IBM recently announced that it will incorporate the Red Hat storage product roadmap and its related teams into IBM's storage business department, so as to provide enterprises with consistent applications and data storage across local infrastructure and cloud.

By doing so, IBM will integrate the storage technology of the Red Hat OpenShift Data Foundation (ODF) as the foundation of IBM Spectrum Fusion. This combination of IBM and Red Hat's containerized storage technology for providing data services helps accelerate IBM's ability in the emerging Kubernetes platform market.

In addition, IBM plans to provide a new Ceph solution, provide a unified software defined storage platform, and bridge the architectural gap between data centers and cloud providers. This will further advance IBM's leadership in the software defined storage and Kubernetes platform markets.

According to the agreement between IBM and Red Hat, IBM will assume the responsibility of the chief sponsor of Ceph Foundation, and members of Ceph Foundation will cooperate to promote innovation, development, marketing and community activities of Ceph open source projects. IBM Ceph and Red Hat OpenShift Data Foundation will remain 100% open source, and will continue to follow the upstream priority model to strengthen IBM's commitment to these important communities. The involvement of Ceph's leadership team and other aspects of open source projects is a key priority for IBM to maintain and foster Red Hat's continuous innovation.

Red Hat and IBM intend to complete the transition before January 1, 2023, which will transfer the relevant staff involved in the storage roadmap and Red Hat to IBM's storage business department. After this date, Red Hat OpenShift Platform Plus will continue to include the OpenShift Data Foundation sold by Red Hat and its partners. In addition, Red Hat OpenStack customers will still be able to purchase Red Hat Ceph storage from Red Hat and its partners. Red Hat OpenShift and Red Hat OpenStack customers with existing subscriptions will be able to maintain and expand their storage footprint as needed without changing their relationship with Red Hat.