What’s shaking at IBM Corp. since it acquired Red Hat Inc.? In some quarters, it’s more of the same; the IBM Storage Division has partnered with Red Hat for quite some time. Albeit, with Red Hat nearer and dearer than ever, it’s poised to juice up its offerings around containers, the popular virtualized method for running distributed applications.

“IBM Storage has been working with Red Hat for over 15 years — way before the company ever thought about buying them,” said Eric Herzog (pictured), chief marketing officer and vice president of worldwide storage sales of IBM’s Storage Division. “We went to the old Red Hat Summits. It was two guys, a dog, and a note — and IBM was there,” he said. 

IBM Storage already supports Red Hat OpenShift, an open-source container application platform. It also supports any sort of container environment out there, according to Herzog.

Herzog spoke with Dave Vellante (@dvellante) and John Furrier (@furrier), co-hosts of theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s mobile livestreaming studio, during the VMworld event in San Francisco. They discussed IBM Storage’s cloud-agnostic portfolio and its upcoming container announcements (see the full interview with transcript here). (* Disclosure below.)

CSI, data protection products upcoming

IBM recently introduced Cloud Paks — add-ons built around Red Hat OpenShift that provide a faster, more secure way to move business applications to cloud. Now it is preparing to bring out products built around Container Storage Interface.

IBM Storage is aiming to provide a solid storage foundation for both enterprises and service providers. Over 400 cloud providers of various sizes rely on its Spectrum Protect data protection as their engine for backup service, according to Herzog. It has bent with the market, bringing out storage for big data, artificial intelligence, cyber resiliency, etc. It has supported containers for 2.5 years.

IBM is gearing up make a couple of new announcements, Herzog revealed. On Sept. 12, it will announce a new high-end product. And on Oct. 22, it will unveil its modern data protection for containers.

Watch the complete video interview below, and be sure to check out more of SiliconANGLE’s and theCUBE’s coverage of the VMworld event. (* Disclosure: IBM Corp. sponsored this segment of theCUBE. Neither IBM nor other sponsors have editorial control over content on theCUBE or SiliconANGLE.)

Photo: SiliconANGLE