The hybrid cloud portfolio of IBM has been enriched by two new managed services Red Hat AI Inference on IBM Cloud and Red Hat OpenShift Virtualization Service on IBM Cloud. To be exact designed to make seamless transition from AI experimentation to production, these hosted solutions deliver a calmer, more secure canal for virtualization at scale.
As enterprises go from proof of concept AI projects, to full automation, the development, production and deployment3 needs of reliable, high-performance infrastructure is critical. IBM’s new managed services deliver a Red Hat-based platform that enables customers to keep pace with increased inference requirements and modernize VM workloads all in a unified, secure environment.
“Enterprises are eager to operationalize AI, but the gap between pilot and production may hold them back. With Red Hat AI Inference on IBM Cloud, we’re giving clients a managed platform that is built for real workloads, not just experiments. At the same time, our new virtualization offering on IBM Cloud is enabling enterprises to migrate to a resilient and security-focused virtualization environment while giving them the flexibility to adopt Red Hat OpenShift at their own pace for future AI workloads and containerization,” said Jason McGee, CTO, IBM Cloud.
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Accelerating AI from Pilot to Production
Red Hat AI inference on IBM Cloud is an IBM-managed offering that brings developer teams a way to deploy production ready AI models without the operational requirement of managing GPUs or infrastructure. Powered by a high performance inference engine, the service is a Models-as-a Service implementation that allows real-time AI integration into business processes.
“These new managed services are the next step in our work with IBM to help enterprises drive innovation in the era of AI with an open, consistent hybrid cloud platform. By bringing Red Hat AI Inference and Red Hat OpenShift Virtualization Service to IBM Cloud, we are empowering clients to modernize at their own pace while preparing for an AI-driven future,” said Ashesh Badani, senior vice president and chief product officer, Red Hat.
The service addresses the common challenge of cost volatility in AI scaling by offering a predictable pricing structure.
Key technical highlights include:
- Enterprise-Level Performance: Built on vLLM and designed for low-latency performance with guaranteed uptime for agents and applications.
- Broad Model Offering: The initial offering will include Granite 4.0 H Small (IBM), Llama 3.3 70B Instruct, and Mistral-Small models, with customized model offerings to follow in late May 2026.
- Governance Integration: Seamless integration with IBM Cloud IAM and audit logging means that applications critical to your mission will be secure and compliant.
Modernizing Virtualization for the Hybrid Era
At the same time, IBM is working to cater to the change in virtualization strategy in the industry at large. Red Hat OpenShift Virtualization Service on IBM Cloud provides organizations with a managed option to transition legacy applications running in VMs to a Kubernetes architecture.
Hosted in IBM Cloud VPC Bare Metal, this service cuts down the TCO with its platform lifecycle management automation. These aspects include things like patching, worker node recovery, and updating the system itself. With the assistance provided by IBM Technology Expert Labs and IBM Consulting, the service helps organizations migrate their systems without disruptions and serves as a great starting point for containerization initiatives.
