Hardware Fusion

I'm pleased to announce that I've recorded a YouTube video in which I introduce and describe the hardware of IBM Spectrum Fusion HCI and the software stack that the hardware supports. Specifically, I go into detail on the advantages of installing Red Hat OpenShift on the bare metal of Spectrum Fusion HCI , and how such a bare metal installation unlocks powerful OpenShift features such as OpenShift Virtualization and sandboxed containers (integrating the Kata Containers project). You will find the video here:  https://youtu.be/7JwhMJ9DUtA Many thanks to Tricia Jiang and Sean Sperry who organized this video project and did the editing to pull it together. Photo by Jakob Owens on Unsplash

  In my previous post , I wrote about the different types of servers that are available for use in the IBM Spectrum Fusion HCI product.  There are storage/compute servers and compute-only servers that make up the bulk of the system, with optional servers available to add GPU capability and to add storage networking capability.  In this post, I will take a look at the network switches that connect all these servers together and also provide the uplink ports for connecting the Spectrum Fusion HCI system to the data center network and beyond. You might be wondering why network switches are even included in Spectrum Fusion HCI. Wouldn't it just be easier to connect all the servers to network switches that are already available in the data center?  Easier, yes, but that shortcut would certainly weaken the value of the offering.  Having integrated, redundant network switches makes the product easier to ...

In my previous post, I gave an introduction to the hardware of the IBM Spectrum Fusion HCI product and described how  Spectrum Fusion HCI was designed to be  simple to deploy and operate,   resilient to failure,  and  provide a high level of performance .  You can find that introductory post here .   In this post, I take a closer look at the server components of Spectrum Fusion HCI. There are four different server types that can be included in Spectrum Fusion HCI, and I'll discuss each of them in turn: Storage/compute servers, the basic building block Compute-only servers, for boosting compute power GPU servers, for AI applications AFM servers, for connecting to a larger storage network The Basic Building Block The "HCI" in the product name stands for Hyper-Converged Infrastructure and describes a style of system design in which pieces of the d...

IBM Spectrum Fusion is a new family of products from IBM that is designed to bring together application storage services from IBM's rich Spectrum storage product portfolio and deliver them on Red Hat OpenShift, the platform that supports IBM's hybrid cloud strategy.  There are two products in the IBM Spectrum Fusion family.  IBM Spectrum Fusion Software is designed for deployment into an existing Red Hat OpenShift environment and IBM Spectrum Fusion HCI is an integrated offering that combines all the necessary hardware and software to create an OpenShift environment that can be up and running just hours after it is plugged in and connected to the network. IBM created Spectrum Fusion to address the data challenges that organizations are experiencing getting applications out of pilot and into production. To make this possible, Spectrum Fusion  enables applications to access any data anywhere and  protects  app...