How you can use the IBM Cloud Object Storage service on your on-premises, edge or multicloud infrastructure.

IBM Cloud Object Storage is now available for IBM Cloud Satellite locations as a managed service. You can use IBM Cloud Object Storage to store and retrieve data on your on-premises infrastructure, an edge or a multicloud location in IBM Cloud Satellite, using the same familiar tools and interfaces as with any other public IBM Cloud location.

This service offers you all the capabilities of running IBM Cloud Object Storage as-a-service on your infrastructure with all the other service integrations in IBM Cloud, without the overhead of installing or managing the lifecycle of the software technologies. It also provides skilled resources needed to continually maintain such a complex system.

Consistent public cloud experience on your own infrastructure

You can now experience the same fidelity, agility and security of public cloud by deploying the Cloud Object Storage as-a-service on your on-premises infrastructure in an IBM Cloud Satellite location. By provisioning IBM Cloud Object Storage on an IBM Cloud Satellite location you’ll take advantage of the benefits of public cloud using the following:

• IBM Cloud UI console
• API and SDKs
• Feature parity with public cloud (e.g., versioning, expiration, etc.)
• Identity management and access control with IAM in public cloud
• Data at rest encryption and integration with IBM Key Protect for IBM Cloud key management system (in public cloud)

As you deploy Cloud Object Storage on your own infrastructure (in a Satellite location) using the IBM Cloud UI console, Cloud Object Storage APIs or SDKs, IBM Cloud will provide the tools, support and integration for managing the COS service. You will be responsible for installation and management of your own hardware infrastructure.

The Key Protect key management system (KMS) is provided as a managed service in public cloud locations where IBM Cloud Satellite is hosted, and it has the same SLA and assurances as other services, including the high availability management and operational compliance.

Integration and availability

The service is deployed in an IBM Cloud Satellite location, which is tethered to the closest IBM public cloud region for orchestration and control. Currently, IBM Cloud Object Storage service for IBM Cloud Satellite is available globally in a number of geographical regions in Americas, Europe and Asia Pacific (see list). In the future, the service will be available wherever a base IBM Cloud Satellite location can be deployed.

Sizing and pricing

• IBM Cloud Object Storage service (for IBM Cloud Satellite) can be consumed in T-shirt size service instances ranging from 12TB to 96TB
• A flat monthly pricing per service instance is applied, ranging from $0.02 to $0.04 per GB per month:

Why use the Cloud Object Storage service for IBM Cloud Satellite?

With Cloud Object Storage as a managed service, IT practitioners can optimize their operations by maintaining the storage on their private infrastructure, edge or any cloud — depending on the use-case — while still monitoring and integrating with IBM Cloud services:

• Run low-latency applications that need to be run in close proximity to on-premises data, including workloads running on factory floors for automated operations in manufacturing, medical imaging data and media streaming.
• Meet data residency or regulatory compliance requirements by storing/retrieving data on-premises in the region where a public cloud location is not available.
• Run applications on the edge that store and process large amount of local manufacturing data, IOT or telco data that is used for business analytics.

Use case example

Imagine a scenario where you are responsible for managing workloads for the offshore operations of an oil and gas facility. With the proliferation of discrete data sources across sensors, embedded microcontrollers and other devices, massive amounts of data (on the order of TBs/day/equipment) are generated. The large amount of collected data needs to be stored, analyzed and contextualized using AI models. These self-learning models are used in predictive analytics for the equipment health, pipeline security, leakage and other environmental impacts.

For such a system, if a public cloud-based object store is used for data storage and retrieval, you will experience low performance for your analytics applications and high data transfer costs due to transmission latencies and bandwidth charges associated with the transfer of large amounts of data to the remote cloud location. On the other hand, a managed Object Storage service running on the edge in a Satellite cloud closer to the applications and the data sources is the preferred solution for such a use case. This eliminates the high data transmission latencies and charges associated with repeated egress of data to the remote cloud.

Provisioning IBM Cloud Object Storage for Satellite locations

The provisioning experience for Cloud Object Storage as-a-service requires the interaction of two personas: the persona (Cloud Object Storage administrator) deploying Cloud Object Storage as-a-service and the persona (Satellite administrator) managing the IBM Cloud Satellite location. The Cloud Object Storage administrator simply selects the desired capacity (T-shirt size) for deployment of the service on the Satellite location. On the other hand, the persona managing the Satellite location will need to ensure that the infrastructure (hosts, storage) required by the service are available and are assigned to the Cloud Object Storage service cluster.

Use the Cloud Object Storage UI console to initiate the service deployment (choose between public cloud and Satellite):

1. On the Object Storage catalog page, you can now provision Cloud Object Storage service for satellite by selecting the Satellite tile.
2. Specify an existing Satellite location (user on-premises, edge or a multicloud location) or create a new Satellite location. The Satellite administrator needs to configure a new “Location” using the Satellite console and assign hosts for the Satellite Control Plane.
3. Choose Cloud Object Storage service capacity by selecting a service instance size. 
4. Specify the service instance name.

To facilitate the provisioning of a service instance for Cloud Object Storage as a managed service on the user’s Satellite location, the following infrastructure requirements must be met for capacity and compute resources:

• For Cloud Object Storage capacity size of 12TB to 48TB: 1.5X storage along with 9 nodes of 4vCPU and 16GiB of memory
• For Cloud Object Storage capacity size of 96TB to 48TB: 1.5X storage along with 18 nodes of 4vCPU and 16GiB of memory

For further details on provisioning the service, see the documentation.

Get started

To get started using IBM Cloud Object Storage for IBM Cloud Satellite, select Satellite on the Cloud Object Storage page.

To learn more, visit the documentation.