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).

The Swift High Latency Media project seeks to create a high-latency storage back end that makes it easier for users to perform bulk operations of data tiering within a Swift data ring. In today's world, data is produced at significantly higher rates than a decade ago. The storage and data management solutions of the past can no longer keep up with the data demands of today. The policies and structures that decide and execute how that data is used, discarded, or retained determines how efficiently the data is used. The need for intelligent data management and storage is more critical now than ever before. Traditional management approaches hide cost-effective, high-latency media (HLM) storage, such as tape or optical disk archive back ends, underneath a traditional file system. The lack of HLM-aware file system interfaces and software makes it difficult for users to understand and control data access on HLM storage. Coupled with data-access latency, this lack of understanding results in slow responses and potential time-outs that affect the user experience. The Swift HLM project addresses this challenge. Running OpenStack Swift on top of HLM storage allows you to cheaply store and efficiently access large amounts of infrequently used object data. Data that is stored on tape storage can be easily adopted to an Object Storage data interface. This IBM® Redpaper™ publication describes the Swift High Latency Media project and provides guidance for installation and configuration.