What is it?
For a while now, your customers have been on a journey to modernize their existing applications and move from stand-alone software running on virtual machines (VMs) to micro services that run within container environments. The journey hasn't always been easy, and they are now more anxious than ever to make the change due to rapidly rising licensing costs for traditional infrastructure hypervisors.
Fortunately, the combination of IBM Fusion and Red Hat OpenShift offers a solution that can not only revolutionize and modernize your customers' IT environment, but also provide an opportunity for you to replace a revenue stream that may have been lost.
IBM Storage Fusion is a container-native enterprise application data services platform for Red Hat OpenShift that provides a consistent experience for both.
The Red Hat Enterprise virtualization platform is designed for business-critical, modernized workloads built on Red Hat Enterprise Linux. Its integration with Red Hat OpenShift helps manage virtual machines running across both platforms easily. This solution is perfect for businesses looking to lower costs, simplify management, improve performance and protect their assets.
Why should you care?
Gartner predicts that 95% of all new apps by 2025 will be cloud-native. It's clear the majority of your customers' apps will soon be cloud-native and container-based. So, now is a great time to focus on helping them achieve their cloud-native goals.
Gartner also polled businesses to find out what they are doing with the rest of their applications. Gartner discovered that clients were re-platforming strategic databases, logging, AI/ML and other applications using cloud-native middle ware — a lift-and-shift move from VMware to container platforms like OpenShift.
The OpenShift + Fusion solution can run Windows and Linux virtual machines, which will:
- Eliminate duplication
- Reduce skills requirements
- Improve performance
- Protect and provide availability from a single simple operational control point
- Speed up the transition to cloud-native
How does it work?
The IBM Fusion and Red Hat OpenShift solution offers powerful features and benefits.
IBM Fusion
- Shared, simplified persistence
- Backup and restore for virtual machines
- Disaster recovery for virtual machines
- Multiple clusters on virtual machines
Red Hat OpenShift
- Creates and manages Linux and Windows virtual machines
- Imports and clones existing virtual machines
- Manages network and storage attached to virtual machines
- Includes vMotion-like virtual machines between nodes
- Ports virtual machines using an MTV toolkit
Differentiation in the market
IBM Fusion includes enterprise performance, scale, automation with HA/DR/Backup and multiple clusters wrapped up in an easy-to-deploy appliance.
Red Hat OpenShift provides a great foundation for virtual machines as "first-class citizens" that are managed just like containers with tooling to simplify porting to KVM and vMotion-like automation.
Here are just some of the Red Hat OpenShift virtualization advantages that differentiate it in the market:
- OpenShift virtualization enables virtual machine-based applications to leverage modern management principles that are integrated into OpenShift. It adds existing virtual machines to mixed applications, including containers and serverless technologies.
- Red Hat provides a unified view and consistent set of tools for managing virtual machines, containers and serverless components, which help align virtual machine administrators and development teams more effectively.
- OpenShift virtualization improves time to production with self-service options for quick deployment of virtual machines. Application teams can integrate virtual machines with development pipelines through the OpenShift API and then directly incorporate these CI/CD pipelines into OpenShift deployments.
- Red Hat applies cloud-native operational practices to virtual machines and utilizes an infrastructure that enables VMs and containers to be managed by the same set of tools on a single unified platform.
How do you position and sell this solution?
Your VMware customers are facing many hardships resulting from the recent Broadcom acquisition, including:
- Growing maintenance costs for aging technology
- Overall cost increases, forced bundles and PAYG
- Lack of partner support (channel program has been discontinued)
- Top 2,000 accounts have been taken direct
- 3,000 VMware field sellers laid off
But fortunately, IBM Fusion and Red Hat OpenShift provide a great alternative to VMware. IBM Fusion and Red Hat OpenShift offer a powerful virtualization opportunity and value for modernization, along with being an incredibly economical alternative to VMware's vSphere hypervisor.
Also, be sure to remind your VMware customers that anything they can do in VMware, they can also do in OpenShift! So, now is the perfect time to speak with them about IBM and Red Hat!
More information
The Arrow IBM and Red Hat teams are always on call to help and assist with all your sales efforts. To learn more about modernizing IT with IBM and Red Hat, email us at ibmbrands@arrow.com or RedHatECS@arrow.com.
And don't forget that the Arrow Solutions Lab is a great place to go for testing and demonstrations. Schedule an appointment with your customers and Arrow's technical experts today!
The resources below will help you effectively explain the advantages of IBM and Red Hat virtualization solutions to your customers:
- Messaging guide: OpenShift Virtualization
- Presentation: Red Hat OpenShift Virtualization update
- On-demand webinar: Modernization IT with IBM and Red Hat
- Case study: València City Council speeds process and production of new service
- Arrow webpage: Red Hat application modernization
