Today, IBM announced that the Red Hat and IBM Storage businesses are coming together as a single group within IBM. By combining our mission, teams and technologies, we will be able to more fully harness our strengths to grow this business further and faster, accelerate innovation in cloud-native software-defined storage, drive new capabilities for IBM and Red Hat customers, and position IBM to compete as a leader in the Enterprise Storage System & Hybrid Cloud Storage Software market.
Moving forward, this group will be responsible for the development and delivery of Red Hat OpenShift Data Foundation and Red Hat Ceph Storage, and derivative cloud services offerings. Red Hat OpenShift Data Foundation and Red Hat Ceph Storage have roots in the upstream Rook, and Ceph open source communities, where Red Hat has been a key contributor for a number of years, and also includes the multi-cloud gateway from Red Hat’s prior acquisition of NooBaa. We believe it’s important that these efforts continue. They will remain open source and IBM has committed to shepherding and continuing a strong connection to the Rook and Ceph communities after the transition.
Existing customers will see no change to their experience. Red Hat will continue to sell and support Red Hat OpenShift Data Foundation and Red Hat Ceph Storage with Red Hat platforms as we always have for the last several years to ensure customers maintain continuity and can better experience the benefits of this transition. The technologies will continue to serve as the integrated storage solutions for Red Hat OpenShift Container Platform and Red Hat OpenStack Platform, respectively, and Red Hat OpenShift Platform Plus will continue to include Red Hat OpenShift Data Foundation Essentials. In addition, Red Hat OpenShift Data Foundation will become the primary data services layer for IBM Spectrum Fusion software deployments in hybrid and public cloud environments. This combination offers customers a consistent set of storage services for applications on Red Hat OpenShift, regardless of whether they are running on-premises or on public clouds.
We believe the future of IT is hybrid and see this reality every day as these environments become the norm for many organizations, particularly as a catalyst for digital transformation. In turn, the adoption of hybrid cloud strategies is driving growth in the storage software market where the flexibility of cloud-native architectures enables organizations to deliver their applications and data when, where and how the business needs them. Industry analyst firm IDC underscores this shift, predicting in 2021 that "85% of organizations will use software and cloud-based infrastructure to create a 35% increase in sustainable efficiencies across workloads and datacenters by 2025."1
Looking ahead, we're excited about the opportunity and the role that these technologies will continue to play in enabling transformative capabilities in our customers.
View the Red Hat Storage strategy update FAQ
1 Source: IDC FutureScape: Worldwide Cloud 2022 Predictions (October 2021, Doc #US47241821)
About the author
Ashesh Badani is Senior Vice President and Chief Product Officer at Red Hat. In this role, he is responsible for the company’s overall product portfolio and business unit groups, including product strategy, business planning, product management, marketing, and operations across on-premise, public cloud, and edge. His product responsibilities include Red Hat® Enterprise Linux®, Red Hat OpenShift®, Red Hat Ansible Automation, developer tools, and middleware, as well as emerging cloud services and experiences.
Previously, Badani was Senior Vice President of Cloud Platforms, where he helped solidify the company as a hybrid cloud and enterprise Kubernetes leader. Under his leadership, Red Hat has also expanded OpenShift from an award-winning Platform-as-a-Service solution to the industry’s leading enterprise Kubernetes platform, with 1,000+ customers spanning all regions and industries. Badani started at Red Hat overseeing product line management and marketing for the Red Hat JBoss® Enterprise Application Platform middleware portfolio.
Badani has played a significant role around strategy, analysis, and integration for key Red Hat acquisitions—including StackRox in 2021, CoreOS in 2018, and FuseSource in 2012—to bolster the company’s integration portfolio.
Prior to joining Red Hat, Badani served as Director of Product Management and Product Marketing of Integration and Application Platform Products at Sun Microsystems. He has more than 20 years of experience in the technology and finance industries at both established and emerging companies.
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