IBM integrates Red Hat ODF and Ceph into its storage division

IBM acquired Red Hat in 2018. Since then Red Hat has operated as a semi-autonomous company with IBM using its expertise to enhance its own software developments and its OpenShift management software as a pivotal part of its hybrid multi-cloud strategy.
Last week it announced the upcoming integration of parts of Red Hat into IBM’s Storage Division from the start of 2023. In particular:

• Red Hat Ceph Storage (RHCS), which is Red Hat’s Software Defined Storage (SDS) solution encompassing block, file and object storage providing cluster data management capabilities as part of the OpenShift container platform and
• Red Hat OpenShift Data Foundation (ODF), which will be integrated into IBM’s Spectrum Fusion team.

These teams and their products will become part of IBM’s portfolio from that point, although Red Hat customers will be able to continue to renew and purchase ODF and Ceph components as part of their OpenShift and OpenStack solutions.
The change also has implications for the two companies’ approach to the open source community, since while the development of ODF, Ceph, Rook (a cloud-native storage orchestrator for Kubernetes) and NooBaa (a company acquired by Red Hat in 2018 which provides a single interface for data services allowing tiering, migration and copying of data between clouds) will remain ‘open source first’, the Ceph and Rook teams themselves will transfer to IBM.
The move shows that, unlike the way Dell managed Vmware during its ownership, IBM is prepared to assimilate resources from Red Hat into the main company where it makes sense. These changes are designed to aid IBM Storage’s Software Defined Storage (SDS) strategy through decoupling its Spectrum Virtualize and Scale software announcements from its FlashSystem hardware releases. It also embeds open source approaches even more strongly into its storage software development processes. For analysts like me it would be useful if the creation of a larger storage team led to financial reporting that combines hardware, software and services together – then we could see how close IBM storage revenues are to market leader Dell.