As the hybrid cloud becomes one of the main support structures for the digital transformation, a new common demand from companies is to have a consistent and manageable platform across this complex environment.

One way to meet this need is to enable companies to consume public cloud services anywhere else in their IT infrastructure in a software deployment model, according to Jason McGee (pictured, right), IBM fellow, vice president and chief technology officer of the IBM cloud platform at IBM.

“So, recently we launched this thing called IBM Cloud Satellite,” he said. “[It is] how we can actually extend the public cloud experience back into the data center, out to the edge, and allow people to kind of mix both location flexibility with public cloud consumption,” he said.

McGee and Octavian Tanase (pictured, left), senior vice president of engineering at NetApp Inc., spoke with John Furrier, host of theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s livestreaming studio, during IBM Think. They discussed the new demands of companies on the hybrid cloud, the main features of the IBM Cloud Satellite, and how the data storage provider NetApp complements this solution. (* Disclosure below.)

IBM Cloud Satellite integrates NetApp features

The IBM Cloud Satellite managed distributed cloud solution allows enterprises to deploy services such as toolchains, databases and artificial intelligence anywhere. Companies can even add these services to public clouds from other providers, such as AWS and Azure.

“That really allows you to kind of combine the benefits of public cloud with kind of location independence you see in hybrid and lets us solve new problems,” McGee explained.

NetApp’s storage and data services complement this solution. For example, NetApp ONTAP data management software integrates with Red Hat OpenShift, the Kubernetes-based container orchestration platform that is the foundation of the IBM Cloud Satellite, to provide persistent storage for containerized applications.

“What we are doing is enabling not only storage, but rich data services around tiering based on temperature or replicated snapshots or capabilities around caching, high availability, encryption and so forth,” Tanase stated. “We believe that our technology integrates very well with Red Hat OpenShift, and the Kubernetes aspect enables the application mobility in that translation of really distributed computing at scale.”

In this increasingly important hybrid cloud scenario, NetApp has been rewriting many of its software with some design points in mind, such as the software-defined concept and the hybrid cloud in the containerization of its operating systems, so they can run both in traditional environments and in the cloud, according to Tanase.

“The last thing that we wanted to do is enable the speed of scale, and that has been by building intrinsically in the product … or in also using Kubernetes as an infrastructure to achieve that agility, that scale,” he concluded.

Watch the complete video interview below, and be sure to check out more of SiliconANGLE’s and theCUBE’s coverage of IBM Think. (* Disclosure: TheCUBE is a paid media partner for IBM Think. Neither IBM, the sponsor for theCUBE’s event coverage, nor other sponsors have editorial control over content on theCUBE or SiliconANGLE.)

Photo: SiliconANGLE