IBM continued its Red Hat and open-source integration work this week by adding Red Hat OpenShift support to its blockchain platform and bringing a Kubernetes Operator for Apache CouchDB along side its hybrid-cloud services offering.
The ability to deploy IBM Blockchain on Red Hat OpenShift, the company’s flagship enterprise Kubernetes platform, means IBM Blockchain developers will have the ability to deploy secure software, either on-premises, in public clouds or in hybrid cloud architectures.
Blockchain is a distributed database that maintains a continually growing list of records that can be verified using hashing techniques, and the IBM Blockchain Platform includes tools to build, operate, govern and grow protected blockchain networks.
IBM says its blockchain/OpenShift combination is targeted at companies that want to keep a copy of the blockchain ledger and run workloads on their own infrastructure for security, risk mitigation or compliance; need to store data in specific locations to meet data-residency requirements; and need to deploy blockchain components in multiple cloud or hybrid-cloud architectures.
Since finalising its acquisition of Red Hat in July, IBM has been assembling an ecosystem of cloud development around Red Hat’s Kubernetes-based OpenShift Container Platform.
Most recently Big Blue fused its new z15 mainframe with IBM’s Red Hat technology saying it will deliver IBM z/OS Cloud Broker for the Red Hat OpenShift container platform. This offering will provide direct, self-service access of z/OS computing resources to users through connectivity to Kubernetes containers.
IBM said it intends to deliver IBM Cloud Pak offerings to Linux on IBM z and LinuxONE offerings. Cloud Paks are bundles made up of Open-Shift with more than 100 other IBM software products. LinuxONE is IBM’s highly successful mainframe system designed specifically to support Linux environments.
The vision is for OpenShift-enabled IBM software to become the foundational building blocks customers use to transform their organisations, IBM said.
“Most of our customers want solutions that support hybrid-cloud workloads and the flexibility to run those workloads anywhere, and z/OS Cloud Broker for Red Hat will be the central point for how we enable cloud-native on the platform,” IBM said.
In related news IBM announced support for the open source Apache CouchDB, a Kubernetes Operator for Apache CouchDB and that the Operator has been certified to work with Red Hat OpenShift.
The Operator automates deploying, managing and maintaining Apache CouchDB deployments. Apache CouchDB is a non-relational, open-source NoSQL database.
In a recent Forrester Wave report, researchers said, “Enterprises like NoSQL's ability to scale out using low-cost servers and a flexible, seamless model that can store, process and access any type of business data.
"NoSQL platforms give enterprise architecture pros greater control over data storage and processing, along with a configuration that accelerates application deployments. While many organisations are complementing their relational databases with NoSQL, some have started to replace them to support improved performance, scale and lower their database costs."
Currently IBM Cloud uses the Cloudant Db service as its standard database for new cloud-native applications. Bolstering support for the CouchDB gives users alternatives and back-up options, IBM said.
And being able to tie it all into Red Hat OpenShift Kubernetes deployments can let customers use database-native replication capabilities to maintain low-latency access to data as they deploy applications and move data across multiple cloud environments, IBM stated.
“Our clients are turning to containerisation and micro-service-oriented architectures to improve speed, agility and operational capabilities. In cloud-native application development, applications need to have a data layer that allows for scalability, portability and resiliency,” wrote Adam Kocoloski, IBM Fellow and Vice President, Cloud Databases.
“We believe that data portability and CouchDB significantly improve the capabilities of multi-cloud architectures, allowing customers to build solutions that are truly portable across private clouds, public clouds and edge locations.”