Introduction to IBM Storage Fusion Data Foundation provider mode

This section provides an overview of IBM Storage Fusion Data Foundation provider mode.

The IBM Storage Fusion Data Foundation is layered on Red Hat OpenShift Service on bare metal and comprises Fusion Data Foundation provider. IBM Storage Fusion HCI System with Fusion Data Foundation provides base storage on all Hosted Control Plane based clusters as shown in the following figure:

Figure 1. IBM Storage Fusion Data Foundation provider mode
Schematic diagram of Fusion Data Foundation provider mode.

IBM Storage Fusion Data Foundation provider mode is a deployment configuration where the OpenShift cluster (on bare metal) serves local storage for OpenShift virtualization, standard applications, and hosted clusters that are running on top of OpenShift virtualization. Provider mode consists of two key components:

  • Provider - Provider is a deployment mode for Fusion Data Foundation storage services that are built on a minimum of three worker nodes on bare metal volumes. This mode enables external clusters to connect through the client operator. Fusion Data Foundation replicates the data across these nodes, making the data tolerant to node failures.

  • Client - Client is a managed container storage interface (CSI) deployment that connects to the provider to provide a local storage class for the hosted clusters.