Announcing IBM Storage Fusion on AWS

Customers needs are constantly evolving, weather it is modernizing applications and process by adopting container workloads, providing new AI solutions, or migrating existing software investments to the cloud, there is always a need to storage and data protection. IBM Storage Fusion provides a collection of services to compliment the modern business objectives.

What is Fusion?

Fusion starts off by providing a shared storage solution for container workloads, with Fusion Data Foundation. Fusion Data Foundation is a CSI compliant, Read / Write Many file storage, and object storage solution backed by Ceph, Amazon Elastic Block Store (EBS) , and Amazon Simple Storage Service (S3). Storage nodes are added to Red Hat OpenShift and the attached storage can then be presented as persistent volumes to container workloads. A single Fusion cluster can provide storage to multiple OpenShift clusters, reducing the cost and administrative overhead of having a storage cluster per container workload cluster.

Fusion goes beyond simple shared storage, as it adds a data protection layer catering for backup / restore and disaster recovery options for container workloads, simplifying the resilience needs of customers. Fusion adds data catalog capability helping customers gain insight and improved data management.

Provisioning:

IBM Fusion deploys on top of OpenShift via a Kubernetes Operator, once the operator is installed the configuration will add OpenShift worker / compute nodes as storage nodes which will present the storage as persistent volumes (PVs) to the Kubernetes layer of OpenShift.

Fusion under pinning your data, AI and modernization:

IBM Fusion will run anywhere that OpenShift will, supported on self managed OpenShift Container Platform (OCP) and managed OpenShift (ROSA). IBM Fusion is also a supported shared storage option for various IBM software solutions which run on OpenShift

Bringing structure to data:

IBM Fusion data cataloging automatically and continuously indexes objects and files creating a powerful and customizable data catalog providing insights into data regardless of type or location. Customers can query the catalog using SQL or API commands.

Customers with artificial intelligence (AI), machine learning (ML), and analytics workflows can use the catalog to create custom tags and policy-based workflows for orchestration and content inspection. Fusion data catalog can be used for faster AI analysis, compliance classification, image and video indexing, identifying personal data, AI data pipeline integration, real-time data discovery, and providing new insights data scientists and information workers.

Conclusion and next steps:

IBM Storage Fusion is an evolution beyond simply shared storage! So weather customers are looking for a fully supported storage option, or way of managing hybrid multi cluster data protection or data insights to compliment modernization and AI/ML workloads, Fusion has something for all.

IBM Fusion is now available via the AWS Marketplace, and has a 60 day trail option. Go now and trial drive IBM Fusion for your business requirements. Feel free to reach our to your AWS or IBM account team and request a deeper dive.