Introduction

IBM® Storage Enabler for Containers allows IBM storage systems to be used as persistent volumes for stateful applications running in Kubernetes clusters.

IBM Storage Enabler for Containers is based on an open-source IBM project, . Through the IBM Storage Enabler for Containers, Kubernetes persistent volumes (PVs) can be provisioned from IBM storage. Thus, IBM storage can be accessed by containers and used with stateful microservices, such as database applications (MongoDB, PostgreSQL etc).

IBM Storage Enabler for Containers uses Kubernetes dynamic provisioning for creating and deleting volumes on IBM storage systems. For details about volume provisioning with Kubernetes, refer to (kubernetes.io/docs/concepts/storage/volumes). In addition, IBM Storage Enabler for Containers utilizes the full set of Kubernetes FlexVolume APIs for volume operations on a host. The operations include initiation, attachment/detachment, mounting/unmounting etc.

Note: For the user convenience, this guide might refer to IBM Storage Enabler for Containers as Enabler for Containers.

This image shows IBM Storage Enabler for Containers integration with IBM storage. — Figure 1. Integration of IBM block storage systems and IBM Spectrum Scale in Kubernetes environment

Note:

IBM Spectrum Scale uses the network for communication between nodes in the Spectrum Scale cluster, as well as for accessing IBM Spectrum Connect. For example, Spectrum Connect uses the RESTful API, running on the IBM Spectrum Scale GUI node.
IBM Spectrum Scale must be installed on the worker nodes that access Spectrum Scale filesystems. Additional Spectrum Scale nodes might exist outside of the Kubernetes cluster. For example, the Spectrum Scale GUI and Spectrum Scale I/O servers might exist outside of the Kubernetes cluster. In this case, the storage from these nodes might be made available directly to worker nodes that run IBM Spectrum Scale.
Currently, only one backend (block storage or IBM Spectrum Scale) can be configured on a single Kubernetes cluster via IBM Storage Enabler for Containers.