IBM’s new partnering announcements are focused on expanding opportunities for other vendors’ customers to use the IBM cloud.
Today, at its IBM InterConnect event in Las Vegas on cloud and cognitive computing, IBM announced a series of significant partnering arrangements with other major vendors. A new strategic collaboration with Red Hat will more easily extend Red Hat virtualized and cloud workloads in the IBM Private Cloud, backed by the two companies’ joint marketing and sales. Another collaboration with Veritas Technologies sees both companies extend their existing relationship by certifying Veritas NetBackup 8.0 for the IBM cloud. Here too, both companies are committing to joint go-to-market and support around the initiative. Finally, IBM announced an expansion of their long-standing partnership with NetApp, with native support for IBM Cloud Object Storage into NetApp’s AltaVault cloud-integrated backup solutions.
The new collaboration with Red Hat sees IBM become a Red Hat Certified Cloud and Service Provider. This is timed to give clients greater confidence that they will be able to use Red Hat OpenStack Platform and Red Hat Ceph Storage on IBM Private Cloud, when the latter reaches general availability at the end of the month, and is aimed in particular at customers who lack the in-house expertise to manage an OpenStack infrastructure. The agreement will also make Red Hat Cloud Access available for IBM Cloud by the end of Q2 2017. This will give Red Hat customers the option of moving eligible, unused Red Hat Enterprise Linux subscriptions from their data center to IBM’s cloud.
“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 and creating new business opportunities, said Zane Adam, vice president, IBM Cloud.”
The two companies will jointly market and sell the new offerings for private cloud deployments, including workload migrations, disaster recovery, capacity expansion and data center consolidation.
IBM and Veritas are long-time partners, and joint adopters of one another’s technology. This new announcement sees Veritas certify the IBM Cloud Object Storage family of software and cloud services for use with the forthcoming Veritas NetBackup 8.0. In turn, IBM has certified NetBackup 8.0 to run on the IBM Cloud, to offer clients additional data protection for cloud-based workloads. NetBackup 8.0 has scheduled availability of 2Q17. It will be available for order from the IBM Bluemix Catalog of services. The agreement also calls for joint go-to-market and support initiatives from both companies.
“This agreement will provide our respective global clients with greater control of their data and greater management capabilities through the cloud,” said John Morris, General Manager, Cloud Object Storage, IBM. “Veritas is a great example of a company using IBM Cloud to innovate for both its business and its clients.”
IBM’s agreement with NetApp expands that long-time partnership with new capabilities that allow NetApp customers to take advantage of the IBM Cloud. NetApp’s AltaVault cloud backup solutions will now automatically be able to send backups to IBM Cloud Object Storage on IBM Cloud. Incorporating native support for IBM Cloud Object Storage into AltaVault solutions allows NetApp users to deploy backup data to the IBM Cloud. As part of the agreement, NetApp will offer backup and archival solutions that integrate with IBM Cloud Object Storage.
“Our expanded partnership with IBM provides NetApp customers with new ways to take advantage of elastic cloud economics using IBM Cloud,” said Henri Richard, executive vice president, Worldwide Field and Customer Operations, NetApp. “These new solutions further the progress of our Data Fabric strategy and strengthen our leadership in helping customers seamlessly manage their data in the hybrid cloud era.”
