Executive summary

The evolution of IT environments continues with the transformation of organizations across the globe towards a better exploitation and operation on transactional and statistical data. The trend is towards hybrid application development, containerization and secured multi-cloud environments, which can deal with complex and distributed application workload, including AI use cases. In these adoptions, data processing and effective data management are crucial to achieve competitive advantages and ensure customer satisfaction.

IBM Fusion offers one storage solution for all your data, from databases, to containers and to shared file systems. The same data is shared in different environments and IT architectures where the most used data is automatically maintained.

IBM Fusion provides software defined storage for containerized workload running on Red Hat OpenShift Container Platform. It focuses explicitly on consumability and ease of use, by leveraging key concepts for persistence as defined by Kubernetes and OpenShift.

While IBM Fusion gives you the choice of leveraging IBM Storage® or Fusion Data Foundation (formerly known as Red Hat OpenShift Data Foundation), this whitepaper focuses on the use of IBM Storage Scale. IBM Spectrum Scale is a proven, scalable, high-performance data and file management solution, which is enabled for transactional computing, Big Data and Analytics, container workloads, and Cloud. IBM Storage Scale is being used extensively across multiple industries worldwide.

This paper illustrates how to leverage the capabilities of IBM Storage Scale for containerized workloads running on Red Hat OpenShift Container Platform (RHOCP) on IBM Z and IBM LinuxONE.