IBM has announced Spectrum Scale file system support for containers. The release means that companies building containerised IT environments can use their existing Spectrum Scale storage systems as opposed to buying new products.
Spectrum Connect enables the provisioning, monitoring, automation and orchestration of IBM block storage in containerised, VMware and Microsoft PowerShell environments. Spectrum Scale is integrated with Spectrum Connect using IBM Storage Enabler for Containers v2.0, an open source software product.
Storage Enabler for Containers v2.0 extends Spectrum Connect’s containerised storage support to Spectrum Scale v5.0 and later versions. It also supports mixed Fibre Channel and iSCSI deployments in the same Kubernetes cluster and Kubernetes Service Accounts for pod authorisation procedures.
The upshot is that stateful microservices such as MongoDB and PostgreSQL can use Spectrum Scale storage when running in containers. Admins specify persistent volumes using Kubernetes or IBM Cloud Private orchestrator. They then provision the storage via Spectrum Connect storage service for Kubernetes storage class objects.
Comment+
IBM is doing a good job in keeping its legacy high-performance computing Spectrum Scale (the rebranded GPFS -General Parallel File System) relevant for container software shops.
