OpenShift deployment comes to z/OS

Its finally here…

Since I took on this role in z/OS approximately 18 months ago the biggest request I’ve continually had from clients, business partners and the IBM field team has been ‘When is it going to be possible to run OpenShift on z/OS?’?

We’ve had great solutions for a while now for being able to run Red Hat OpenShift on IBM Z, with deployment options through Linux on IBM Z, but for clients who either don’t run Linux on IBM Z today or want their containerized workloads to have the strongest possible affinity with their existing z/OS deployments, we’re delighted to announce a new offering… IBM zCX Foundation for Red Hat OpenShift. This new offering provides the deployment of containerized Linux on IBM Z applications and software in a self-contained Red Hat OpenShift cluster on z/OS, a great option to extend your z/OS deployments with container orchestration as part of your hybrid cloud strategy.

Colocation with z/OS

IBM Z continues to be the backbone of some of the world’s largest enterprises, running millions of transactions a day and there are a number of reasons why clients continue to invest in IBM Z, but the ones that most frequently come up revolve around the security, scalability and resilience. With IBM zCX Foundation for Red Hat OpenShift running in z/OS, we are able to take that value proposition even further.

This new deployment option means clients can take advantage of enhanced security with z/OS Pervasive Encryption, use our industry leading Workload Management technology (WLM) and leverage samehost networking for running at ultra high scale, and also inherit the Disaster Recovery and replication capabilities delivering a super resilient infrastructure to support your mission critical workload.

Furthermore, this solution is zIIP eligible, meaning can not only take advantage of the benefits of colocating with your z/OS workload, but you can do it in a cost effective way.

Find out more

To find out more about IBM zCX Foundation for Red Hat OpenShift, you can visit the website plus you can watch a replay of this introductory webinar to learn more about the offering. This is our first step in bringing OpenShift deployment directly to z/OS, so would love to hear from anyone who would like to engage on our future roadmap or would like to share more about the use cases they’re looking to leverage so feel free to comment or drop me a line.