OpenStack is open source software that is widely used as a base with which to build cloud and infrastructure as a service solutions. OpenStack often is deployed on commodity hardware and used to virtualize various parts of the infrastructure (compute, storage, and network) to ease the sharing of the infrastructure across applications, use cases, or workloads.
IBM® Spectrum Scale is software that is used to manage storage and provide massive scale, a global namespace, and high-performance data access with many enterprise features. IBM Spectrum™ Scale is used in clustered environments and provides file protocol (POSIX, NFS, and SMB) and object protocol (Swift and S3) access methods.
Configuring IBM Spectrum Scale™ in systems that use OpenStack software offers benefits that are provided by the many enterprise features in IBM Spectrum Scale and the ability to consolidate storage for various OpenStack components and applications that are running on top of the OpenStack infrastructure under a single storage management plane.
This IBM Redpaper™ publication describes the benefits and best practice recommendations of the use of IBM Spectrum Scale in OpenStack environments. It also describes the steps that are used to configure the storage infrastructure that uses IBM Spectrum Scale with various OpenStack components.
The intended audience for this publication is technical decision makers, cloud architects, IT architects, and those readers who want to learn more about deploying an OpenStack cloud environment with Spectrum Scale storage.
Introduction
Spectrum Scale and Spectrum Scale Protocols
Solution and use cases provided by OpenStack components
Advantages of using Spectrum Scale Storage for OpenStack
Deployment models
Configuring OpenStack with IBM Spectrum Scale
Multitier storage architecture for OpenStack deployment
Conclusion