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® Redguide™ publication describes big data and analytics deployments that are built on IBM Spectrum Scale™. IBM Spectrum Scale is a proven enterprise-level distributed file system that is a high-performance and cost-effective alternative to Hadoop Distributed File System (HDFS) for Hadoop analytics services. IBM Spectrum Scale includes NFS, SMB, and Object services and meets the performance that is required by many industry workloads, such as technical computing, big data, analytics, and content management. IBM Spectrum Scale provides world-class, web-based storage management with extreme scalability, flash accelerated performance, and automatic policy-based storage tiering from flash through disk to the cloud, which reduces storage costs up to 90% while improving security and management efficiency in cloud, big data, and analytics environments. This Redguide publication is intended for technical professionals (analytics consultants, technical support staff, IT Architects, and IT Specialists) who are responsible for providing Hadoop analytics services and are interested in learning about the benefits of the use of IBM Spectrum Scale as an alternative to HDFS.

Advancing the science of medicine by targeting a disease more precisely with treatment specific to each patient relies on access to that patient's genomics information and the ability to process massive amounts of genomics data quickly. Although genomics data is becoming a critical source for precision medicine, it is expected to create an expanding data ecosystem. Therefore, hospitals, genome centers, medical research centers, and other clinical institutes need to explore new methods of storing, accessing, securing, managing, sharing, and analyzing significant amounts of data. Healthcare and life sciences organizations that are running data-intensive genomics workloads on an IT infrastructure that lacks scalability, flexibility, performance, management, and cognitive capabilities also need to modernize and transform their infrastructure to support current and future requirements. IBM® offers an integrated solution for genomics that is based on composable infrastructure. This solution enables administrators to build an IT environment in a way that disaggregates the underlying compute, storage, and network resources. Such a composable building block based solution for genomics addresses the most complex data management aspect and allows organizations to store, access, manage, and share huge volumes of genome sequencing data. IBM Spectrum™ Scale is software-defined storage that is used to manage storage and provide massive scale, a global namespace, and high-performance data access with many enterprise features. IBM Spectrum Scale™ is used in clustered environments, provides unified access to data via file protocols (POSIX, NFS, and SMB) and object protocols (Swift and S3), and supports analytic workloads via HDFS connectors. Deploying IBM Spectrum Scale and IBM Elastic Storage™ Server (IBM ESS) as a composable storage building block in a Genomics Next Generation Sequencing deployment offers key benefits of performance, scalability, analytics, and collaboration via multiple protocols. This IBM Redpaper™ publication describes a composable solution with detailed architecture definitions for storage, compute, and networking services for genomics next generation sequencing that enable solution architects to benefit from tried-and-tested deployments, to quickly plan and design an end-to-end infrastructure deployment. The preferred practices and fully tested recommendations described in this paper are derived from running GATK Best Practices work flow from the Broad Institute. The scenarios provide all that is required, including ready-to-use configuration and tuning templates for the different building blocks (compute, network, and storage), that can enable simpler deployment and that can enlarge the level of assurance over the performance for genomics workloads. The solution is designed to be elastic in nature, and the disaggregation of the building blocks allows IT administrators to easily and optimally configure the solution with maximum flexibility. The intended audience for this paper is technical decision makers, IT architects, deployment engineers, and administrators who are working in the healthcare domain and who are working on genomics-based workloads.