IBM Fusion services

In the service-based IBM Fusion HCI System , choose the features that you want to deploy. You do not have to install all the services at installation time instead enable a feature that is available as a service on-demand basis.

As an administrator, you can install or enable the required services from the user interface, but make sure you meet the resource requirements of individual services.

You can also manage the upgrade of these IBM Fusion services from the user interface. For steps to upgrade in IBM Fusion HCI System, see Upgrading IBM Fusion HCI System services.
Note: All IBM Fusion services are supported on the Bare Metal platform of IBM Fusion HCI System.

Global Data Platform service

The Global Data Platform (GDP) in IBM Fusion HCI is a unified data management solution that simplifies access, sharing, and management of data across diverse environments. It offers scalable storage optimized for hybrid cloud and AI workloads, ensuring seamless data availability and mobility across multiple locations. It is a software-defined file and object storage that enables organizations to build a global data platform for artificial intelligence (AI), high-performance computing (HPC), advanced analytics, and other demanding workloads.

The Global Data Platform storage type provides the following features:
  • File storage
  • High availability via capacity-efficient erasure coding
  • Metro and regional disaster recovery
  • CSI snapshot support with built-in application consistency
  • Encryption at rest
  • Ability to mount file systems hosted by remote IBM Storage Scale clusters.

Fusion Data Foundation

Fusion Data Foundation as storage in IBM Fusion. You can enable and manage the Fusion Data Foundation services, deploy, and scale up or out the storage cluster. The Fusion Data Foundation storage type provides the following features:
  • Block, file, and object storage
  • High availability through automatic data replication
  • Metro and regional disaster recovery
  • CSI snapshot support
  • Encryption at rest

The provider deployment mode is supported. In this mode, you run a storage cluster locally that can serve multiple mode clusters. The provider mode is similar to an external Fusion Data Foundation configuration. It acts as the provider and base storage on the host cluster. You can provision new clusters within a managed rack and consume storage from the central provider cluster.

Backup & Restore

The Backup & Restore service provides the following features:
  • Policy-driven backup of applications that run on Red Hat® OpenShift®
  • Change block detection for Ceph RBD block volumes. It greatly reduces backup times for applications using block mode volumes, including OpenShift Virtualization VMs based on RBD block volumes.
  • Orchestration of application consistent online backups through recipes
  • Multi-cluster Backup & Restore by using a hub and spoke topology
The Backup & Restore provides application-centric backup and data recovery. To know more about the service and its architecture, see Data protection.

Data Cataloging

The Data Cataloging provides data insight for exabyte-scale heterogeneous file, object, backup, and archive storage on premises and in the cloud. The software easily connects to these data sources to rapidly ingest, consolidate, and index metadata for billions of files and objects. For more information about the Data Cataloging service and its architecture, see Data Cataloging.