Setting up an S3 Compliant Object Store in IBM Spectrum Scale with Object Compression, ILM and Tiering

IBM Spectrum Scale is a high-performance clustered filesystem that offers support for multiple protocols including object. Since IBM Spectrum Scale is based on the OpenStack Swift implementation of the object protocol there is a need to also support Amazon’s Simple Storage Service (S3) object protocol for applications that require an S3 compatibility. This emulation is achieved by using Swift middleware. The ability to support both AWS S3 and OpenStack Swift protocols in IBM Spectrum Scale Object means that it can support a broader variety of Cloud applications using either object protocol. Amazon has recently announced the deprecation of their path-style addressing scheme in favour of their virtual-hosted style addressing scheme (also referred to as DNS style addressing). Since OpenStack Swift by default supports path-style addressing, it is important to be able to understand what is required to enable this virtual-hosted style addressing in IBM Spectrum Scale to ensure compatibility with S3 applications going forward. This document covers all the steps that are required in order to achieve this. In addition, advanced Spectrum Scale functions like Object compression, Object Information Lifecycle Management (ILM) and Object Tiering are detailed in depth to showcase the benefits of using IBM Spectrum Scale for your Object storage requirements.