Cloud-native technologies, such as Kubernetes, are unlocking new levels of efficiency and agility for businesses, but organizations need to adapt their structures and skills to fully realize the benefits.

The evolving IT landscape has created a need for a platform that can meet the cloud-native needs of enterprises. IBM Storage Fusion and Red Hat OpenShift fill this void with a super platform that supports both Kubernetes applications and virtual machines, according to Pete Brey (pictured), global product executive, IBM Storage Fusion, at IBM Corp.

“We work very closely with our friends at Red Hat … they have a technology called OpenShift Virtualization based on KubeVirt,” he said. “Customers bringing these VMs over want to be able to co-host not just the containers, but also the VMs together and have a single substrate to support it all. That’s really what Fusion is all about.”

Brey spoke with theCUBE industry analysts Dave Vellante and Rob Strechay at IBM Storage Summit, during an exclusive broadcast on theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s livestreaming studio. They discussed how IBM Storage Fusion and Red Hat OpenShift offer a complete and integrated solution so that businesses can focus on their core mandate and not their infrastructure. (* Disclosure below.)

Through the application and data lens

Since data has become a crown jewel in the enterprise world, out-of-the-box approaches are needed to get results. The overarching concept of both the applications and the data should be delivered as a platform, with capabilities such as encryption and user authentication, and IBM helps with this objective, according to Brey.

“I don’t need to bolt something on, and this is the recurring theme we’re seeing from the customers that we work with. They want a turnkey solution,” he said. “It includes all the OpenShift, it includes all these additional data services. If I want to turnkey a hyperconverged system, I can get that too from IBM, but I can also get the software from them.”

The ability to move data and applications together across clouds, on-prem and at the edge has become a vital one for businesses. IBM comes in handy, because it makes data mobility and cataloging a reality, Brey pointed out.

“Being able to move data between app dev and app test environments into production and back and forth is a very critical capability,” he stated. “We have unique capabilities in terms of being able to catalog and label and tag the data so it’s quickly and easily found.”

Through data cataloging, IBM eliminates the pain point of data scientists having to look for the right data for a long time, according to Brey. This is accomplished by tagging and labeling the data for fast and seamless queries.

“The number one problem for the data scientists today is not how long my inferencing takes or not how long it takes to do model training; it’s can I get to the right data quickly?” he pointed out. “Some of the estimates are like 80 to 90% of their time is spent just trying to find the right data, and that’s the problem that we solve.”

Here’s the complete video interview, part of SiliconANGLE’s and theCUBE’s coverage of IBM Storage Summit:

(* Disclosure: TheCUBE is a paid media partner for the IBM Storage Summit. Neither IBM Corp., the sponsor of theCUBE’s event coverage, nor other sponsors have editorial control over content on theCUBE or SiliconANGLE.)

Photo: SiliconANGLE