The Spectrum Scale feature called transparent cloud tiering allows cloud object storage providers such as IBM Cloud Object Storage (previously known as Cleversafe), IBM SoftLayer®, and Amazon S3 to be used as a storage tier for IBM Spectrum Scale. Transparent cloud tiering can help cut storage capital and operating costs by moving data that does not require local performance to an on or off premise cloud object storage provider.

Transparent cloud tiering reduces the complexity of cloud object storage by making data transfers transparent to the user or application. This capability can help you adapt to a hybrid cloud deployment model where active data remains directly accessible to your applications and inactive data is placed in the correct cloud (private or public) automatically through Spectrum Scale policies.

The IBM Redpaper Enabling Hybrid Cloud Storage for IBM Spectrum Scale Using Transparent Cloud Tiering draft was published in October and the final publication this week was updated with the latest Spectrum Scale 4.2.2 features related to transparent cloud tiering.  One of the management GUI changes added a new Files > Transparent Cloud Tiering page. The Transparent Cloud Tiering page provides both summarized and attribute-specific details of the transparent cloud tiering service, which is integrated with the IBM Spectrum Scale system.

Also, Spectrum Scale introduced component-specific email notifications. The system administrator can now configure the email notifications in the Settings > Event Notifications page to send email notifications to the recipients for reported events.  Transparent cloud tiering is one of the functional areas supported with the new feature.

For more information regarding what's new in Spectrum Scale 4.2.2 take a look at Sandeep R. Patil's DeveloperWorks posting this week: In a Nutshell : What is new in Spectrum Scale 4.2.2 ?

New sections added to the final Redpaper are Restoring files from the cloud tier and Bulk file restore.  The following figure (Figure 7 Spectrum Scale cluster with Cloud Service nodes in the redpaper) is updated to show Spectrum Scale transparent cloud tiering components for a typical multi-node configuration.

For more detailed information regarding Spectrum Scale 4.2.2 see the IBM Knowledge Center at:

http://www.ibm.com/support/knowledgecenter/STXKQY_4.2.2/ibmspectrumscale422_welcome.html