About this document

Container-based applications provide organizations with a new paradigm for application development and deployment. Kubernetes and containerized applications allow organizations to streamline their DevOps environment and rapidly deploy, develop, and maintain both stateless and stateful applications.

Red Hat OpenShift Container Platform (RHOCP) is Red Hat’s enterprise Kubernetes distribution. RHOCP provides developers, IT organizations, and business leaders with a hybrid cloud application platform for developing and deploying new containerized applications on a secure platform. RHOCP also offers scalable resources that require minimal configuration and management. Developer can create and deploy applications by delivering a consistent environment throughout the lifecycle of the application including development, deployment, and maintenance. The self-service capabilities and minimal maintenance requirements reduce the burden on IT organizations that are associated with deploying and maintaining application platforms.

Container workloads are stateless by definition. This fundamental assumption makes their lifecycle so easy and efficient to orchestrate. A container is easily portable and can be scaled up and down at ease. A container can be restarted and be moved between servers at any time. But this implies that any kind of permanent persistence needs to be provided separately.

Adding persistence to containers and making them stateful is exactly the focus of IBM Fusion and IBM Fusion Data Foundation: IBM Fusion Data Foundation provides software-defined storage for containerized applications. IBM Fusion Data Foundation manages storage resources that are used by application containers and ensures that persistence is strictly decoupled from the orchestration of applications. Engineered as the data and storage services platform for RHOCP, IBM Fusion Data Foundation helps teams to develop and deploy applications quickly and efficiently across hybrid cloud and multi cloud container deployments.

Along with IBM Scale, IBM Fusion Data Foundation is the foundation of IBM Fusion, which is IBM’s preferred software stack for container-native storage. By licensing IBM Fusion, a customer has access to the IBM-branded IBM Fusion Data Foundation. It is also possible to purchase a subscription of a Red Hat branded Red Hat OpenShift Data Foundation directly from Red Hat. Both options are based on the same open source software.

This reference architecture document provides an overview of the options available for implementing IBM Fusion Data Foundation on IBM Z and IBM® LinuxONE and within IBM® z/OS® Container Extensions (IBM zCX).

In addition, this document reviews topologies and configurations, as well as implementation choices and outlines their pros and cons. This document also details the best practice for installing and configuring IBM Fusion Data Foundation on IBM Z. This also includes important design considerations and key integrations between the products of the Red Hat OpenShift ecosystem.

The information that is provided by this document is intended to help organizations deploy IBM Fusion Data Foundation on IBM Z quickly in a reliable and supported configuration.

This document should not be considered as product documentation. Official IBM Fusion documentation exists for all the components included within this reference architecture and should be reviewed before deployment.

This document is intended for system integrators, IT architects, system administrators, and application developers. It is assumed that the reader has previous experience with Kubernetes, Red Hat OpenShift Container Platform, IBM Z and IBM® LinuxONE, and Red Hat® Enterprise Linux®.