Evaluating the capabilities of containerized solutions using IBM Spectrum Scale and Protect Plus

A blog post by: Hemang Dholakia, managing director, Deloitte Consulting LLP.

The era of large-scale digital transformation has made organizations embrace trends like hybrid cloud environments, cloud portability, and containerization. With an increasing rate of cloud adoption, using the fundamentals of DevSecOps to meet various IT challenges is the most feasible solution for them. By breaking the traditional silos between the development, security, and operations teams, DevSecOps automation lets IT companies adopt containerization with a diversified cloud migration strategy. This approach builds a hybrid cloud environment and includes tools to expedite and enhance cloud storage.

The world of IBM Spectrum Storage solutions

A game changer for many organizations, containers are the base of private clouds. Container orchestration works with tools like Docker, Kubernetes, or Red Hat OpenShift Container Platform (OCP) that deliver a stable cloud computing environment, where apps can transfer without any complex application programming interfaces (API). With the hybrid multi-cloud computing platforms, a software-defined storage infrastructure plays an integral role in enabling your data-driven, multi-cloud enterprise with agility and flexibility. Many AI-enabled technologies are on the rise, such as IBM Spectrum, which improves the dynamics of on-premises storage and hybrid cloud environments while reducing costs. IBM Spectrum Storage solutions, featuring AI-infused abilities, offer various services: streamlining software-defined storage, containerization, management, and data protection.

In this age of serverless technologies, organizations often find it challenging to acquire software defined-infrastructure (SDI) capabilities. But once the potential of SDI is achieved, CIOs and CTOs meet business requirements with excellent quality and steadiness. Not every venture can be capable of using serverless architectures for many reasons (for instance, the nature of complex COTS integrations or investments in commercial application server technologies). This is where containers ease the process of leveraging DevSecOps so that organizations can use the cloud for taking major business decisions as per requirements. Challenges arise when an organization needs a particular tool to bridge the optimization gap between a container platform like OCP and different storage options. Here enters the IBM Spectrum Storage Suite, which offers some of the most innovative systems (e.g., IBM Spectrum Scale and IBM Spectrum Protect Plus) that enhance the way you store, run, and preserve data, providing crucial proficiency to DevSecOps in enterprises.

Being a robust storage solution, containerized IBM Spectrum Scale is integrated into OpenShift Console. This native integration makes Spectrum Scale easy to administer, manage, and set up. Thus, for DevSecOps teams that look forward to getting rid of internal barriers and enhancing the speed of the delivery of their systems, the improved container storage interface (CSI) operator becomes a superb option. Another advantage is the convenient ability to boost data access output with a single click. By adding this solution to their software-defined infrastructure, organizations can achieve the following:

• Improve delivery and design of their services
• Manage risks effectively and secure efficiently
• Reduce capital and operational expenditures
• Deliver high-performance business results for a better future 

Reasons to consider IBM Spectrum Protect Plus for container optimization

The costs and complexity of securing data have become a struggle for enterprises as they adopt digital transformation. A high-performance DevOps plan should also ensure high-end data maintenance agility, disaster recovery, and backups. IBM Spectrum Protect Plus is a data resilience solution that delivers data safety, duplicity, recovery, and reuse for virtual machines, apps, SaaS, containers, and cloud environments. It is easy to deploy and run, and the agentless architecture is convenient to maintain, allowing quick data recovery of container images and application data. This solution also offers the ability to achieve cost-effective data retention, recovery, and compliance in hybrid cloud environments.

With the help of Spectrum Protect Plus, organizations enable self-service for data sets confidently, using policy engines to recover resources upon delivering the DevSecOps pipeline. This becomes a benefit for DevSecOps teams who don’t want to spend extra time on substantial resource reclamation exercises amid their busy schedules. Additionally, businesses can use easy to maintain consistent guardrails by implementing Spectrum Protect Plus profiles with Kubernetes namespaces and a single-pane management interface to increase efficiency and reduce time to market for solutions. These benefits certainly assist DevSecOps teams while dealing with extensive research and development platforms or IT innovation platforms envisioned to support an ecosystem of complex business applications.

Key features of IBM Spectrum Protect Plus:

• Easy to use, with a drill-down dashboard that makes tracking storage utilization and compliance simple.
• Its service-level agreement (SLA) management policies streamline operations, enabling safe self-service data access.
• Offers enterprises enhance cloud and container protection, with high-end storage efficiency in native format via compression, snapshots, and much more.
• Spectrum Protect Plus provides cost-effective and long-term data retention.

To a better future of containerized solutions

In today’s rapidly digitalizing world, organizations look forward to solutions that can help them meet the  demands of data-driven infrastructures. Rapid data growth continues to add to the complexity and costs associated with IT. From its management to licensing to protection and storage, businesses have a lot to look after. But with modern solutions like IBM Spectrum Suite and Protect Plus, combined with container platforms like IBM Red Hat OCP, data management, protection, and storage get easier with higher effectiveness and without giving up on the use of existing data center or cloud assets.

If you’d like to know more about the potential of containerized solutions using IBM systems, check out this full paper here.