Hazelcast accelerates IBM Cloud Private

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In response to market forces that are both broad and deep, IBM has been moving deliberately and systematically to a cloud-based model, with IBM Cloud Private being the leading edge of IBM’s offer to the enterprise market.

IBM Cloud Private is built on open-source frameworks Kubernetes and Cloud Foundry, with common services for self-service deployment, monitoring, logging and security, as well as a portfolio of middleware, data and analytics. With IBM Cloud Private, development and administrative teams share a flexible cloud environment behind their firewalls to create new microservices-based applications.

Hazelcast has been working extensively with IBM’s WebSphere team to support the WebSphere Open Liberty project operating with Kubernetes via Docker containers, through the integration of Hazelcast IMDG Enterprise HD within IBM Cloud Private. This will include access to pre-configured Hazelcast clusters as well as access to the Hazelcast Management Center.

This means that Hazelcast’s in-memory solution can be deployed as an ultrafast, integrated distributed cache solution for IBM applications. By combining Hazelcast with IBM Cloud Private, IBM will be able to deliver cloud-native applications with industry leading in-memory performance, scalability and resilience all from the safety of a corporate firewall-protected data center.

The net result for IBM will be a world class application platform for developing and managing containerized applications via Kubernetes, which can deliver significant performance improvements in customer-facing applications, reduced hardware requirements for edge computing or microservice use cases, and improved SLA support.

The value to IBM includes:

  • Speed and presence: Hazelcast is the industry’s fastest in-memory data-grid (particularly when it comes to complex event processing), as well as being the most widely used IMDG on a global basis, with millions of downloads in production.
  • Security and Scalability: Enterprise HD features including: scalability (HDMS) with fast restart, response times that enable a whole new level of security and fraud prevention, rolling upgrade, WAN replication, Management Center and support SLA. In addition, Hazelcast also can provide potential PaaS support for Cloud Foundry and OpenShift.
  • Simplicity: No code changes are required when migrating from WXS to Hazelcast in IBM Cloud Private. This shortens time to market, reduces development overhead, and minimizes customer disruption.

Hazelcast’s work with IBM covers five primary areas:

  • High Availability – In a world drive by IoT data volumes (not to mention billions of mobile devices) Hazelcast accelerates data ingestion and computation with in-memory infrastructure, driving massive gains in performance, scalability, and ultimately customer satisfaction. This is the leading edge of infrastructure enablement driving digital transformation across a broad range of industries and applications.
  • Container-based – Containers are essentially an executable package of software that includes everything needed to run it, such as Kubernetes. One of the biggest trends underway now is the movement to the cloud, and containers are the most efficient and effective way to move legacy or on-premise applications into the cloud with minimal disruption to existing process – technology like Kubernetes effectively lets you change the tires on a moving car.
  • Orchestration – Hazelcast automates the deployment, scaling, and management of containerized applications via Kubernetes. For bigger organizations (most of IBM’s customers) it’s not a matter of migrating an app or two, its hundreds of apps across a variety of platforms, operating systems, and integration requirements. Getting all of this to transition smoothly (that is, the customer doesn’t notice) is complex and mission critical, which is where orchestration between apps in transition is one of Hazelcast’s core value-adds..
  • Management – which enables the installation and (more importantly) the upgrade of applications delivered via Kubernetes by using Helm chart capabilities. Cloud-based applications are inherently more efficient; tighter integration and management between services provides a more seamless user experience (which is to say, if done correctly, no one notices that everything is working perfectly).
  • Provisioning – which delivers infrastructure as code to provision public cloud and on-premise environments. This gives IBM the flexibility to respond to whatever operational conditions exists in their customer’s ecosystem with a solution that can be delivered quickly, and with minimal disruption.

All of these capabilities are built with open standards, which prevents vendor lock-in.

More specifically, the value add of Hazelcast for the IBM sales organization covers the following areas:

  • Available: Hazelcast is available today in the IBM Marketplace and Console.
  • Enterprise-grade: Hazelcast delivers an in-memory data grid for caching and operational data that delivers against the requirements of the most demanding, high-volume customer-facing organizations in the world.
  • Timely: Websphere eXtreme Scale is not being ported to IBM Cloud Private and IKS, because of this, Hazelcast IMDG Enterprise HD will be recommended for customers in these circumstances. The net effect of this will be to drive ICP node consumption, supported by high availability for multi-cloud data center and hybrid cloud. This addresses a critical market need with an improved experience, and is available right now.
  • Relevant: the Hazelcast solution is secure, fully integrated, enterprise-class, and cloud-native caching solution that addresses a key component of the IBM Cloud Private reference architecture – cache.

This opens up several interesting potential use cases:

  • Improved Caching – offering a high density memory store, client, and member, with full JCache support, elastic scalability, the fastest performance for complex workloads, always on (fault tolerant) and cloud-ready. This doesn’t just help IBM customers move gracefully to the cloud, it takes them to the leading edge of digital transformation by enabling an instant response to complex events.
  • An In-Memory Data Grid – driven by simple, modern APIs that support distributed data structures, computing, and clustering, highly elastic and highly scalable, and delivered in a client-server or embedded architecture. Regardless of the complexity of the customer’s information technology ecosystem, Hazelcast a solution that accelerates every facet of the business, creating new business opportunities while driving transformative change.
  • Microservices infrastructure – improved maintenance of customer facing solutions via isolation of services with many small clusters, supported by a service registry and multiple network discovery mechanisms supporting interprocess messaging. Systems that were functionally separated and poorly integrated (and customer-facing) now work together seamlessly and at a speed that operates in real-time for end-users.
  • Web Session Clustering – Supports WebSphere Liberty, enabling seamless fall-over between user sessions, high performance and easy scale out, and designed to work efficiently with large session objects using delta updates. In addition, Hazelcast supports WAN replication in both embedded and client-server mode.

In summary, this addresses a mission-critical and time-sensitive issue for IBM, and does so with a leading edge and fully integrated solution that puts IBM at the leading edge of digital transformation.