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Red Hat OpenShift Data Foundation on IBM zSystems & IBM LinuxONE: A foundation for stateful containerized workloads
Learn how Red Hat OpenShift Data Foundation supports persistent storage for containerized applications
With Red Hat OpenShift on IBM zSystems and IBM LinuxONE, the industry's leading enterprise Kubernetes platform expands its capabilities across public, managed, and on-premises clouds on various different hardware architectures.
Red Hat OpenShift enables hybrid and multi-cloud solutions including the IBM zSystems and IBM LinuxONE platform with the capability to automate DevSecOps and CI/CD processes across platforms. From a central management capability with Red Hat Advanced Cluster Management for Kubernetes, the different environments can be managed from a single pane of glass.
The picture below illustrates the bridge that Red Hat OpenShift delivers across the different clouds and architectures and brings the advantage from different angles:
The characteristics of Red Hat OpenShift represent a big advantage for more agile and effective workload placement on IBM zSystems and LinuxONE. For details, view the Red Hat OpenShift for IBM zSystems and LinuxONE Reference Architecture.
A very important capability is the use of shared storage on Red Hat OpenShift on IBM zSystems and LinuxONE with Red Hat OpenShift Data Foundation, which is highly integrated in the Red Hat OpenShift solution offering. Red Hat OpenShift Data Foundation provides software-defined storage for containerized applications. Red Hat OpenShift Data Foundation manages storage resources used by application containers and helps ensure that persistence is strictly decoupled from the orchestration of applications. Engineered as the data and storage services platform for Red Hat OpenShift, Red Hat OpenShift Data Foundation helps teams to develop and deploy applications more quickly and efficiently across hybrid cloud and multi-cloud container deployments.
Red Hat OpenShift Data Foundation features high resiliency by running multiple copies of the used persistent volumes in separate storage nodes. There is no additional data replication between the storage devices necessary, as the data is mirrored to be kept instantly in sync. The overarching control plane of the Red Hat OpenShift cluster schedules the pods and their applications and persistent volumes (PVs) across all nodes.
Red Hat OpenShift Data Foundation release 4.10 is now available
With the new release of Red Hat OpenShift Data Foundation 4.10, Red Hat has taken the next step and added External Mode for IBM zSystems and LinuxONE, as well as highly available single cluster deployments across multiple LPARs. Here are more details on these capabilities:
Red Hat OpenShift Data Foundation can be deployed with different capabilities:
About the authors
Thomas Stober - Product Owner OpenShift Data Foundation on IBM zSystems and LinuxONE; Wilhelm Mild - IBM Executive IT Architect Integration Architectures for Containers, Mobile, IBM zSystems and LinuxONE; Andrei Constantinescu - Product Manager OpenShift Data Foundation on IBM zSystems and LinuxONE; and Murthy Garimella – Global Solutions Architect, Red Hat.
Red Hat OpenShift enables hybrid and multi-cloud solutions including the IBM zSystems and IBM LinuxONE platform with the capability to automate DevSecOps and CI/CD processes across platforms. From a central management capability with Red Hat Advanced Cluster Management for Kubernetes, the different environments can be managed from a single pane of glass.
The picture below illustrates the bridge that Red Hat OpenShift delivers across the different clouds and architectures and brings the advantage from different angles:
- Consistent development processes, with container build capabilities on different architectures
- Automation pipelines to build, deploy and run containerized workloads where they fit best
- Management consistency for all environments no matter where the workload runs
The characteristics of Red Hat OpenShift represent a big advantage for more agile and effective workload placement on IBM zSystems and LinuxONE. For details, view the Red Hat OpenShift for IBM zSystems and LinuxONE Reference Architecture.
A very important capability is the use of shared storage on Red Hat OpenShift on IBM zSystems and LinuxONE with Red Hat OpenShift Data Foundation, which is highly integrated in the Red Hat OpenShift solution offering. Red Hat OpenShift Data Foundation provides software-defined storage for containerized applications. Red Hat OpenShift Data Foundation manages storage resources used by application containers and helps ensure that persistence is strictly decoupled from the orchestration of applications. Engineered as the data and storage services platform for Red Hat OpenShift, Red Hat OpenShift Data Foundation helps teams to develop and deploy applications more quickly and efficiently across hybrid cloud and multi-cloud container deployments.
Red Hat OpenShift Data Foundation features high resiliency by running multiple copies of the used persistent volumes in separate storage nodes. There is no additional data replication between the storage devices necessary, as the data is mirrored to be kept instantly in sync. The overarching control plane of the Red Hat OpenShift cluster schedules the pods and their applications and persistent volumes (PVs) across all nodes.
Red Hat OpenShift Data Foundation release 4.10 is now available
With the new release of Red Hat OpenShift Data Foundation 4.10, Red Hat has taken the next step and added External Mode for IBM zSystems and LinuxONE, as well as highly available single cluster deployments across multiple LPARs. Here are more details on these capabilities:
Red Hat OpenShift Data Foundation can be deployed with different capabilities:
- External Mode
- External mode: Application pods run on 1 or more Red Hat OpenShift clusters, while Red Hat OpenShift Data Foundation storage is provided from an external Red Hat Ceph cluster. This implies that the lifecycle, monitoring, and management of Red Hat OpenShift and Red Hat OpenShift Data Foundation are decoupled. Compute and storage infrastructure scale independently in different clusters. This approach is optimized for scale and performance (on-premises only). Typically, the external Red Hat OpenShift Data Foundation is deployed as a Red Hat Ceph Storage environment on a x86 bare metal deployment. With this new release, Red Hat OpenShift Data Foundation 4.10, external mode is now also supported on IBM zSystems and LinuxONE.
- Internal Mode
- For completeness, prior to Red Hat OpenShift Data Foundation release 4.10, the only deployment option for IBM zSystems and LinuxONE was the internal mode, which installs Red Hat OpenShift Data Foundation within a single Red Hat OpenShift cluster.
- High Availability (HA) based on a single cluster spread across multiple LPARs
- High Availability is not required, but is recommended for production environments.
- One key element of resilience on IBM zSystems is the virtualization layer of an LPAR, which provides a highly secure hardware isolation. Given that LPAR virtualization is EAL5+ certified, each single LPAR can be considered as a logical hardware unit of its own. Deploying a single Red Hat OpenShift cluster with Red Hat OpenShift Data Foundation across multiple LPARs can achieve a high available-distributed setup by spreading across largely independent logical units.
- Thanks to the redundancy built into IBM zSystems, this deployment on multiple LPARs and hardware units (CECs) is the most simple setup for HA. There is flexibility on how the nodes of a single cluster can be spread across LPARs, hardware units and data centers.
About the authors
Thomas Stober - Product Owner OpenShift Data Foundation on IBM zSystems and LinuxONE; Wilhelm Mild - IBM Executive IT Architect Integration Architectures for Containers, Mobile, IBM zSystems and LinuxONE; Andrei Constantinescu - Product Manager OpenShift Data Foundation on IBM zSystems and LinuxONE; and Murthy Garimella – Global Solutions Architect, Red Hat.
