In announcing the closure of its $6.4 billion buy of Hashicorp, IBM said its goal is to infuse HashiCorp automation and security technology in every data center possible.
With the deal, which was 10 months in the making, IBM plans to further integrate HashiCorp’s automation technology into its Red Hat, watsonx, data security, IT automation and consulting businesses. IBM uses Hashicorp technology in its cloud offerings already.
HashiCorp’s products include its flagship Terraform package, which lets customers automatically provision infrastructure, network, and virtual components across multiple cloud providers and on-premises environments. The company also offers Vault for identity-based authentication and to authorize access to sensitive data; Nomad for workload orchestration; Boundary for secure remote access; and Consul for service-based networking.
When combined with IBM and Red Hat, HashiCorp will give customers a platform capable of automating the deployment and orchestration of workloads across evolving infrastructure, including hyperscale cloud service providers, private clouds, and on-premises environments. Ansible could then automate application configurations and middleware deployments on top of that infrastructure, IBM stated.
Enterprises are looking for ways to more efficiently manage and modernize cloud infrastructure and security tasks from initial planning and design, according to Rob Thomas, senior vice president, IBM Software said in a statement.
“By 2028, it is projected that generative AI will lead to the creation of 1 billion new cloud-native applications. Supporting this scale requires infrastructure automation far beyond the capacity of the workforce alone,” Thomas stated.
The IBM and Red Hat portfolio also has many products we can integrate with to deliver a better user experience, wrote Armon Dadgar, CTO and cofounder of HashiCorp in a blog about the deal closure.
“Integrating Terraform for provisioning with Ansible for configuration management will enable an end-to-end approach to infrastructure automation as code, while integrating Terraform with Cloudability will bring native FinOps capabilities to manage and optimize cost at scale,” Dadgar wrote.
Vault integration with OpenShift, Ansible, and Guardium will bring world-class secrets management to those platforms and reduce the integration burden on end users, Dadgar wrote.
Source:: Network World