Deploy IBM Spectrum Scale on the AWS Cloud with New Quick Start

Posted on: Sep 13, 2017

This new Quick Start automatically deploys a highly available IBM Spectrum Scale cluster with replication on the Amazon Web Services (AWS) Cloud, into a configuration of your choice. (A small cluster can be deployed in about 25 minutes.)

IBM Spectrum Scale is a flexible, software-defined storage solution that can be deployed as highly available, high-performance file storage. It can scale in several dimensions, including performance (bandwidth and IOPS), capacity, and number of nodes that can mount the file system. The product’s high performance and scalability helps address the needs of applications whose performance (or performance-to-capacity ratio) demands cannot be met by traditional scale-up storage systems. The IBM Spectrum Scale software is being made available through a 90-day trial license evaluation program.

This Quick Start automates the deployment of IBM Spectrum Scale on AWS for users who require highly available access to a shared name space across multiple instances with good performance, without requiring an in-depth knowledge of IBM Spectrum Scale.

The Quick Start deploys IBM Network Shared Disk (NSD) storage server instances and IBM Spectrum Scale compute instances into a virtual private cloud (VPC) in your AWS account. Data and metadata elements are replicated across two Availability Zones for optimal data protection. You can build a new VPC for IBM Spectrum Scale, or deploy the software into your existing VPC. The automated deployment provisions the IBM Spectrum Scale instances in Auto Scaling groups for instance scaling and management.

The deployment and configuration tasks are automated by AWS CloudFormation templates that you can customize during launch. You can also use the templates as a starting point for your own implementation, by downloading them from the GitHub repository. The Quick Start includes a guide with step-by-step deployment and configuration instructions.

To get started with IBM Spectrum Scale on AWS, use the following resources:

About Quick Starts
Quick Starts are automated reference deployments for key workloads on the AWS Cloud. Each Quick Start launches, configures, and runs the AWS compute, network, storage, and other services required to deploy a specific workload on AWS, using AWS best practices for security and availability. This Quick Start was created by IBM in partnership with AWS.