Embracing Cloud Native for Mission Critical Workloads

by Marcel Mitran

As enterprises look for ways to accelerate the delivery of new feature/function to stay ahead in a disrupt-or-be-disrupted world, cloud-native has become the standard for how clients develop, deploy, and manage innovative cloud services at the speed of business.   To truly win with such a cloud-first strategy most enterprises have concluded that speed is required not only at the edge where the digital channels live but also at the core of their IT landscape where the mission critical systems-of-record and rich operational data lives.  A cloud-native strategy that does not holistically encompass the full spectrum of the IT landscape leaves speed of innovation bound to the lowest common denominator.

With this in-mind Red Hat recognized the need for a ubiquitous cloud-native platform that can reach across the spectrum of infrastructure used by modern enterprises.  Today Red Hat OpenShift is the industry leading and de-facto standard Kubernetes-based cloud native platform.   As of February 2020, Red Hat OpenShift became available and supported on IBM Z and LinuxONE bringing cloud-native to core mission critical systems.

Since becoming available on IBM Z and LinuxONE there has been tremendous interest and momentum worldwide and across industries for OpenShift on the platform.  Enterprises are leveraging the latter in several different ways:

  1. They are co-locating new cloud-native services on the same physical infrastructure as their existing systems-of-record to take advantage of low-latency, resilient and secure networking with their core systems to significantly lower risk and accelerate time-to-value for their digital transformation strategy (https://mediacenter.ibm.com/media/t/1_sfguakql),
  2. They are leveraging the resilience of IBM Z infrastructure to host cloud-native workloads that demand mission critical availability (https://www.jamaicaobserver.com/sunday-finance/sagicor-bank-reduces-wait-time-with-new-technologies_227964),
  3. They are securing cloud-native workloads, such as digital asset management and blockchain solutions, by running them on IBM Z and LinuxONE (https://bluebarricade.com/press-release-1400-tps/), and
  4. They are significantly reducing their power footprint and accelerating their net-zero commitments by hosting cloud-native workloads on densely virtualized IBM Z and LinuxONE systems (https://www.ibm.com/downloads/cas/GYR3MWQN).

In addition, enterprises are also seeing significant savings when running cloud-native workloads on OpenShift on IBM Z.  A recent study by IBM has shown a potential savings of up-to 69% in total-cost-of-ownership when consolidating cloud-native workloads on IBM Z and LinuxONE.

Finally, cloud native has become ubiquitous in the industry and is synonymous with modern. As such it is no surprise that as enterprises are looking to modernize and extend their core and mission critical systems, they are embracing cloud native platforms. OpenShift is the only cloud-native platform in the industry that is supported across all the major public clouds as well as on IBM Z and LinuxONE systems.  This means that by re-platforming to OpenShift an enterprise is future-proofing their investment and enabling true fit-for-purpose placement of their cloud-native workloads – opening the door to leveraging the unique qualities-of-service of IBM Z while given enterprises flexibility and freedom of choice as their needs change and evolve. This makes OpenShift a unique and ideal platform for modernizing and extending core systems.

by Marcel Mitran – Distinguished Engineer, CTO IBM LinuxONE and Red Hat Synergy IBM Z

Marcel is presenting a keynote session at the GSE UK Virtual Conference 2021 in November, ‘Infrastructure and Application Modernization on IBM Z with Red Hat OpenShift’

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