This chapter describes the IBM Spectrum Virtualize product that is implemented in a cloud environment, which is referred to as IBM Spectrum Virtualize for Public Cloud. A brief overview of the technology that is behind the product introduces the drivers and business values of using IBM Spectrum Virtualize in the context of public cloud services. It also describes how the solution works from a high-level perspective.

This publication describes IBM Spectrum Virtualize for Public Cloud V8.3.

In this chapter, the following topics are described:

Companies are currently undergoing a digital transformation, and making architecture decisions that determine how their businesses are going to operate in the next couple of years. They recognize the value of delivering services by using the cloud, and many of them are already using public clouds to some degree. The role of the cloud is maturing and it is more often being considered as a platform for innovation and business value. The cloud is a key enabler to drive transformation and innovation for IT agility and new capabilities.

Nevertheless, one of the challenges for these organizations is how to integrate those public cloud capabilities with the existing back- nd. Organizations want to retain flexibility without introducing new complexity or requiring significant new capital investment.

Cloud integration can occur between different endpoints (cloud-to-cloud, on-premises to off-premises, or cloud to non-cloud) and at different levels within the cloud stack: infrastructure layer, service layer and, for example, at the application layer or at the management one. Within the infrastructure as a service (IaaS) domain, storage layer integration is often the most attractive approach for ease of migration and replication of heterogeneous resources and data consistency.

In this sense, coming from the IBM Spectrum Storage™ family, IBM Spectrum Virtualize for Public Cloud supports clients in their IT architectural transformation and migration towards the cloud service model, enabling hybrid cloud strategies or, for a cloud-native workload, providing the benefits of familiar and sophisticated storage functions on public cloud data centers, enhancing the existing cloud offering.

Running on-premises, IBM Spectrum Virtualize software supports capacity that is built into storage systems, and capacity in over 400 different storage systems from IBM and other vendors. This wide range of storage support means that the solution can be used with practically any storage in a data center today and integrated with its counterpart IBM Spectrum Virtualize for Public Cloud, which supports Amazon Web Services (AWS) Elastic Block Store (EBS) and its various options, which are detailed in Chapter 3, “Architecture of the solution” on page 23 and Chapter 4, “Planning and preparation for the IBM Spectrum Virtualize for Public Cloud on AWS deployment” on page 37.

 

Designed for SDS environments, IBM Spectrum Virtualize for Public Cloud represents a solution for public cloud implementations, and includes technologies that both complement and enhance public cloud offering capabilities.

For example, traditional practices that provide data replication simply by copying storage at one facility to largely identical storage at another facility are not an option for public cloud. Also, using conventional software to replicate data imposes unnecessary loads on application servers. More detailed use cases are analyzed in Chapter 2, “Typical use cases for IBM Spectrum Virtualize for Public Cloud” on page 9.

IBM Spectrum Virtualize for Public Cloud delivers a powerful solution for the deployment of IBM Spectrum Virtualize software in public clouds. This new capability provides a monthly license to deploy and use IBM Spectrum Virtualize for Public Cloud on AWS to enable hybrid cloud solutions, which offer the ability to transfer data between on-premises data centers by using any IBM Spectrum Virtualize -based appliance and multiple cloud environments.

With a deployment that is designed for the cloud, IBM Spectrum Virtualize for Public Cloud can be deployed in cloud data centers around the world where, after provisioning the infrastructure, an installation script automatically installs the software.

The term virtualization is used widely in IT and applied to many of the associated technologies. Its usage in storage products and solutions is no exception. IBM defines storage virtualization in the following manner:

The aggregation of volumes into storage pools enables you to better manage capacity, performance, and multiple tiers for the workloads. IBM Spectrum Virtualize for Public Cloud provides virtualization only at the disk layer (block-based) of the I/O stack, and for this reason is referred to as block-level virtualization, or the block aggregation layer. For the sake of clarity, the block-level volumes that are provided by the cloud are exposed as target volumes, and are seen by IBM Spectrum Virtualize as a managed disk (MDisk).

These MDisks are then aggregated into a storage pool, sometimes referred to as a managed disk group (mdiskgrp). IBM Spectrum Virtualize then creates logical volumes (referred to as volumes or VDisks) that are striped across all of the MDisks inside of their assigned pool.

The virtualization terminology is included into the wider concept of SDS, an approach to data storage in which the programming that controls storage-related tasks is decoupled from the physical storage hardware. This separation allows SDS solutions to be placed over any existing storage systems or, more generally, installed on any commodity x86 hardware and hypervisor.

Shifting to a higher level in the IT stack allows for a deeper integration and response to application requirements for storage performance and capabilities. SDS solutions offer a full suite of storage services (equivalent to traditional hardware systems) and federation of multiple persistent storage resources: internal disk, cloud, other external storage systems, or cloud and object platforms.

In general, SDS technology uses the following concepts:

IBM Spectrum Virtualize for Public Cloud offers a powerful value proposition for enterprise and cloud users who are searching for more flexible and agile ways to deploy block storage on cloud. Using standard Intel servers, IBM Spectrum Virtualize for Public Cloud can be easily added to existing cloud infrastructures to deliver more features and functions, which enhance the storage offering that is available on the public cloud catalog. The benefits of deploying IBM Spectrum Virtualize for Public Cloud are two-fold:

In this sense, IBM Spectrum Virtualize for Public Cloud offers data replication between the FlashSystem family, SAN Volume Controller, or VersaStack and Public Cloud and extends replication to all types of supported virtualized storage on-premises. Working together, IBM Spectrum Virtualize and IBM Spectrum Virtualize for Public Cloud support synchronous and asynchronous mirroring between the cloud and on-premises for more than 400 different storage systems from a wide variety of vendors. In addition, they support other services, such as IBM FlashCopy® and IBM Easy Tier®.

IBM Spectrum Virtualize, both on-premises and on cloud, provides a data strategy that is independent of the choice of infrastructure, which delivers tightly integrated functions and consistent management across heterogeneous storage and cloud storage. The software layer that is provided by IBM Spectrum Virtualize on-premises or in the cloud can provide a significant business advantage by delivering more services faster and more efficiently, enabling real-time business insights and supporting more customer interaction.

Capabilities such as rapid, flexible provisioning; simplified configuration changes; nondisruptive movement of data among tiers of storage; and a single user interface helps make the storage infrastructure (and the hybrid cloud) simpler, more cost-effective, and easier to manage.

IBM Spectrum Virtualize for Public Cloud helps make cloud storage volumes (block-level) more effective by including functions that are not natively available on the public cloud catalogs and that are traditionally deployed within disk array systems in the on-premises environment. For this reason, IBM Spectrum Virtualize for Public Cloud improves and expands the existing capabilities of the cloud offering.

Table 1-1 summarizes the IBM Spectrum Virtualize for Public Cloud features and benefits.

The initial release of IBM Spectrum Virtualize for Public Cloud is available on AWS. Block virtualization further uses public cloud infrastructure for various types of workload deployments whether it is new or traditional. The following features are supported on the AWS infrastructure:

The AWS infrastructure is an established platform for today’s computing needs. By deploying the IBM Spectrum Virtualize for Public Cloud platform, the features of IBM Spectrum Virtualize further enrich the capabilities of the cloud infrastructure. Figure 1-1 shows the general layout of IBM Spectrum Virtualize for Public Cloud on AWS.

In AWS, the EBS storage is directly attached to the IBM Spectrum Virtualize node instances that compose a single node pair (or I/O group) that provides a shared storage pool that is used by IBM Spectrum Virtualize. IBM Spectrum Virtualize supports the following Amazon EBS types: