IBM Wazi cloud-native devops for Z

In this rapidly evolving world of hybrid and multicloud systems, organizations are required to quickly evolve their processes and tooling to address business needs. Foremost among that are development environments that include IBM Z as part of their hybrid solution face, says Sanjay Chandru, Director, IBM Z DevOps.

IBM’s goal, then  is to provide a cloud native developer experience for the IBM Z that is consistent and familiar to all developers. And that requires cross platform consistency in tooling for application programmers on Z who will need to deliver innovation faster and without the backlogs that have been expected in the past.

Wazi, along with OpenShift,  is another dividend from IBM purchase of Red Hat. Here is where IBM Wazi for Red Hat CodeReady Workspaces comes in: an add-on to IBM Cloud Pak for Applications. It allows developers to use an industry standard integrated development environment (IDE),  such as Microsoft Visual Studio Code (VS Code) or Eclipse, to develop and test IBM z/OS applications in a containerized, virtual z/OS environment on Red Hat OpenShift running on x86 hardware. The container creates a sandbox. 

The combination of IBM Cloud Pak for Applications goes beyond what Zowe offers as an open source framework for z/OS and the OpenProject to enable Z development and operations teams to securely manage, control, script and develop on the mainframe like any other cloud platform. Developers who are not used to z/OS and IBM Z, which are most developers, now can  become productive faster in a familiar and accessible working environment, effectively  improving DevOps adoption across the enterprise

As IBM explained: Wazi integrates seamlessly into a standard, Git-based open tool chain to enable continuous integration and continuous delivery (CI/CD) as part of a fully hybrid devops process encompassing distributed and z systems.

IBM continues: Wazi is offered with deployment choices so that organizations can flexibly rebalance entitlement over time based on its business needs. In short, the organization can 

protect and leverage its IBM Z investments with robust and standard development capabilities that encompasses IBM Z and multicloud platforms.

The payoff comes as developers who are NOT used to z/OS and IBM Z, which is most of the developer world, can become productive faster in a familiar and accessible working environment while  improving DevOps adoption across the enterprise. IBM Wazi integrates seamlessly into a standard, Git-based open tool chain to deliver CI/CD and is offered with deployment choices so that any organization can flexibly rebalance over time based on its business needs. In short, you are protecting and leveraging your IBM Z investments with robust and standard development capabilities that encompass the Z and multicloud platforms.

As one large IBM customer put it: “We want to make the mainframe accessible. Use whatever tool you are comfortable with – Eclipse / IDz / Visual Studio Code. All of these things we are interested in to accelerate our innovation on the mainframe” 

An IT service provider added in IBM’s Wazi announcement: “Our colleagues in software development have been screaming for years for a dedicated testing environment that can be created and destroyed rapidly.” Well, now they have it in Wazi.

DancingDinosaur is Alan Radding, a veteran information technology analyst, writer, and ghost-writer. Follow DancingDinosaur on Twitter, @mainframeblog, and see more of his work athttp://technologywriter.com/

Apps and Ecosystem Critical for 5G Edge Success

According to the gospel of IBM, Edge computing with 5G creates opportunities in every industry. It brings computation and data storage closer to where data is generated, enabling better data control, reduced costs, faster insights and actions, and continuous operations.

Edge computing IBM Cloud Architecture

By 2025, 75% of enterprise data will be processed more efficiently on devices at the edge, compared to only 10% today. It will eliminate the need to relay data acquired, and often used for decision making in the field back to a data center for processing and storage. 

In short, the combination of 5G and smart devices on the edge aids this growing flow of data and processing through the proliferation of a variety of clouds: private, public, multi, and hybrid. But more is needed.

To get things rolling, IBM announced a handful of applications and tools and an edge ecosystem. As IBM notes: organizations across industries can now fully realize the benefits of edge computing, including running AI and analytics at the edge to achieve insights closer to where the work is done and the results applied. These new solutions include:

• IBM Edge Application Manager – an autonomous management tool to enable AI, analytics and IoT enterprise workloads to be deployed and remotely managed, delivering real-time analysis and insight at scale. It aims to enable the management of up to 10,000 edge nodes simultaneously by a single administrator. It is the first to be powered by Open Horizon, which is folded into the Linux Foundation. 
• IBM Telco Network Cloud Manager – runs on Red Hat OpenShift and Red Hat Open Stack,  a cloud computing platform that virtualizes resources from industry-standard hardware, organizes them into clouds, and manages them to provide new services now and going forward as 5G adoption expands.
• A portfolio of edge-enabled applications and services, including IBM Visual Insights, IBM Production Optimization, IBM Connected Manufacturing, IBM Asset Optimization, IBM Maximo Worker Insights and IBM Visual Inspector. All aim to deliver the flexibility to deploy AI and cognitive applications and services at the edge and at scale. 
• Red Hat OpenShift, which manages containers with automated installation, upgrades, and lifecycle management throughout the container stack—the operating system, Kubernetes cluster services, and applications—on any cloud.
• Dedicated IBM Services teams for edge computing and telco network clouds that draw on IBM’s expertise to deliver 5G and edge-enabled capabilities across all industries.

In addition, IBM is announcing the IBM Edge Ecosystem, through which an increasingly broad set of ISVs, GSIs and more will be helping enterprises capture the opportunities of edge computing with a variety of solutions built upon IBM’s technology. IBM is also creating the IBM Telco Network Cloud Ecosystem, bringing together a set of partners across the telecommunications industry that offer a breadth of network functionality that helps providers deploy their network cloud platforms. 

These open ecosystems of equipment manufacturers, networking and IT providers, and software providers include Cisco, Dell Technologies, Juniper Networks, Intel, NVIDIA, Samsung, Packet, Equinix Company, Hazelcast, Sysdig, Turbonomic, Portworx, Humio, Indra Minsait, Eurotech, Arrow Electronics, ADLINK, Acromove, Geniatech, SmartCone, CloudHedge, Altiostar, Metaswitch, F5 Networks, and ADVA as members. 

Making the promise of edge computing a reality requires an open ecosystem with diverse participants. It also requires open standards-based, cloud native solutions that can be deployed and autonomously managed at massive scale throughout the edge and can move data and applications seamlessly between private data centers, hybrid multiclouds, and the edge. IBM has already enlisted dozens of organizations in what it describes as its open edge ecosystem.  You can try to join the IBM ecosystem or start organizing your own.

DancingDinosaur is Alan Radding, a veteran information technology analyst, writer, and ghost-writer. Follow DancingDinosaur on Twitter, @mainframeblog, and see more of his work at http://technologywriter.com/

IBM teams with Cloudera and Hortonworks

Dancing Dinosaur has a friend on the West coast who finally left IBM after years of complaining, swearing never to return, and has been happily working at Cloudera ever since. IBM and Cloudera this week announced a strategic partnership to develop joint go-to-market programs designed to bring advanced data and AI solutions to more organizations across the expansive Apache Hadoop ecosystem.

Deploy a single solution for big data

The agreement builds on the long-standing relationship between IBM and Hortonworks, which merged with Cloudera this past January to create integrated solutions for data science and data management. The new agreement builds on the integrated solutions and extends them to include the Cloudera platform. “This should stop the big-data-is-dead thinking that has been cropping up,” he says, putting his best positive spin on the situation.

Unfortunately, my West coast buddy may be back at IBM sooner than he thinks. With IBM finalizing its $34 billion Red Hat acquisition yesterday, it is small additional money to just buy Horton and Cloudera and own them all as a solid big data-cloud capabilities block IBM owns.  

As IBM sees it, the companies have partnered to offer an industry-leading, enterprise-grade Hadoop distribution plus an ecosystem of integrated products and services – all designed to help organizations achieve faster analytic results at scale. As a part of this partnership, IBM promises to:

• Resell and support of Cloudera products
• Sell and support of Hortonworks products under a multi-year contract
• Provide migration assistance to future Cloudera/Hortonworks unity products
• Deliver the benefits of the combined IBM and Cloudera collaboration and investment in the open source community, along with commitment to better support analytics initiatives from the edge to AI.

IBM also will resell the Cloudera Enterprise Data Hub, Cloudera DataFlow, and Cloudera Data Science Workbench. In response, Cloudera will begin to resell IBM’s Watson Studio and BigSQL.

“By teaming more strategically with IBM we can accelerate data-driven decision making for our joint enterprise customers who want a hybrid and multi-cloud data management solution with common security and governance,” said Scott Andress, Cloudera’s Vice President of Global Channels and Alliances in the announcement. 

Cloudera enables organizations to transform complex data into clear and actionable insights. It delivers an enterprise data cloud for any data, anywhere, from the edge to AI. One obvious question: how long until IBM wants to include Cloudera as part of its own hybrid cloud? 

But IBM isn’t stopping here. It also just announced new storage solutions across AI and big data, modern data protection, hybrid multicloud, and more. These innovations will allow organizations to leverage more heterogeneous data sources and data types for deeper insights from AI and analytics, expand their ability to consolidate rapidly expanding data on IBM’s object storage, and extend modern data protection to support more workloads in hybrid cloud environments.

The key is IBM Spectrum Discover, metadata management software that provides data insight for petabyte-scale unstructured storage. The software connects to IBM Cloud Object Storage and IBM Spectrum Scale, enabling it to rapidly ingest, consolidate, and index metadata for billions of files and objects. It provides a rich metadata layer that enables storage administrators, data stewards, and data scientists to efficiently manage, classify, and gain insights from massive amounts of unstructured data. Combining that with Cloudera and Horton on the IBM’s hybrid cloud should give you a powerful data analytics solution. 

DancingDinosaur is Alan Radding, a veteran information technology analyst, writer, and ghost-writer. Follow DancingDinosaur on Twitter, @mainframeblog, and see more of his work at technologywriter.com.