The global COVID-19 pandemic accelerated enterprise adoption of multiple clouds as it reaffirmed the critical need for business agility. But deploying combinations of on-premises, off-premises, public and private clouds is not necessarily an easy task.

IBM and Red Hat Inc., the open source powerhouse it acquired last year, are joining their existing infrastructure, capabilities and security tools to help businesses move forward into hybrid and multicloud environments built on container technology, according to Sam Werner (pictured, left), vice president of offering management — storage at IBM.

“IBM is bringing together all of our capabilities, everything from analytics and AI to application development and all of our middleware and packaging them up in something that we call Cloud Paks, which are pre-built catalogs of containerized capabilities that can be easily deployed in any OpenShift environment,” he said. “[It] allows customers to build applications that could be deployed both on-premises and then within public cloud, so in a hybrid, multicloud environment.”

In fact, the hybrid cloud was at the heart of IBM’s acquisition of Red Hat, according to Brent Compton (pictured, right), senior director of storage, HCI and big data architectures at Red Hat. “The stated intent of Red Hat OpenShift is to become the default operating environment for the hybrid cloud, so that is at the very heart of the synergy between our companies,” he said.

Werner and Compton spoke with Stu Miniman, host of theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s livestreaming studio, during the KubeCon + CloudNativeCon Europe Virtual event. They discussed the combined solutions of IBM and Red Hat for storage, customer concerns about data protection, and the movement of workloads toward containers. (* Disclosure below.)

Data protection as a top priority

Despite the numerous benefits of the container and Kubernetes environment, such as scalability and portability, every major change in technology raises concerns. One of the main concerns of customers toward containers is how to maintain the level of data protection they currently have, according to Werner. This is especially true when businesses start moving some of their most critical workloads.

To address this, IBM has made data protection for containers a top priority for its Spectrum Protect suite, which provides scalable solutions for physical file servers, applications and virtual environments.

“We provide the capabilities to do application-aware snapshots of your storage environment so that a Kubernetes developer can actually build in the resiliency they need as they build applications and a storage administrator can get a pane of glass and visibility into all of the data and ensure that it’s all being protected appropriately and provide things like [service-level agreements],” Werner explained.

Among business infrastructure teams, concerns go beyond data protection and involve data governance and privacy. While it is usually businessmen who decide to move from traditional infrastructure to Kubernetes, storage administrators need to support this change.

“These things are difficult in any environment, but now you’re moving to a completely new world and … administrators have a tough challenge ahead of them,” Werner said. “I think that’s where IBM and Red Hat can really come together with all of our experience and our very broad portfolio with incredibly enterprise-hardened storage capabilities to help them.”

In addition to mission-critical applications, the number two workload category that moves into the Kubernetes and container environment refers to machine learning, analysis and artificial intelligence, according to Compton.

“We’re seeing [in] the state of the industry today a tremendous use of these Kubernetes and OpenShift-based architectures for machine learning, analytics, [which is] made more simple by data pipeline automation through things like OpenShift container storage, through things like OpenShift serverless,” Compton pointed out. “We’re seeing an explosion of adoption of the OpenShift, and of course Cloud Paks … for those types of workloads.”

Watch the complete video interview below, and be sure to check out more of SiliconANGLE’s and theCUBE’s coverage of the KubeCon + CloudNativeCon Europe Virtual event. (* Disclosure: TheCUBE is a paid media partner for the KubeCon + CloudNativeCon Europe 2020 Virtual Experience. IBM sponsored this segment of theCUBE. Neither IBM nor other sponsors have editorial control over content on theCUBE or SiliconANGLE.)

Photo: SiliconANGLE