ADVA teams with IBM to help enterprises manage hybrid cloud workloads

ADVA (FSE: ADV) today announced that its Ensemble Connector can provide businesses with easy, secured access to IBM Cloud Satellite. With its zero-touch provisioning (ZTP) and the Ensemble management and orchestration (MANO) suite, the cloud-native platform supports automated deployments, helping enterprises manage their applications across any environment with IBM Cloud Satellite. IBM Cloud Satellite, now generally available, enables clients to run IBM Cloud services anywhere – on IBM Cloud, on premises, in multi-cloud environments or at the edge – all delivered as a service. This flexibility will help bring cloud capabilities to where client data resides, in the environment of their choice, while focusing on consistency, user experience, and security.

With its open architecture, IBM Cloud Satellite builds on IBM’s deep industry expertise and can help enterprises across a variety of industries, including telecommunications, healthcare, banking, insurance, travel and transportation, transform into digital-first organizations. The need to modernize mission-critical workloads is intensifying. According to a recent IBM Institute for Business Value report, 74% of CEOs interviewed during the COVID-19 pandemic believe cloud computing will most help their organization deliver these results over the next 2-3 years. We see a cornerstone of this transformation is in edge computing. The continued proliferation of edge devices is expected to shift the amount of data that resides at the edge compared to within central data centers. As this transition takes place, IBM Cloud Satellite is designed to bring cloud services to where clients’ data already resides – and help them bridge to where they want to go.

ADVA is part of IBM’s ecosystem of partners fueling hybrid cloud environments by helping clients manage and modernize workloads from bare-metal to multi-cloud and everything in between with Red Hat OpenShift, the industry’s leading enterprise Kubernetes platform. IBM Cloud Satellite is engineered to give clients the flexibility to bring their applications to environments where their data resides while leveraging the security of IBM Cloud.¹

“With the pace of cloud adoption accelerating, companies are increasingly turning to hybrid cloud to allow them to innovate more efficiently, while maintaining high levels of security and control,” said Harish Grama, general manager, IBM Cloud. “To help facilitate this momentum, IBM is investing $1 billion in its ecosystem initiative over the next three years to support ecosystem partners and speed the development of platforms such as IBM Cloud Satellite. Collaborating with ecosystem partners like ADVA can help offer a wider set of clients new ways of bringing IBM Cloud to where their data resides.”

ADVA’s Ensemble Connector is an open vendor-neutral network operating system and hosting platform. It runs on a wide variety of standard servers from low-end units with small Atom CPUs up to multi-socket Xeon platforms. The solution helps to accelerate softwarization and virtualization by offering service providers and enterprises access to Ensemble Harmony, a portfolio of flexible and disaggregated networking technologies. As the basis for edge cloud applications such as IBM Cloud Satellite, Ensemble Connector is designed to simplify the deployment, operation, and management of edge cloud installations. Its operational features, such as ZTP, support wired and wireless deployment models, and maintenance capabilities help to streamline deployment at scale. Ensemble Connector is designed to be an ideal platform for powering universal CPE (uCPE) deployments by offering networking, operations and choice at the edge of the network.

“We believe that by teaming with IBM, we’re able to offer enterprises an efficient way to optimize the location of their workloads for their latency, security and bandwidth needs. Our Ensemble Connector is designed to simplify the installation of IBM Cloud Satellite, delivering all the benefits of Cloud Satellite with no hassle,” commented James Buchanan, GM, Edge Cloud, ADVA. “Our Ensemble Connector enables communications functions to be implemented as virtual network functions (VNFs) running on standard servers. And, thanks to our solution’s ZTP capabilities, these servers can be simply drop-shipped to the end site, with no pre-configuration required. Virtual machines (VMs) for IBM Cloud Satellite can be instantiated and populated using our Ensemble MANO suite. This helps ensure end users can enjoy all the benefits of the cloud with the same telecom resiliency they’re used to.”

¹. Based on IBM Hyper Protect Crypto Service, the only public-cloud enabled FIPS 140-2 Level 4-certified Hardware Security Module (HSM). FIPS 140-2 Security Level 4 provides the highest level of security defined in this standard. At this security level, the physical security mechanisms provide a comprehensive envelope of protection around the cryptographic module with the intent of detecting and responding to all unauthorized attempts at physical access.