Storage cluster deployment approaches

The growing list of operating modalities is an evidence that flexibility is a core tenet of IBM Fusion Data Foundation. Use this information to help you to select the most appropriate approach for your environments.

The main difference between internal and external modes is that you can deploy IBM Fusion Data Foundation either entirely within Red Hat OpenShift Container Platform (Internal approach) or to make available the services from a cluster running outside of Red Hat OpenShift Container Platform (External approach).

Internal mode

Deployment of IBM Fusion Data Foundation entirely within Red Hat OpenShift Container Platform has all the benefits of operator based deployment and management. You can use the internal-attached device approach in the graphical user interface (GUI) to deploy Fusion Data Foundation in internal mode using the local storage operator and local storage devices.

Ease of deployment and management are the highlights of running Fusion Data Foundation services internally on OpenShift Container Platform. There are two different deployment modalities available when Fusion Data Foundation is running entirely within Red Hat OpenShift Container Platform:
  • Simple
  • Optimized
Simple deployment
Fusion Data Foundation services run co-resident with applications. The operators in Red Hat OpenShift Container Platform manages these applications.
A simple deployment is best for situations where,
  • Storage requirements are not clear.
  • Fusion Data Foundation services runs co-resident with the applications.
  • Creating a node instance of a specific size is difficult, for example, on bare metal.
For Fusion Data Foundation to run co-resident with the applications, the applications must have local storage devices, or portable storage devices attached to them dynamically, like EBS volumes on EC2, or vSphere Virtual Volumes on VMware, or SAN volumes.
Note: PowerVC dynamically provisions the SAN volumes.
Optimized deployment
IBM Fusion Data Foundation services run on dedicated infrastructure nodes. Red Hat OpenShift Container Platform manages these infrastructure nodes.
An optimized approach is best for situations when,
  • Storage requirements are clear.
  • IBM Fusion Data Foundation services run on dedicated infrastructure nodes.
  • Creating a node instance of a specific size is easy, for example, on cloud, virtualized environment, and so on.

External mode

IBM Fusion Data Foundation exposes the IBM Storage Ceph services running outside of the OpenShift Container Platform cluster as storage classes.

The external approach is best used in the following use cases:

  • Storage requirements are significant (600+ storage devices).
  • Multiple OpenShift Container Platform clusters need to consume storage services from a common external cluster.
  • Another team, Site Reliability Engineering (SRE), storage, and so on, need to manage the external cluster providing storage services. Possibly a preexisting one.