Introducing Red Hat OpenShift Data Foundation 4.10 on IBM zSystems and LinuxONE
Expanded persistent storage options for Red Hat OpenShift applications
By Andrei Constantinescu, IBM
Red Hat OpenShift Data Foundation is a powerful infrastructure to provide persistence to containerized workloads. Red Hat OpenShift Data Foundation is not a storage system itself, but rather a set of cluster data management services running on top of Red Hat OpenShift and abstracting underlying storage infrastructure specifics.
When running Red Hat OpenShift on IBM zSystems and IBM LinuxONE, customers can take full advantage of the platform capabilities and characteristics:
- Non-disruptive growth - Vertical and horizontal scalability help to accommodate a substantial workload increase on demand.
- Highest scalability - Supports up to 20 billion HTTPS transactions per day with OLTP microservice applications running on OpenShift Container Platform in one physical machine.
- Containerized workload - Provides a state of the art microservices architecture, which can also be co-located with traditional transactional z/OS services and databases running on IBM zSystems.
- Multi tenancy with full LPAR isolation - Users can securely share a single physical hardware server, with logical partitions (LPARs) certified at EAL5+, and virtual machines certified at EAL4.
- Consolidation and business continuity - Sharing resources efficiently by consolidating multiple distributed server workloads onto a single, highly reliable physical system
In IBM zSystems, the hardware consolidation means that capacity and operational analytics and analysis is simplified. This is because all results are consolidated on the single hardware machine for the entire Red Hat OpenShift environment versus having a distributed environment with many physical servers. As a result, capacity planning is more predictable.
What is new with the Red Hat OpenShift Data Foundation 4.10 release?
With the new release of Red Hat OpenShift Data Foundation 4.10, Red Hat has taken the next step and added External Mode for IBM zSystems and LinuxONE, as well as highly available single cluster deployments across multiple LPARs. Here are some more details on these capabilities.
Red Hat OpenShift Data Foundation can be deployed in different modes:
- External Mode
- Application pods run on one or more Red Hat OpenShift clusters, while Red Hat Openshift Data Foundation storage is provided from an external Red Hat Ceph cluster. This implies that lifecycle, monitoring, and management of Red Hat OpenShift and Red Hat Openshift Data Foundation are decoupled. Compute and storage infrastructure scale independently in different clusters.
- This approach is optimized for scale and performance (on-premises only). Typically the external Red Hat OpenShift Data Foundation is deployed as a Red Hat Ceph Storage environment on a x86 bare metal deployment. Since this new release 4.10, external mode is now also supported on IBM zSystems and LinuxONE.
- For completeness, prior to release 4.10 the only deployment option for IBM zSystems and LinuxONE was the internal mode, which installs Red Hat OpenShift Data Foundation within a single Red Hat OpenShift cluster.
- High Availability (HA) based on a single cluster spread across multiple LPARs
- High Availability is not required, but is recommended for production environments.
- One key element of resilience on IBM zSystems is the virtualization layer of a Logical Partition (LPAR), which provides a highly secure hardware isolation. Given that LPAR virtualization is EAL5+ certified, each single LPAR can be considered as a logical hardware unit of its own. Deploying a single Red Hat OpenShift cluster with Red Hat OpenShift Data Foundation across multiple LPARs can achieve a high available-distributed setup by spreading across largely independent logical units.
- Thanks to the redundancy built into IBM zSystems hardware, this deployment on multiple LPARs and hardware units(CECs) is the most simple setup for HA. There is flexibility on how the nodes of a single cluster can be spread across LPARs, hardware units and data centers.
You can read more about Red Hat OpenShift 4.10 at https://cloud.redhat.com/blog/meet-cloud-data-management-needs-with-red-hat-openshift-data-foundation-4.10.
For Red Hat OpenShift Data Foundation 4.10 on IBM zSystems and LinuxONE, we have also published a detailed reference architecture document, which provides an overview of the options available for implementing Red Hat OpenShift Data Foundation on these platforms. This public document describes best practices for installing and configuring Red Hat OpenShift Data Foundation on IBM zSystems and IBM LinuxONE, and can be found at https://www.ibm.com/docs/en/linux-on-systems?topic=architecture-storage.
IBM Storage Suite for Cloud Paks
Red Hat OpenShift Data Foundation is available either as an individual offering or as part of IBM Storage Suite for IBM Cloud Paks.
The IBM Storage Suite for Cloud Paks brings a complete storage management offering to the same container environment that runs and manages applications.
IBM Storage Suite for Cloud Paks offering covers two major product for IBM zSystems and LinuxONE: Spectrum Scale Cloud-Native Storage Access and Red Hat OpenShift Data Foundation. All of this runs on Red Hat OpenShift Container Platform.
The cloud-native storage technologies in the IBM Storage Suite for Cloud Paks bring the latest and most advanced software-defined storage technology to IBM zSystems and LinuxONE. With this new offering that combines modern software-defined storage for containerized environments to enable data services to the large IBM zSystems and LinuxONE user base, we are adding even more options to complement the already impressive feature set around performance, security, cryptography, reliability, and scale on IBM zSystems and LinuxONE.