IBM Cloud Satellite Boosted to GA Orbit

IBM’s Cloud Satellite service is now circling within the generally available orbit, and the vendor has brought in dozens of partners like Cisco, Dell Technologies, and Intel to develop cloud services that can run across the multi-cloud and premises platform. IBM’s Cloud Satellite service is now circling within the generally available orbit, and the vendor has brought in dozens of partners like Cisco, Dell Technologies, and Intel to develop cloud services that can run across the multi-cloud and premises platform. IBM explained that the GA push now makes the platform available to all customers. It allows users to run their IBM Cloud service on-premises or in edge locations managed through a single pane of glass in the public cloud. IBM said it has more than 65 “ecosystem partners” building services to run in the Cloud Satellite environment. Those services include storage, networking, and server options. “IBM is working with clients to leverage advanced technologies like edge computing and [artificial intelligence], enabling them to digitally transform with hybrid cloud while keeping data security at the forefront,” said Howard Boville, head of IBM Hybrid Cloud Platform, in a statement. He added that “clients can securely gain the benefits of cloud services anywhere, from the core of the data center to the farthest reaches of the network.” As part of the GA launch, IBM noted that Lumen Technologies was using the platform to deliver its Edge Compute service. This capability relies on Red Hat’s OpenShift that runs within Cloud Satellite to host the applications running close to Lumen’s edge locations. Lumen touts that it has approximately 450,000 route fiber miles in its network spread across more than 60 countries. Lumen struck a similar deal earlier this year with VMware that will see both vendors “fast-track the design, development, and delivery of edge computing and more secure, work-from-anywhere solutions.” IBM initially unveiled its Cloud Satellite platform last May. The platform uses IBM’s Cloud as a base and includes IBM Cloud Observability in order to provide a centralized view of clusters and the services running within them. Running on top of that base is a control plane that abstracts away the operational details into a single management layer. That setup can then be used to run and manage applications running in on-premises, hybrid edge, or infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) environments. Users can then use the systems to set up Cloud Satellite hosts to run in those locations. These hosts serve as a pool of resources designated to run the cloud services and applications and make up a satellite location. From there, these satellite locations can use what IBM calls a satellite link to link back from the cloud edge location to the control plane. The satellite link is not a real satellite link, but it does allow a user to manage networking requirements for the applications like firewalls and auditing. The vendor late last year struck a deal with AT&T to be one of the first passengers on the service. The operator is using the platform to bolster the reach and depth of its 5G network into enterprise markets. The Satellite Cloud service moves IBM closer to similar multi-cloud management offerings from its competitors. Microsoft, for instance, last fall rolled out its Arc platform that allows Microsoft customers to manage their data and applications that reside on either its Azure cloud or public cloud offerings from rivals like AWS and Google Cloud. That cross-cloud management includes data and services running in virtual machines (VMs), containers, or Kubernetes, and also allows enterprises to enforce a single security posture across those data sources or applications. Amazon Web Services offers a similar feature set with its Outposts platform as does Google with its Anthos product. Jason McGee, VP and CTO for IBM Cloud Platform, previously explained to SDxCentral that IBM’s work with Cloud Satellite has more flexibility than what some of the other vendors in the market are offering. “We see it as an opportunity to uncover a bigger part of that spectrum and to push to the left and push toward those edge scenarios,” he explained. “So we designed an architecture that has flexibility at the infrastructure level so we can more quickly address these different variations, versus if we had picked an only integrated hardware approach then you would have had to have different variations of hardware and that takes time and there’s complexity there.”