IBM links arms with Red Hat and Veritas

Big Blue unveils strategic partnerships around hybrid cloud, a new blockchain network and more

IBM has today announced a duo of collaborations around the cloud, plus a third one leveraging blockchain technology.

Big Blue has teamed up with Red Hat to help drive hybrid cloud adoption with OpenStack. According to IBM's announcement, the deal will allow enterprises to see the economic benefits of OpenStack, as well as its speed, while being able to bring existing Red Hat virtualised and cloud workloads to IBM Private Cloud.

The two vendors will eventually jointly market and sell the new solutions for private cloud deployments, including workload migrations, disaster recovery, datacentre consolidation and capacity expansion.

IBM also announced it is now a Red Hat Certified Cloud and Service Provider, in an effort to make customers feel more confident about using Red Hat's OpenStack Platform and Red Hat Ceph Storage on IBM Private Cloud when it becomes generally available at the end of this month.

Additionally, Red Hat Cloud Access will be set for IBM Cloud by the end of Q2 2017, IBM said.

Big Blue has also made a deal to have its IBM Cloud Object Storage family of cloud services and software certified to use with Veritas NetBackup 8.0, which Veritas is expected to release in Q2 2017 and will be available on IBM's Bluemix Catalog. IBM said the deal aims to help customers better manage, optimise and protect data in hybrid cloud environments.

With this aim, IBM said NetBackup 8.0 will be certified to run on IBM Cloud for further data protection of cloud-based workloads.

Similar to its Red Hat partnership, IBM will go to market with and provide support with Veritas, it said.

Finally, IBM announced it is creating a secure, "enterprise-ready" global blockchain ecosystem for sharing identity. By teaming up with SecureKey Technologies, an identity and authentication provider, Big Blue is looking to create a new digital identity and attribute-sharing network based on IBM Blockchain. The goal is for the network to facilitate consumers' identification with privacy and security, the vendor said. IBM added that it expects to launch the network later this year.