Myths, truths and our take on IBM Cloud Paks

With IBM’s purchase of Red Hat, the entire portfolio of software solutions for cybersecurity, applications, databases, automation and hybrid cloud management has been ported to OpenShift under the brand name
IBM Cloud Paks
. This means that many of these applications have been redesigned and adapted to run on top of containers (although some, such as QRadar, have been doing so for years) and be controlled by Kubernetes, which is the container orchestrator on which OpenShift is based.

How are IBM Cloud Paks deployed?

IBM Cloud Paks are installed on a PaaS environment with OpenShift both in own data centers on IBM Power Systems, VMWare, KVM (RHEV / LinuxONE) and in public clouds of Microsoft (Azure), IBM, Amazon (AWS) and Google (GCP). Thanks to IBM Satellite, it can be deployed in a combination of on-premises and cloud resources, through a flexible hybrid architecture. Our
professional services department
can help you.

How are IBM Cloud Paks licensed? How much do they cost?

This is perhaps one of the least known and, in our opinion, most controversial parts. IBM has always sold perpetual licenses for all its software solutions. These licenses come with a basic technical support for HW incidents and a more advanced one for SW (SWMA) that can be renewed typically every 3 years. By moving to a cloud environment we are moving towards pay-per-use systems, which are very scalable and sometimes, to be honest, very expensive. complicated to estimate. For example, Data has these prices per “virtual core”. That is, from a few hundred dollars to a few hundred thousand… :)

This has obvious advantages for solutions where it makes sense to keep renewing support, as is the case with open and extremely complex solutions such as those based on micro-services and containers. Customers who are not comfortable with this model can continue to purchase appliances or licenses to deploy many of these solutions in their infrastructure for a one-time payment and optional support to be renewed every several years. In others, this is the only model as they are native solutions for Kubernetes and Cloud based environments.

Do I need to have OpenShift to install an IBM Cloud Pak?

Short answer: yes. However, if you don’t have it, you can deploy it without too many problems thanks to the installers included in the latest versions both in your own infrastructure and in an external one (IaaS) from your favorite cloud provider.

Are IBM Cloud Paks worth it?

As a good free verse that we are in the systems integrators sector, we think that some do, and others not so much (at least for now). It depends on their intended use, the dependency we have with other applications and the level of maturity in the adoption of containers and the use of Kubernetes in our organization. If we are starting out with Dockers, OpenShift and Cloud environments, perhaps it is better to stick to a good
digital transformation and modernization plan
rather than “putting the cart before the horse”.

Are there IBM Cloud Paks courses or training?

In order to take advantage of this technology you need to master both the infrastructure (OpenShift) for which there is official training offered by Red Hat, and an intensive hands-on workshop developed by ourselves. Once the infrastructure is under control you will need to train on the different IBM products and solutions you are interested in, as they are collections of Software grouped by category and licensed together. The Cloud Pak for Security, for example, is primarily IBM QRadar SOAR Platform while the Cloud Pak for Applications includes the entire Websphere suite.

That said, if you want,
we speak
.