Storage considerations

IBM Cloud Pak for Data customers can obtain OpenShift Data Foundation Essentials storage entitlement at no charge.

Entitlement terms

IBM Storage Fusion entitlement applies only to self-managed OpenShift.

You are entitled to use IBM Storage Fusion with the following limitations:

• You can use up to 6 TB of IBM Storage Fusion storage.
• You can use IBM Storage Fusion for up to 12 months.

If you exceed these terms, a separate license is required.

Contact your IBM Sales representative for access to this storage.

IBM Cloud Pak for Data customers can obtain IBM Storage Fusion storage entitlement at no charge.

Entitlement terms

IBM Storage Fusion entitlement applies only to self-managed OpenShift.

You are entitled to use IBM Storage Fusion with the following limitations:

• You can use up to 6 TB of IBM Storage Fusion storage.
• You can use IBM Storage Fusion for up to 12 months.

If you exceed these terms, a separate license is required.

Contact your IBM Sales representative for access to this storage.

For details about the amount of storage you can use, see How many volumes can be ordered.

IBM Storage Fusion supports both ReadWriteMany (RWX access) and ReadWriteOnce (RWO access) with the same storage class.

For details on creating the recommended storage class, see Setting up IBM Storage Scale storage.

IBM Storage Scale Container Native supports both ReadWriteMany (RWX access) and ReadWriteOnce (RWO access) with the same storage class.

For details on creating the recommended storage class, see Setting up IBM Storage Scale storage.

• gp2-csi
• gp3-csi

• ibmc-file-gold-gid
• ibm-file-custom-gold-gid

By default, all services use multiple replicas for high availability. OpenShift Data Foundation maintains each replica in a distinct availability zone.

Replication is supported and can be enabled within the IBM Storage Scale Storage Cluster in a variety of ways, see Data Mirroring and Replication in the IBM Storage Scale documentation.

Replication is supported and can be enabled within the IBM Storage Scale Storage Cluster in a variety of ways, see Data Mirroring and Replication in the IBM Storage Scale documentation.

By default, most services use a storage class that supports 3 replicas.

For details about the replicas for each storage class, see Creating Portworx storage classes.

For details about the storage classes required for each service, see Storage requirements.

When you create an EBS volume, it is automatically replicated within its Availability Zone to prevent data loss due to failure of any single hardware component.

You can use EFS replication to create a replica of your EFS file system in the AWS Region of your choice. When you enable replication on an EFS file system, Amazon EFS automatically and transparently replicates the data and metadata on the source file system to the target file system. For details, see Amazon EFS replication.

You can create a snapshot schedule to automatically copy snapshots to a destination volume in a remote data center for Data replication. For details, see Replicating data in the IBM Cloud documentation.

You can enable replication from the IBM Cloud console. For details, see Replicating data.

Tight integration with Velero CSI plugin for Red Hat OpenShift Container Platform backup and recovery.

For storage level backup, see Protecting Data in the IBM Storage Fusion documentation.

On-premises

Limited support.

IBM Cloud

Supported with the Portworx Enterprise Disaster Recovery plan.

For details, see Backing up and restoring data.

OpenShift Data Foundation uses Linux Unified Key System (LUKS) version 2 based encryption with a key size of 512 bits and the aes-xts-plain64 cipher.

Support for FIPS cryptography

By storing all data in volumes that use RHEL-provided disk encryption and enabling FIPS mode for your cluster, both data at rest and data in motion, or network data, are protected by FIPS Validated Modules in Process encryption. You can configure your cluster to encrypt the root file system of each node. For details, see FIPS 140-2 in the OpenShift Data Foundation documentation:

• Version 4.8
• Version 4.10
• Version 4.12

If you have OpenShift Data Foundation Advanced, you can also encrypt persistent volume claims (PVCs) in addition to enabling encryption for the whole cluster. You can enable PVC encryption for storage that is created by the ocs-storagecluster-ceph-rbd storage class.

For details, see Encryption in the IBM Storage Scale documentation.

For details, see Encryption in the IBM Storage Scale documentation.

Portworx uses the LUKS format of dm-crypt and AES-256 as the cipher with xts-plain64 as the cipher mode.

On-premises deployments

Refer to Enabling Portworx volume encryption in the Portworx documentation.

IBM Cloud deployments

To protect the data in your Portworx volumes, encrypt the volumes with IBM Key Protect or Hyper Protect Crypto Services.

Network requirements

Your network must support a minimum of 10 Gbps.

I/O requirements

Each node must have at least one enterprise-grade SSD or NVMe device that meets the Disk requirements in the system requirements.

For more information, see Planning your deployment in the OpenShift Data Foundation documentation.

If SSD or NVMe aren't supported in your deployment environment, use an equivalent or better device.

Network requirements

You must have sufficient network performance to meet the storage I/O requirements.

I/O requirements

For details, see Disk requirements in the system requirements.

Network requirements

You must have sufficient network performance to meet the storage I/O requirements.

I/O requirements

For details, see Disk requirements in the system requirements.

Network requirements

Your network must support a minimum of 10 Gbps.

For details, see Prerequisites in the Portworx documentation.

I/O requirements

For details, see Disk requirements in the system requirements.

For details on performance, see FIO performance in the Portworx documentation.

Network requirements

You must have sufficient network performance to meet the storage I/O requirements.

I/O requirements

For details, see Disk requirements in the system requirements.

Network requirements

You must have sufficient network performance to meet the storage I/O requirements.

I/O requirements

For details, see Disk requirements in the system requirements.

Network requirements

You must have sufficient network performance to meet the storage I/O requirements.

I/O requirements

For details, see Disk requirements in the system requirements.

Network requirements

You must have sufficient network performance to meet the storage I/O requirements.

I/O requirements

For details, see Disk requirements in the system requirements.

Network requirements

You must have sufficient network performance to meet the storage I/O requirements.

For details, see Network connection in the IBM Cloud File Storage documentation.

I/O requirements

For details, see Disk requirements in the system requirements.

The default I/O settings are typically lower than the minimums specified in the Disk requirements section.

To improve the I/O performance for production environments, you must adjust the I/O settings. Contact IBM Software Support for guidance on how to adjust the settings according to Changing the size and IOPS of your existing storage device.

• 10 vCPU per node on three initial nodes.
• 2 vCPU per node on any additional nodes

For details, see Resource requirements.

• 24 GB of RAM on initial three nodes.
• 5 GB of RAM on any additional nodes.

For details, see Resource requirements.

On each node, you must have at least one SSD or NVMe device. Each device should have at least 1TB of available storage.

For details, see Storage device requirements.

See the IBM Storage Scale Container Native hardware requirements.

For details, see the IBM Storage Scale Container Native requirements

See the IBM Storage Scale Container Native requirements.

For details, see the IBM Storage Scale Container Native requirements

On-premises

4 vCPU on each storage node

IBM Cloud

For details see the following sections of Storing data on software-defined-storage (SDS) with Portworx:

• What worker node flavor in Red Hat OpenShift on IBM Cloud is the right one for Portworx?
• What if I want to run Portworx in a classic cluster with non-SDS worker nodes?

Storage is not automatically expanded and is created in smaller chunks.

Increasing the size of the volumes improves I/O performance for production environments. Contact IBM Software Support as indicated in the preceding row.

If you are running the Prometheus Cluster Monitoring stack on IBM Cloud, you might notice that pods consume more local storage. You can reduce the retention periods of your logs or you can configure logs to be saved in persistent storage instead of local storage. For more information, see Configuring the monitoring stack. To troubleshoot issues, see Worker nodes show status of disk pressure.