IBM Brings AI-Enhanced OpenShift Container Platform To Power Systems

December 1, 2025 Timothy Prickett Morgan

Given that Big Blue owns Red Hat, any Red Hat software that runs on X86 or Arm machinery should eventually make its way onto IBM’s own Power processors and their Power Systems servers. But, it takes time to do this, of course, and some Red Hat software is more important to the Power Systems based than other systems software.

In announcement letter AD25-1628, dated November 25 when IT Jungle was, like many of you, getting ready for the Thanksgiving holiday, IBM said that it had Red Hat OpenShift Platform Plus ready to go on its Power Systems iron. The software was, in fact, ready on announcement day.

The OpenShift Platform Plus stack builds on Red Hat’s OpenShift Container Platform implementation of the Kubernetes container controller that was open sourced more than a decade ago by Google and that has been advanced through the work of close to 100,000 developers since that time. It includes:
OpenShift Container Platform, which itself is a bunch of stuff wrapped around Kubernetes that is tested and integrated with the OpenShift Serverless, OpenShift Pipelines, and OpenShift GitOps.
Advanced Cluster Security for Kubernetes, which is a Kubernetes-native security layer.
Advanced Cluster Management for Kubernetes, which delivers end-to-end management visibility and control of Kubernetes clusters, including entire multicluster Kubernetes domains across multiple datacenters and public clouds.
OpenShift Data Foundation Essentials, which is a cluster data management services layer that provides data efficiency, resilience, and added security for OpenShift environments.
Quay, which is a security-enhanced private registry platform for managing content across global datacenter and cloud environments, focusing on cloud-native and DevSecOps development models and environments.
OpenShift Lightspeed, which is a generative AI virtual assistant that is integrated into the OpenShift console and is used to help manage OpenShift installations.

Given all of these features, this is a kind of IBM i-like implementation of OpenShift, given all of the bells and whistles and integration points and it is probably the one that Power Systems shops should prefer over the base OpenShift Container Platform.

OpenShift Container Platform debuted first on X86 platforms way back in June 2015, when Red Hat embraced Docker containers and added them to its Linux containers and wrapped them all up with Kubernetes orchestration. Red Hat delivered OpenShift Container Platform in February 2020 for IBM’s System z and LinuxONE mainframes and made it available for selected Arm instances in March 2022. OpenShift Platform Plus debuted in April 2021 on X86 platforms. And now, you can get it for Power Systems servers running Red Hat Enterprise Linux. There is a good chance that more than a few IBM i shops will use it as their Linux container platform.

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