New storage solutions from IBM

Management and data placement with guaranteed access, resiliency and availability infrastructure hybrid cloud are complex problems to solve. However, this reality is what IBM tries to cover with the latest announcements of the last April 27th.

The Big blue presented important innovations in its storage range with SDS solutions native container (Software Defined Storage) designed to help organizations expand the availability of their data through the hybrid cloud ensuring greater availability and resilience, while maintaining a level of performance that does not prevent critical business applications from becoming dependent.

The first novelty is the IBM Spectrum Fusion, a tool available from the second half of 2021 and that the american company defines as a “container-native hybrid cloud data platform for OpenShift. Built with a storage platform that includes the essential elements necessary for mission critical containers and the hybrid cloud with storage services that are necessary for enterprise applications and a data driven Red Hat OpenShift environment”. This software-defined storage solution (SDS) brings together the unstructured data management capabilities of IBM Spectrum Scale, the metadata management capabilities found in IBM Spectrum Discover, and the data protection elements of IBM Spectrum Data. Protection Plus, and designed to integrate with IBM Cloud Satellite to manage services from the cloud in the data center, edge, or to the public cloud with a single dashboard.

The first realization of the new tool will come in the form of a container-native hyperconverged infrastructure (HCI), under the name of Spectrum Fusion HCI, which will integrate computing, storage and networking in a single solution. 

It is being designed to come equipped with Red Hat OpenShift, to enable organizations to support both virtual machine and container environments and provide software-defined storage for the cloud, edge, and data centers.

The IBM Spectrum Fusion HCI base configuration includes a 42U rack, two 100GbE ethernet switches, two management ethernet switches, and six 1U x86 compute / storage nodes. The compute can scale up to twenty nodes, while the storage scales with ten 7.68TB NVMe flash drives per node.

The latest announcement affects the family of the high-performance physical devices IBM Elastic Storage Systems (ESS), presenting the renewal of the ESS 5000 model and the new ESS 3200 device. The existing ESS 5000 has been updated to support 10% more density than previously available for a storage capacity total of 15.2PB. On the other hand, the IBM ESS 3200 is introduced with a new 2U storage solution that is designed to provide a data throughput of 80 GB / second per node and increase the 100% of read performance over the ESS 3000 model. The system can also provide up to 367TB per 2U node of storage capacity.

Additionally, all ESS systems are equipped with automated optimized container deployment capabilities with the latest version of Red Hat ansible.

As the blue giant wanted to demonstrate, its key to success is its set of storage and data management software.

Jaume Campeny and Alba Massa