributed between datacenters and clouds. Workloads can also scale on demand as applications grow. Through the publishing of certified applications in Cloud Paks, CIOs can get access to IBM software in containers, eliminating the need to manage both application and OS versioning. Coupled with some microservices refactoring, CIOs can safely and effectively move their legacy apps into the cloud and future proof their initial investment for years to come. 

Develop New IBM Based Applications

It is hard for traditional enterprise IT to provide a broad array of tools that modern developers need to build applications at speed. Often times, this leads to developers building their own development systems, exposing all kinds of security risks via shadow IT. In addition, many of the applications built on these shadow systems can’t ever get promoted to production because their software content is not authorized. 

By moving to IBM Cloud Private on OpenShift and along with some DevOps enabled CI/CD best practices, CIOs can rapidly provide developers certified development environments running best of breed IBM, Red Hat, and OpenSource software. For example, the IBM Cloud Pak for Data enables developers access to popular open source analytics tools like Jupyter Notebook Server, Python 2.7, MongoDB, alongside Watson Machine Learning. 

Provide Multi-Layer End to End Security

There is a misconception held by some CIOs that container based applications are not secure. This is simply not true. Container and orchestration architectures are built from the ground up to solve all of the security problems that have plagued IT for the last 20 years. IBM Cloud Private on OpenShift is no exception. By leveraging content from certified catalogues, scanning registries and images using OpenShift’s Clair and Quay tools and IBMs time tested IAM tools, CIOs can be assured that only authorized software content can execute and users accessing that software content have the right permissions relative to their role. 

Next Steps

IBM has been an early adopter in the DevOps-fueled digital transformation that modern enterprises are implementing. By providing containers and orchestration early via BlueMix and then layering on Softlayer, Cloud Private, Cloud Paks, and OpenShift, CIOs running enterprise IBM shops now have all of the development tools and deployment options to create the digital solutions their customers demand. 

If you are overwhelmed by both the need to migrate your legacy workloads and the broad array of cloud options, then we’re here to help. Stone Door Group offers the IBM Cloud Private for OpenShift Accelerator. This comprehensive solutions offering provides the software, solutions engineering, implementation, and training to help enterprises start their digital transformation journey. 

About the Author

Darren Hoch is a Managing Partner for Stone Door Group, an IBM and Red Hat Apex partner, that specializes in enterprise DevOps cloud engineering solutions. He is the principal architect of the IBM Cloud Private for OpenShift Accelerator. 

Stone Door Group helps enterprises of all sizes with their digital transformation initiatives. To talk to Darren and learn more how Stone Door Group can help, drop us a line at: letsdothis@stonedoorgroup.com