Nov 3, 2025

IBM Partners with Cockroach Labs to Deliver Cloud-Native Resilience Nov 3, 2025 Cockroach Labs, the company behind the distributed SQL database CockroachDB, announced an OEM partnership with IBM to bring CockroachDB PostgreSQL for IBM to market. According to Cockroach Labs, this collaboration gives enterprises a trusted path to modernize mission-critical applications with a cloud-native PostgreSQL database engineered for active-active business continuity across hybrid environments—including IBM LinuxONE, Linux on Z, Power Systems, and Red Hat OpenShift—as well as major public clouds and other distributed platforms. "The modernization journey can't wait. Enterprises today face unprecedented pressure to deliver always-on experiences, meet rigorous compliance standards, and unlock real-time data for AI," said Spencer Kimball, CEO and co-founder of Cockroach Labs. "Through our partnership with IBM, we're combining CockroachDB's cloud-native, distributed architecture with the resilience and security of IBM's enterprise platforms – bringing resilience, scale, and AI-readiness to the environments where they already run their most important systems." CockroachDB was purpose-built to solve the challenges of running relational workloads in cloud-native environments. By combining PostgreSQL compatibility with a distributed architecture, CockroachDB delivers: Always-on availability across zones, regions, or clouds Enterprise-grade security with encryption and compliance, enhanced by IBM LinuxONE's quantum-safe protections Elastic scale without re-architecting Geo-partitioning for data locality and global regulatory compliance For IBM, integrating CockroachDB means providing enterprises a trusted way to modernize without compromise, bridging their core s390x-enabled systems on IBM Z and LinuxONE with the flexibility of IBM Power Systems, Red Hat OpenShift, and IBM Cloud. "Our partnership with Cockroach Labs brings distributed SQL innovation directly into IBM's hybrid cloud and enterprise platforms," said Martin Oberhofer, vice president and distinguished engineer at IBM. "By combining CockroachDB's cloud-native resilience with IBM's trusted technologies like LinuxONE and Linux on Z, we're giving clients a modernization path that feels familiar with PostgreSQL yet is built for the future. Together, we empower enterprises to run mission-critical workloads with security, efficiency, and the scalability demanded by the AI era." This OEM agreement extends IBM's data leadership across its platforms: LinuxONE & IBM Z: Pairing CockroachDB's distributed SQL with LinuxONE's pervasive encryption, AI-infused Telum processors, and energy efficiency. Red Hat OpenShift: Seamless Kubernetes-native operations, enabling portability across hybrid and multi-cloud environments. IBM Cloud & Power Systems: A consistent foundation for enterprises modernizing mission-critical apps while maintaining governance and control. Together, these capabilities provide enterprises a modernization path that feels familiar—with PostgreSQL at the developer layer—yet future-ready, with the resilience and scale demanded by AI-era workloads, the companies said. The IBM + CockroachDB OEM gives enterprises a modern path forward—enabling them to move to cloud-native and Kubernetes environments without rewriting core applications. Built for always-on resilience, CockroachDB delivers distributed scale and zero RPO by default, now fully supported on IBM's most trusted platforms. It's also architected for AI. With real-time CDC streaming into watsonx.data and support for pgvector, CockroachDB powers both transactional and vector workloads—making it ideal for AI use cases like retrieval-augmented generation (RAG). According to the vendors, by consolidating fragmented workloads onto CockroachDB on IBM LinuxONE, enterprises can simplify operations, reduce risk, and modernize with confidence. For more information about this news, visit www.cockroachlabs.com .