Storage for Containers

As full enterprise workloads move to the cloud and continual organizational efforts remain focused on application modernization, containers have become the go-to technology for application developers. Containers were initially built for stateless applications, but a growing majority of organizations are using containers to host stateful applications in production. To be clear, "Stateful" implies that storage in a

As containers become the norm for organizations, its uses are spanning across development, testing and production. The more users trust their workloads to run in containers on cloud-native environments, organizations are struggling to find a single viable solution that meets the needs of their containerized and non-containerized workload requirements. Application modernization requires an equally modernized storage infrastructure that is capable supporting the performance, capacity and resiliency requirements for enterprises who need a complete and persistent foundation for both production and dev/test containerized applications.

Today we are excited to announce the latest release of IBM Spectrum Fusion, now with two deployment options: software defined and as a hyper-converged infrastructure. IBM Spectrum Fusion enables organizations to create a consistent and standardized approach to application and data management for any type of workload running on Red Hat OpenShift Container Platform that needs access to block, file, and/or object storage.

As Red Hat OpenShift hybrid cloud application footprints continue to expand both in scale and reach, we have seen organizations look to enterprise-grade data services to support these mission-critical workloads. With the introduction of IBM Spectrum Fusion, Red Hat OpenShift customers can deploy geo-dispersed hybrid cloud infrastructure with enterprise ready data protection, mobility, scalability, and data discovery - all built in," said Brent Compton, senior director, Data Foundation Business, Red Hat. "Additionally, IBM Spectrum Fusion includes Red Hat OpenShift Data Foundation Essentials, providing tight data services integration with Red Hat OpenShift. This combination of Red Hat OpenShift, Red Hat OpenShift Data Foundation and IBM Spectrum Fusion represents an innovative leap forward in maximizing the value of application containers."

IBM Spectrum Fusion architectural view

IBM Spectrum Fusion addresses the expectations of application owners and developers with managed and consistent infrastructure resource allocation based on a published storage and protection profiles that reduce the time to provision infrastructure from days to as few as minutes in a consistent way. This helps our customers achieve their desired levels of operational agility, improve time to market/production, accelerate their continuous integration/development initiatives, and so much more.  Specifically with IBM Spectrum Fusion, customers benefit from the following:

• One Application and Data Platform - All types of cloud infrastructure

With Red Hat OpenShift (and any other Kubernetes platform), apps run wherever it makes the most sense, and moving them only takes a few seconds. OpenShift plays a major role in the data management of public, private and hybrid cloud infrastructures. In this case, IBM Spectrum Fusion deployed in both public and private clouds enables a consistent IT environment with a common set of data services and management workflows to reduce IT costs and complexities while increasing the flexibility in how capacity and resiliency are provisioned in a self-service/managed way without compromising business requirements. Whether running on-premises or not, IBM Spectrum Fusion delivers cloud data services consistently

• Alleviate Data Gravity Constraints

Moving data is costly and wastes valuable time. Unlike transporting apps, in cloud environments transporting data takes hours or days, it can impact IT capabilities and can result in egress charges when the data lives in the public cloud. IBM Spectrum Fusion eliminates data gravity by enabling instant access to data by creating a managed copy in a local cache thus removing the need to move data from its source location to a point closest to the application development. This allows organization to access data from anywhere within the Spectrum Fusion cluster at any point in time from edge-to-core-to-cloud.

• One Method for Data Storage, Management and Protection

There's a growing demand for enterprises to digitize their infrastructure to keep up with their competitors and maximize the efficiency and growth of the business. As a container native storage offering, IBM Spectrum Fusion allows enterprises to manage their growing data storage more effectively in a simple and inexpensive way.

• Scale Faster and More Securely

Data storage limitations can hinder an organization's agility and growth. This is especially true with container architectures and the ease at which it allows the IT staff to expand their container estate with dynamic life cycle characteristics and data protection requirements.  IBM Spectrum Fusion accelerates app delivery and instantly moves data from development to production with the ability to scale and move workloads and data on-premises and between clouds. This ensures real-time movement of data to the edge for scale and availability, and from the edge for analysis.

• Operate with Simplicity and Optimize Without Disruption

Because of its ability to automate complex application processes, Red Hat OpenShift and Ansible is very popular among enterprises with container strategies. However, it can be challenging to implement - especially for non-developers - and requires extensive knowledge and training. Attempting to add old school storage and data protection to this already tricky configuration and set up is a recipe for disaster.

IBM Spectrum Fusion is simple. After a short and automated install, it runs alongside application containers and offers a more advanced set of data services that ensures data storage, resilience and affords seamless extensibility. This new data services platform instantly adapts to the workload. It's managed by the same tools used to manage other Red Hat OpenShift applications and resources. DevOps teams don't need to rely on operations or bring in storage experts; they can do this themselves based on a published set of storage and protection profiles. And despite all that inherent simplicity, this new data services platform offers enterprise-grade capabilities previously available only on traditional, expensive, and monolithic storage appliances. Enterprises can instantly access data at any point in time, clone and copy, scale up and out, and run on-premises and in the cloud.

So, in essence, what IBM is bringing to the table is a consistent, secure, protected, and reliable storage environment that is Container Native, yet still maintains the table stakes requirements of today's truly valuable on-premises storage, in a truly modern, scalable storage infrastructure. As well, we've created one that is easy to manage, grow, replicate and optimize.

Truly this is a dynamic storage environment that brings to the container world something as flexible as Red Hat's OpenShift is to the application side.