Achieving a state of digital modernity with cloud-native applications requires a shift in IT investment strategies with a renewed focus on speed and flexibility, across the entire enterprise from the edge to the core to the cloud.
And for an increasing number1 of organizations around the world, that means a sophisticated converging of containers and infrastructure. Specifically, advanced hyperconverged systems optimized for helping companies create new applications as microservices, deploying them in containers and managing them with Kubernetes, is the path to the modernized enterprise.
The new IBM Spectrum® Fusion Hyper-Converged Infrastructure – announced in April and made generally available today – is just such a system. The enterprise-grade turn-key Spectrum Fusion HCI is designed from the ground up to streamline container development and enable and ease access to the hybrid cloud.
It combines Red Hat® OpenShift® with integrated compute, storage, networking, and services that is ready from the factory to build, manage, deploy, and concurrently run containerized applications with sustained high performance and pre-built security.
IBM Spectrum Fusion HCI can connect with other geographically dispersed systems based on Red Hat OpenShift technology creating a vast infrastructure network to run containers everywhere. As this network scales, working with Kubernetes can be complex as organizations often face multiple consoles, user interfaces, logins and more.
To address this challenge, IBM Spectrum Fusion HCI simplifies management by providing unified visibility and control to run all your Kubernetes environment from a single management point, across local resources, remote data centers and hybrid cloud environments. This allows organizations to scale applications from development to production without complexity, helping enable the fast deployment of applications and reduce management costs.
According to the “2020 Red Hat Global Customer Tech Outlook” report2, Artificial Intelligence (AI) represents one of the top emerging workloads across hybrid cloud deployments. IBM Spectrum Fusion HCI supports GPU applications with NVIDIA A100 GPU servers to help organizations simplify and accelerate AI, compute-intensive Machine Learning (ML) workloads for data scientists, and inferencing tasks across datacenters, edge, and public clouds.
Backup of application data as well as systems metadata is a critical requirement. IBM Spectrum Fusion HCI integrates with IBM Spectrum Protect Plus for OpenShift to provide complete backup of the system. The backup feature allows administrators to take the entire system backup as well as granular application-level backup with customized backup intervals. The application-level backup can be stored locally leveraging the storage snapshot capability or externally using IBM Spectrum Protect Plus vSnap server’s wide range of target platforms ranging from block storage to S3 compliant object storage.
As customers move to hybrid cloud deployments, containers play a key role in portability and consistency across different environments. IBM Spectrum Fusion HCI is the right all-in-one solution that makes containers easy to build, easy to manage, easy to integrate and easy to run; helping clients improve operational agility by enabling the rapid delivery of cloud-native applications with ubiquitous access to data from edge-to-core-to-the-cloud.
And we’re not stopping there. In early 2022, we’ll release a software defined-only version of Spectrum Fusion that organizations can run on any system with Kubernetes and on any cloud. In these times of unprecedented change, organizations need systems like Spectrum Fusion that have the agility to reach the market faster and adapt more quickly to disruptions.