Integrating Spectrum Accelerate into a cloud environment

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If your organization has a VMware infrastructure, you’re probably looking for advanced, reliable, and robust storage capabilities. With IBM Spectrum Accelerate, not only do you obtain all of the above, but, most importantly, you can use your own server and disk infrastructure for assembling, setting up, and running one or more storage systems. You can find much more details about various Spectrum Accelerate capabilities here and here.

This blog post will focus on a very particular aspect of Spectrum Accelerate, namely integration.

Spectrum Accelerate can be smoothly integrated with various independent software vendor platforms, applications, or virtualization. To facilitate this integration, IBM delivers a range of cloud storage solutions, as shown below:

Spectrum Control Base

IBM® Spectrum Control Base Edition is a centralized cloud integration system that brings together a gamut of IBM storage provisioning, virtualization, automation, and monitoring solutions. It is a unified server platform that enables the storage administrator to:

• Select which IBM storage systems (arrays) and what storage pools should be available for use in the VMware environment
• Control which specific vCenter servers can utilize the IBM storage resources

You can manage Spectrum Control Base via a simple user-friendly Web-based interface. For example, you can instantly display all the resources of an IBM Spectrum Accelerate storage system, including its virtual machines, host systems, datastores, volumes, pools, and so on:

OpenStack

OpenStack is a cloud management software that features a self-service user interface for workload provisioning, virtual image management, and monitoring.

To manage IBM Spectrum Accelerate, you need to use the XIV/DS8000 Cinder driver. After the driver is installed on the OpenStack Cinder nodes, storage volumes can be allocated by the Cinder nodes to the Nova-compute nodes. Virtual machines on the Nova-compute nodes can then utilize these storage resources.

See the concept diagram to understand how Spectrum Accelerate is connected to the OpenStack cloud environment and provides storage resources.

RESTful API

IBM Spectrum Accelerate systems can also be managed through programmable Web applications that establish an interface with the IBM Hyper-Scale Manager RESTful APIs.

The RESTful API is a client/server control model, in which the API focuses on the components’ roles and resources, and ignores their internal implementation details.

The RESTful API supported by Spectrum Accelerate adds functions for storage administration tasks, including Copy Services. This API allows Spectrum Accelerate clients to develop their own storage management infrastructure around it, or include it into their storage cloud administration infrastructure.

For all the pertinent information regarding API protocol specifications, error handling, versioning, and security, refer to this document.

Command Line Interface (CLI)

IBM Spectrum Accelerate systems can be controlled from a CLI management terminal by logging in to the storage system and issuing CLI commands.

You can use the XIV CLI (XCLI) terminal application (included in the XIV Management Tools software package) or any conventional terminal application to connect to the management IP address or hostname of the Spectrum Accelerate storage system.

You can also automate the use of CLI commands via automation through programming. You can develop your own software tools to harness the power of Spectrum Accelerate CLI commands, and complete the most sophisticated tasks without manual intervention.

For comprehensive information about each CLI command, refer to the IBM Knowledge Center

The Storage Management Initiative Specification (SMI-S)

SMI-S is a standard storage management protocol developed and maintained by the Storage Networking Industry Association (SNIA). Today's most prominent use of it is done by Microsoft System Center Virtual Machine Manager (SCVMM). Spectrum Accelerate can be managed directly via SCVMM, since it implements SMI-S, without requiring any additional software.

The Spectrum Accelerate Open API uses SMI-S to view LUN information. The overview of the Spectrum Accelerate Open API is located here.

Our next blog post will discuss how to make sure that Spectrum Accelerate shuts down gracefully and safely in case of accidental power outage.

Stay tuned!