High-speed I/O workloads are moving away from the SAN to Ethernet and IBM® Spectrum Scale is pushing the network limits. The IBM Spectrum® Scale team discovered that many infrastructure Ethernet networks that were used for years to support various applications are not designed to provide a high-performance data path concurrently to many clients from many servers. IBM Spectrum Scale is not the first product to use Ethernet for storage access. Technologies, such as Fibre Channel over Ethernet (FCoE), scale out NAS, and IP connected storage (iSCSI and others) use Ethernet though IBM Spectrum Scale as the leader in parallel I/O performance, which provides the best performance and value when used on a high-performance network. This IBM Redpaper publication is based on lessons that were learned in the field by deploying IBM Spectrum Scale on Ethernet and InfiniBand networks. This IBM Redpaper® publication answers several questions, such as, "How can I prepare my network for high performance storage?", "How do I know when I am ready?", and "How can I tell what is wrong?" when deploying IBM Spectrum Scale and IBM Elastic Storage® Server (ESS). This document can help IT architects get the design correct from the beginning of the process. It also can help the IBM Spectrum Scale administrator work effectively with the networking team to quickly resolve issues.

IBM® Spectrum Scale is a proven, scalable, high-performance data and file management solution. It provides world-class storage management with extreme scalability, flash accelerated performance, automatic policy-based storage that has tiers of flash through disk to tape. It also provides support for various protocols, such as NFS, SMB, Object, HDFS, and iSCSI. Containers can leverage the performance, information lifecycle management (ILM), scalability, and multisite data management to give the full flexibility on storage as they experience on the runtime. Container adoption is increasing in all industries, and they sprawl across multiple nodes on a cluster. The effective management of containers is necessary because their number will probably reach a far greater number than virtual machines today. Kubernetes is the standard container management platform currently being used. Data management is of ultimate importance, and often is forgotten because the first workloads containerized are ephemeral. For data management, many drivers with different specifications were available. A specification named Container Storage Interface (CSI) was created and is now adopted by all major Container Orchestrator Systems available. Although other container orchestration systems exist, Kubernetes became the standard framework for container management. It is a very flexible open source platform used as the base for most cloud providers and software companies' container orchestration systems. Red Hat OpenShift is one of the most reliable enterprise-grade container orchestration systems based on Kubernetes, designed and optimized to easily deploy web applications and services. OpenShift enables developers to focus on the code, while the platform takes care of all of the complex IT operations and processes. This IBM Redbooks® publication describes how the CSI Driver for IBM file storage enables IBM Spectrum® Scale to be used as persistent storage for stateful applications running in Kubernetes clusters. Through the Container Storage Interface Driver for IBM file storage, Kubernetes persistent volumes (PVs) can be provisioned from IBM Spectrum Scale. Therefore, the containers can be used with stateful microservices, such as database applications (MongoDB, PostgreSQL, and so on).

This IBM® Redbooks® publication provides information to help you with the sizing, configuration, and monitoring of hybrid cloud solutions using the transparent cloud tiering (TCT) functionality of IBM Spectrum™ Scale. IBM Spectrum Scale™ is a scalable data, file, and object management solution that provides a global namespace for large data sets and several enterprise features. The IBM Spectrum Scale feature called transparent cloud tiering allows cloud object storage providers, such as IBM Cloud™ Object Storage, IBM Cloud, and Amazon S3, to be used as a storage tier for IBM Spectrum Scale. Transparent cloud tiering can help cut storage capital and operating costs by moving data that does not require local performance to an on-premise or off-premise cloud object storage provider. Transparent cloud tiering reduces the complexity of cloud object storage by making data transfers transparent to the user or application. This capability can help you adapt to a hybrid cloud deployment model where active data remains directly accessible to your applications and inactive data is placed in the correct cloud (private or public) automatically through IBM Spectrum Scale policies. This publication is intended for IT architects, IT administrators, storage administrators, and those wanting to learn more about sizing, configuration, and monitoring of hybrid cloud solutions using IBM Spectrum Scale and transparent cloud tiering.