IBM Fusion

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IBM Fusion is IBM’s strategic offering for container-native software-defined storage. It is targeted for use by Red Hat OpenShift workload. IBM Fusion includes both IBM Storage Scale as well as IBM Fusion Data Foundation as choices for the underlying storage infrastructure.

There are some notable differences between IBM Storage Scale and IBM Fusion Data Foundation:

  • The actual IBM Storage Scale storage is always deployed outside of the IBM Fusion and Red Hat OpenShift cluster as externally shared storage (deployed on RHEL). IBM Fusion includes a client component called IBM Storage Scale Container Native Storage Access (CNSA). CNSA links the external Storage Scale storage to the Red Hat OpenShift cluster and allows to use Storage Scale as container-native storage.
  • IBM Fusion Data Foundation can be deployed either internally inside the Red Hat OpenShift cluster of IBM Fusion, or it can be deployed by using external (shared) IBM Storage Ceph storage. External Ceph storage deployment is only available on x86 systems. More details are described later in this document.

Regardless of the choice of underlying infrastructure, one of the key values of IBM Fusion is a growing set of additional services on top of the storage infrastructure.

Most notable is a powerful backup/restore service, which safe-guards data in both storage infrastructure options in the same user-friendly way. The coordination of backups is provided by a centralized “hub-server”, which makes a multi-cluster orchestration of data protection much easier than before. In each cluster, a lightweight “spoke” service acts as a local agent and performs the actual backup/restore of persistent volumes and application metadata. A powerful aspect of the backup/restore service is its ability to scope backup archives to individual application namespaces. Interoperability is a tremendous achievement of this concept, as backups can be exchanged across different cluster deployments and cluster versions as well as across different cloud storage providers. This makes it a true hybrid cloud solution. Both the backup hub and the spoke agent are fully supported on IBM Z and LinuxONE.

Figure 1. IBM’s software stack for container-native storage based on IBM Fusion
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Note: IBM Fusion Data Foundation is based on the same code base as Red Hat OpenShift Data Foundation. While this document uses IBM’s branding as IBM Fusion Data Foundation (which is a component of the offering IBM Fusion), all content applies to Red Hat’s Red Hat OpenShift Data Foundation as well (which is delivered from Red Hat’s Operator Hub). Both distributions are built from the same open source code base.