Tag: Containers

Posted on

140: Greybeards talk data orchestration with Matt Leib, Product Marketing Manager for IBM Spectrum Fusion

As our listeners should know, Matt Leib (@MBleib) was a GreyBeards co-host But since then, Matt has joined IBM to become Product Marketing Manager on IBM Spectrum Fusion, a data orchestration solution for Red Hat OpenShift environments. Matt’s been in and around the storage and data management industry for many years which is why we tapped him for GreyBeards co-host duties.

IBM Fusion, in its previous incarnation, came as an OpenShift software defined storage or as an OpenShift (H)CI solution. But recently, Fusion has taken on more of a data orchestration role for OpenShift stateful containerized applications. Listen to the podcast to learn more.

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 46:59 — 64.5MB) | Embed

Subscribe: Apple Podcasts | Google Podcasts | Spotify | Email | RSS

Fusion can run in any OpenShift deployment whether (currently AWS, Azure, & IBM) clouds, under VMware (wherever it runs), or on (x86 or IBM Z) bare metal. It supplies NFS file or S3 compatible object storage for container applications running under OpenShift. But it does more than just storage.

Beyond storage, Fusion includes backup/recovery, site to site DR and global (file & object) data access. It’s almost like someone opened up the IBM Spectrum software pantry and took out the best available functionality and cooked it up in to an OpenShift solution. IBM’s Spectrum Fusion current website (linked to above (Dec.’22)) still refers only to the software defined storage and (H)CI solution, but today’s Fusion includes all of the functions identified above.

All Fusion facilities run as containers under OpenShift. Customers can elect to run all Fusion services or pick and chose which ones they want for their environment. IBM Fusion supports an API, an API backed GUI, and CLI for its storage & data management as well as REST access. Fusion is fully compatible with Red Hat Ansible.

IBM Fusion is intended to be storage agnostic. Which means it can support its data management services for any NFS file storage as well as anyone’s S3 compatible, object storage.

Now that Red Hat software defined CEPH and ODF are under IBM product management, CEPH and ODF options will become available under Fusion. And CEPH offers block as well as file and object. We’ve talked about CEPH before, packaged in a hardware appliance, see our SoftIron podcast.

One intriguing part of the Fusion solution is its global data access. With global access, any OpenShift application can access data from any Fusion data store, across clouds, across on prem installations, or just about anywhere OpenShift is running. Matt mentioned that compute could be on AWS OpenShift, Fusion’s data control plane could be running on prem OpenShift and the data storage could be running on Azure OpenShift. All this would be glued together by Fusion global access, so that AWS compute had access to data on Azure.

There’s some sophisticated caching magic to make global access happen seamlessly and with decent levels of performance, but customers no longer have to copy whole file systems over from one cloud to another in order to move compute or data. IBM Fusion would need to run in all those locations for global access.

Keith asked if it was directly available in the AWS marketplace. Matt said not yet but you can deploy OpenShift out of the marketplace and then deploy IBM Fusion onto that.

It took us sometime to get our heads wrapped around what Fusion has to offer and throughout it all, Keith and I had a bit of fun with Matt.

Matthew Leib, Product Marketing Manager, IBM Spectrum Fusion

Matt has spent years in IT, from Engineering, to Architecture, from PreSales to analyst work, and finally to Product Marketing at IBM.

He’s spent years trying to achieve both credibility in the space, as a podcaster, blogger, and community member.

In his spare time, he’s a dad, dog owner, and amateur guitar player..

Posted on

59: GreyBeards talk IT trends with Marc Farley, Sr. Product Manager, HPE

In Episode 59,  we talk with Marc Farley, Senior Product Manager at HPE discussing trends in the storage industry today. Marc been on our show before (GreyBeards talk Cloud Storage…, GreyBeards video discussing file analytics, Greybeards talk cars, storage and IT…) and has been a longtime friend and associate of both Howard and I.

Marc’s been at HPE for a while now but couldn’t discuss publicly what he is working on, so we spent time discussing industry trends rather than HPE products.

We discussed the public cloud and its impact on enterprise IT. Although the cloud has been arguable alive and well for almost a decade now, its impact is still being felt today and for the foreseeable future

We next discussed AI and data storage. HPE’s acquisition of Nimble brought InfoSight into their product family, which was arguably one of the first to use big data analytics to improve field support and ongoing operations.

Howard mentioned that a logical next step is to apply AI to storage performance. Using AI to fingerprint application workloads and thereby help determine when that app’s data was needed in cache. We also mentioned that AI could be better used to help workload optimization/orchestration, in almost real time, rather than after the fact.

We talked about containerization as the next big thing. Howard and Marc said sometimes it’s less risky to just keep chugging away with what IT has always done rather than risking a move to a new paradigm/platform AKA containers. As further evidence, Marc had seen a survey (by an unnamed research firm) of customers pre-purchase expectations for new storage and what they actually used it for post-purchase. Pre-purchase, customers expected to use storage for server virtualization but post-purchase, a majority used it for more traditional, non-virtualized applications.

We returned to a perennial theme, when will SSDs supplant disk. Howard talked about a recent vendors introduction of a dual head disk and which he thought was  overreach. But all agreed the key metric is $/GB and getting the difference between rotating media and SSD $/GB below 10X. Howard believes when it’s more like 4X, then SSDs will kill off disk technology. Although some of us felt disks would never completely go away, witness tape.

The podcast runs ~38 minutes. Marc’s always a gas to talk with and is currently the most frequent guest we have had on our show  (although Jim Handy was tied with him up until now). Its’ great to hear from him again.  Listen to the podcast to learn more.

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 37:36 — 34.4MB) | Embed

Subscribe: Apple Podcasts | Google Podcasts | Spotify | Email | RSS

Marc Farley, Senior Product Manger, HPE

Marc is a storage greybeard who has worked for many storage companies and is currently providing product strategy for HPE. He has written three books on storage including his most recent, Rethinking Enterprise Storage: A Hybrid Cloud Model and his previous books Building Storage Networksand Storage Networking Fundamentals.

In addition to his writing books he has been a blogger and podcaster about storage topics while working for EqualLogic, Dell, 3PAR, HP, StorSimple,  Microsoft, HPE and others.

When he is not working, Marc likes to ride bicycles, listen to music, spend time with his family and dote on his cats. Of course there’s that car video curation…