Executive Summary

Organizations across the globe continue to rapidly develop innovative software applications in hybrid and multi-cloud environments to achieve competitive advantages and ensure customer satisfaction. Many of these applications are deployed in a private cloud due to security and compliance, data affinity, and performance requirements. The IT organizations responsible for operating the private cloud value simplicity, agility, flexibility, security, and cost efficiency, as these features reduce their own barriers to innovation as part of their overall hybrid and multi-cloud strategy.

The IBM Z and IBM® LinuxONE platforms are well suited for these cloud environments, due to the capability of nondisruptive vertical and horizontal scalability on demand, in the most securable platform and inheriting the reliability, stability, and availability of the mainframe. In colocation with traditional workloads, they can enable data gravity in secure computing environments and fulfil the business and IT requirements of today.

This reference architecture showcases a prescriptive, pre-validated, private cloud solution from Red Hat and IBM that provides IT as a Service (ITaaS), and the rapid provisioning and lifecycle management of containerized apps, virtual machines (VMs), and associated application and infrastructure services for cloud users such as software developers, data scientists, and solution architects. Red Hat OpenShift® Container Platform (RHOCP) and IBM z/VM are the key architecture components of this solution.

The following key characteristics highlight the value of Red Hat OpenShift Container Platform:

• An enterprise Kubernetes platform for container workloads
• Enables seamless Kubernetes deployments on any cloud or on-premises environment
• Integrated and automated installation
• Seamless platform and application updates
• Auto-scaling of resources and services
• Ability to run enterprise workloads with enterprise CI/CD services, across multiple deployments