IBM Spectrum Scale as a Persistent Storage for Red Hat OpenShift on IBM Z Quick Installation Guide

Abstract

IBM® Spectrum Scale, formerly named IBM General Parallel File System (GPFS), is a high-performance clustered file system software, that allows concurrent access to a single filesystem or set of filesystems from multiple nodes. IBM Spectrum® Scale Container Native Storage Access (CNSA) is the containerized version of IBM Spectrum Scale that provides a persistent file system for the latest generation of applications (called "containerized applications"), which takes advantage of high performance and benefits of IBM Spectrum Scale in a cloud containerized application world. IBM Spectrum Scale CNSA was introduced with IBM Spectrum Scale version 5.1.

This document describes the steps to deploy IBM Spectrum Scale in containers (CNSA) on Red Hat OpenShift Container Platform (OCP) running on IBM Z®. This Spectrum Scale cluster, called the "Local" storage cluster, will mount a filesystem from a second non-containerized Spectrum Scale storage cluster, called the "Remote" storage cluster.

This document also describes practical information for deploying IBM Spectrum Scale Container Storage Interface (CSI) driver on Red Hat OCP. This CSI driver allows Red Hat OCP Persistent Volumes (PV) to be provisioned from IBM Spectrum Scale. It handles storage provisioning requests at the OCP cluster level and makes API calls on the storage server to create the necessary volumes required by the applications.

Finally, this document contains the steps that explain how to use the CSI driver, after it is deployed, to set up dynamic provisioning of PVs on Red Hat OCP from IBM Spectrum Scale.

It is assumed that the reader has a good understanding of Red Hat OCP administration and IBM Spectrum Scale solution.