IBM’s storage division announces its most important fully container-native products today (adding to the container-native Spectrum Protect Plus and Spectrum Scale clients it already sells) – its Fusion software defined storage and Fusion HCI system. As we’ll see, it’s also making a number of important hardware, software and services enhancements that strengthen its links with Red Hat and widen the use of its storage offerings in hybrid multi-cloud even further. They show IBM Storage division’s all-out support for the development of containerized applications, which are slowly growing in the market (see my Figure above, which shows the annual spending on servers by virtualization status).
I’d like to thank IBM’s Eric Herzog and Sam Werner for my pre-briefing ahead of the public announcement.
Spectrum Fusion HCI and other hardware announcements
IBM has announced today its Spectrum Fusion – a container-native software defined storage solution – and its inclusion in the Spectrum Fusion HCI rack-based system; the software defined storage version will be available to purchase in the first half of 2022 and second half of 2021 for the HCI version . They are designed to make the deployment and management of container-based applications easier for enterprise customers.
Spectrum Fusion HCI is the physical manifestation of this software defined storage approach. So let’s look at it first:
- It is housed in a standard 42U rack cabinet.
- The base unit has 2 top of rack Ethernet 100Gbps switches, 2 Ethernet management switches and
- 6 1U storage/x86 compute nodes, each of which can contain between 2 and 10 NVMe flash drives, installed in pairs.
- The system can be expanded from 6 to a maximum of 20 nodes in increments of 2.
- It will also offer optional nodes incorporating 3 Nvidia A100 GPUs and AMD CPUs, also installed in pairs.
It has native integration with both IBM Cloud Satellite and Red Hat Advanced Cluster Management (ACM) and supports both virtual machines (Linux KVM – not VMware’s) and Docker container-based applications.
IBM Fusion HCI’s competitors include Dell EMC VxRail and vxRack, NetApp Astra and Portworx (acquired by Pure Storage in October last year).
IBM’s other hardware announcements today include:
- The introduction of the Elastic Storage System 3200, which is a new 2U array with a NVMe flash drive capacity of up to 368TB, dual active controllers, up to 12 ports for 100Gbps Ethernet (or 200Gbps using Infiniband) networking and has IBM Spectrum Scale built in. It also supports Spectrum Scale global data services and external Red Hat container storage. It replaces the ESS3000.
- The enhancement of the ESS5000 through the addition of an extra disk enclosure, increasing the maximum capacity of the SC version to 15.2PB.
- The addition of the Slicestor 92 to its Cloud Object Storage System, giving a new high end of 1.47PB raw capacity in a 5U array.
I’ve summarised these announcements in my Figure above. Like other system suppliers IBM is partnering more strongly with Nvidia in a number if these announcements, especially as it now owns Mellanox (the key Infiniband supplier) and is in the process of acquiring ARM.
Software enhancements for deeper Red Hat integration and even wider multi-cloud usage
IBM continues to extend the usability of its Spectrum Storage software today (see my Figure above). In particular:
- It has enhanced the data resilience of Spectrum Protect by adding retention sets to help customers retain long-term backup copies of Microsoft SQL Server and Exchange Server data to meet regulatory compliance.
- It has enhanced the data resilience of Spectrum Protect Plus for Red Hat OpenShift users through adding support for Spectrum Scale and CephFS file systems.
- It has enhanced the global data access of Spectrum Scale through allowing customers to mount external AWS S3 buckets as folders within its single global name space. It has added support for immutable (WORM) file sets as directories and for Red Hat Container Storage Interface (CSI) snapshots. IBM has also achieved Cohasset validation of the WORM capability for regulated industries.
Although these are not major announcements they show that IBM is constantly listening to its customers and adding features to make their lives easier.
IBM and Red Hat – well positioned for widespread enterprise container computing take up
The shift in server workloads from virtual machine-based to container-based is changing the supplier landscape, making VMware less – and Red Hat more- important.
Around 10 years after the introduction of VMware’s virtual machine approach for x86 servers, hardware suppliers created easy-to-deploy Hyper-Converged Infrastructure systems epitomized by VCE (now part of Dell EMC).
In turn the desire to avoid using proprietary software in their self-built systems, the largest and cleverest cloud service providers (AWS, IBM, Azure, Google, etc.) almost all used the KVM hypervisor built-in to Linux rather than VMware’s to deploy virtual machine workloads. These companies also pioneered the use of containers.
This time round enterprise customers need to adopt a technique which has been pioneered by the CSPs, while continuing to address relevant industry regulations, run older-style computing and embrace public clouds. IBM and Red Hat are developing the technology and management systems they need to bring container computing away from the boffins to manage alongside the rest of their IT estate.