IBM tackles HCI again with container-native platform

The use of containers and open source virtualisation without relying on VMware could disrupt the HCI market

IBM has announced plans to launch a new container-native hyperconverged infrastructure (HCI) platform in the second half of 2021 - an addition to the existing HCI solutions it sells with Nutanix. A software-defined storage (SDS) version will follow in early 2022.

IBM Spectrum Fusion will bring together IBM's general parallel file system technology (IBM Spectrum Scale), its data protection technology (IBM Spectrum Protect Plus) and the metadata management capabilities (IBM Spectrum Discover), aiming to manage data and applications across data centres, hybrid cloud and edge infrastructure.

IBM will initially sell Spectrum Fusion as HCI, with Red Hat OpenShift to support containers, virtual machines and software defined storage. The platform will combine storage, computer and networking and will be integrated with Red Hat Advanced Cluster Manager (ACM) as well as IBM Cloud Satellite.

We rarely cover new product releases like this on Computing, but as Forrester analysts point out, this could change up the HCI market. Existing HCI tools tend to focus on VMware's hypervisor and its related ecosystem, to create an internal private cloud with hints of hybrid cloud portability. IBM's solution, on the other hand, is container-native, and its use of open source virtualisation tools like Red Hat could provide a bridge between cloud and on-premises infrastructure.

VMware has its own container strategy in place using Tanzu, which is virtualised but also monolithic, 'and the native scale-out features brought to the market by open source-derived alternatives will make some infrastructure managers take a second look before reupping their existing licensing,' says Forrester.

The nitty-gritty

Spectrum Fusion HCI's base configuration includes a 42U rack, two ethernet management switches, two 100GbE ethernet switches, and six 1U x86 storage/compute nodes. Storage can scale with up to ten 7.68TB NVMe flash drives per node, while compute scales to maximum 20 nodes.

IBM has also announced updates to its Elastic Storage System (ESS): the ESS 5000 and ESS 3200. In comparison to its predecessor, the revamped ESS 5000 delivers 10 per cent greater storage capacity. It also allows up to 380TB/rack unit for the SC models and 264 TB/rack unit for the SL models.

The ESS 3200 offers double the read performance of its predecessor, with data throughput of 80GB per second per node pair.

Both ESS 5000 and ESS 3200 support Kubernetes Container Storage Interface, Red Hat OpenShift, snapshots and clones, as well as Windows, Linux, Ansible, and bare metal environments.