Executive summary

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Organizations across the globe continue to rapidly develop innovative software applications in hybrid and multi-cloud environments to achieve competitive advantages and ensure customer satisfaction. Adding statefulness and persistence to those applications is essential. Software defined storage (SDS) is emerging in a hybrid and multi-cloud strategy and provides persistence in a simple and flexible and cost-efficient way. Adding a powerful layer of persistence to containerized workload is the focus of IBM Fusion Data Foundation, also known as Red Hat OpenShift Data Foundation.

IBM Fusion Data Foundation provides a storage infrastructure for cloud users such as software developers, infrastructure administrators, data scientists, and solution architects.

Alongside with IBM Storage Scale, IBM Fusion Data Foundation is the fundamental storage technology on which IBM Fusion - IBM’s offering for container-native storage - is based on.

This software stack can run on the IBM Z and IBM® LinuxONE platform or within IBM® z/OS® Container Extensions (zCX).

The IBM Z platform can help to transform a customer’s storage infrastructure. It adds innovative data privacy, enterprise security, and cyber resiliency capabilities – all delivered through a hybrid cloud. In particular, IBM Z differentiates itself in four areas from other platforms running the Red Hat® OpenShift® software stack.

Protected business
IBM Z prevents security threats. They can run up to 19 billion fully encrypted transactions per day. Hardware-based encryption and compressing algorithm accelerate the performance of workloads.
App and data integration
IBM Z provide ultra-low latency for integration and modernization of colocated Red Hat OpenShift based workloads. This includes IBM Cloud Paks as well as existing apps and their data. The interaction between existing services and modern microservices is lightning fast.
Flexible and scalable
IBM Z allows for nondisruptive growth in one physical server: The workload can scale out to 2.4 million containers. By increasing the resource capacity within the same server, you can build an entire data center in a single box.
Efficiency and cost savings
IBM Z can reduce the lifecycle management costs and drive savings in operational management, security, and business continuity efforts. You can achieve an impressive reduction of energy and space consumption.

By combining the strength of IBM Z with the open source ecosystem of Red Hat OpenShift, the power of the mainframe can be used by modern containerized workloads in a consistent and easily consumable way, which is based on industry best practices.

This reference architecture document showcases a prescriptive, pre-validated, private SDS solution based on IBM Fusion and IBM Fusion Data Foundation.

The following key characteristics highlight the value of IBM Fusion Data Foundation and are detailed further in this document:

Open source
As IBM Fusion Data Foundation is based on a strong open source community and implemented consistently across multiple architectures, exciting storage topologies can be realized. This includes bridging bare metal, hybrid cloud environments, and different hardware architectures.
Dynamic provisioning of Storage
Dynamic, shared, and highly scalable, production-grade persistent software-defined storage for Red Hat OpenShift applications, which can easily grow with the needs of the application workload.
Developed, released, and deployed in sync with Red Hat OpenShift
  • Aligned release cycles and version schedule for Red Hat OpenShift products on all platforms.
  • Aiming at an aligned feature delivery for IBM Fusion Data Foundation.
Storage abstraction and portability
  • Logical storage infrastructure abstracts physical storage details, so data can be stored in many different places — but act as a single persistent repository.
  • A uniform set of Kubernetes storage services and hybrid cloud data services that abstract the customers’ storage infrastructure.
Simplified application development and administration approach
  • Tightly integrated into the developer and admin user experience of Red Hat OpenShift Container Platform.
  • Based on a common set of skills and well-known industry best practices.
  • Developers - even those with limited storage expertise - can provide storage directly from the Red Hat OpenShift platform without switching to a separate user interface.
  • As part of IBM Fusion, IBM Fusion Data Foundation is part of IBM’s preferred software stack for container-native storage.
Support for data-intensive workloads
  • Support for all common storage types, including file, block, or object storage.
  • Build and run any kind of workload that is created by enterprise Kubernetes users.
Take advantage of the IBM Z and IBM® LinuxONE platform
  • Achieve latency advantages.
  • Build secure cloud solutions.
  • Dynamic, granular resource allocation and scalability of up to millions of container instances.
  • Total cost of ownership reduction through consolidation into a single hardware unit.
  • Future proof backward and forward compatible hardware.
  • Allow for colocation.
  • Can run on IBM® LinuxONE or within the IBM z/OS Container Extensions (zCX).