Red Hat Storage strategy update

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)