Digital User Group Jan 2022 (Day 1 – Jan 18th)

Restarting for 2022, the SSUG::Digital talks are back with talks over two days.

Day 1 Talk 1: What’s new in Spectrum Scale 5.1.2

IBM continues to enhance Spectrum Scale functionality and performance,
in response to recent hardware advancements and evolving workloads.
This talk will discuss key enhancements delivered with Spectrum Scale
5.1.2 including upcoming high performance S3 interface, Spectrum Scale
ECE enhancements, AFM enhancements, performance enhancements and
latest updates on Spectrum Scale BDA and CNSA/CSI.

>> Charts and recordings <<

See >>here<< for sessions of Day 2 – Jan 19th, 2022.

User Group Host: Paul Tomlinson

Speakers:

Speaker NamePhotoBioSocial connections
Chris MaestasChris MaestasChris is an Executive Architect for IBM File and Object Storage Solutions with over 25 years of experience deploying and designing IT systems for clients in various spaces. He has experience scaling performance and availability with a variety of file systems technologies. He has developed benchmark frameworks to test out systems for reliability and validate research performance data. He also has led global enablement sessions online and face to face where discussing how best to position mature technologies like Spectrum Scale with emerging technologies in Cloud, Object, Container or AI spaces.Twitter: @cdmaestas
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/cdmaestas

SSUG::Digital: 015 – Spectrum Scale Container Native Storage Access (CNSA)

IBM Spectrum Scale Container Native Storage Access (CNSA) allows the deployment of Spectrum Scale in a Red Hat OpenShift cluster. Using a remote mount attached file system, CNSA provides a persistent data store to be accessed by the applications via the IBM Spectrum Scale Container Storage Interface (CSI) driver using Persistent Volumes (PVs). This talk provides a field update on CNSA and a deep dive on technical aspects of this technology.

 

 

Download slides here

Q&A

How does the entitlement key work for partners looking to run in their labs for educational purposes?
The way it’s currently set up is that we require entitlement (a purchase) of Data Management Edition (DME) or Data Access Edition (DAE) in order to gain access to the container images. If you are entitled to these editions of Specturm Scale, the container images should be accessible via the entitlement key.

What is with air gap installations?
The switch to IBM Cloud Registry (ICR) improves air gap installations as you can replicate the container images in the same way as you do with your OCP images.for details, please see https://www.ibm.com/docs/en/scalecontainernative?topic=appendix-airgap-setup-network-restricted-red-hat-openshift-container-platform-clusters.

Is it mandatory to have access to IBM Cloud or GitHub site? What if we have a secure site?
There is an air gap install available. You can mirror the registry and pull the images yourself and then serve them internally to your own OpenShift cluster. For GitHub, you would take the command-sets, pre-download the yamls and then use them internally. You would need these all before starting your install on an air gap setup.

Now CNSA only supports mounting one remote filesystem. Is it foreseen to deploy NSD servers in OpenShift pods in the future? Moreover, one worker node can host just one Core pod, because cluster and node files are put in directories mounted from the host in order to make them persistent. If you have a bare metal cluster with, say, static physical machine worker nodes, you are forced to deploy just one Core pod per node even if your physical node can provide computing resources to host multiple Core pods.
We’re looking at ECE and shared nothing local disks. You will first see some of this in the Spectrum Fusion product and then into our CNSA side of things. You’ll also see more filesystems available for remote mount.

Is it foreseen to make multiple Core pods deployable on the same worker node in future releases?
Not anytime soon. We will look into this once we managed to get rid of the kernel module and support FUSE based deployment. We are working on FUSE but have no timeline so far.

What’s the support for other types of containers like? Singularity for example?
Currently we’re sticking with the K8s related environments but we have heard other requests for Singularity.

For CNSA a integration of CSI are great but importantly rolling update is a must.
Agreed. We’re working on rolling upgrade!!!

If you have a fixed number of bare metal worker nodes, and one node fails, it would be useful to start the lost Core pod on one of the remaining worker nodes.
Well, we are infrastructure not an application. With current CNSA (remote mount) we are basically just an interface to the storage cluster. One per pod is fine. Down the line when we add local storage it would be nice to reschedule a failed pod to another node, but unfortunately this does not work either cause it cannot transfer the disks.

When will the Helm charts for CNAS 5.1.1.1 available.?
Meanwhile they are available here:
https://community.ibm.com/community/user/storage/blogs/gero-schmidt1/2021/07/02/helm-charts-ibm-spectrum-scale-container-native
Note that in the future, we’re going to combine CSI/CNSA installs in order to simplify things. At this point, HELM will be less necessary as well.

Related material

User Group Host: Simon Thompson

Speaker

Speaker NamePhotoBio
Laura O. BravermanLaura is a Senior Software Engineer for IBM. She has over 20 years in the Enterprise Storage industry at both IBM and Oracle, with a breadth of experience ranging from system level testing to full stack development to leading software development teams. In her current role, she serves as Scrum Master and developer with the IBM Spectrum Scale Container Native storage access team, bringing Spectrum Scale into Red Hat OpenShift Container Platform to support containerized workloads.
Harald SeippHarald SeippHarald Seipp is a Senior Technical Staff Member with IBM Systems in Germany. He is the founder and Technical Leader of the Center of Excellence for Cloud Storage as part of the IBM EMEA Storage Competence Center. He provides guidance to worldwide IBM teams across organizations, and works with customers and IBM Business Partners across EMEA to create and implement complex storage cloud architectures. In the past 28 years with IBM and other companies he had job roles as Software Developer, Software Development Leader, and Lead Architect for successful software products. Harald was co-inventor of an IBM storage product and holds various patents on storage and networking technology. He is member of the IBM Academy of Technology (AoT), leading the AoT Storage Core team.

SSUG::Digital: 014 – What is new in Spectrum Scale 5.1.1?

Spectrum Scale is a highly scalable, high-performance storage solution for file and object storage that can be deployed in traditional bare-metal and Cloud environments. IBM continues to enhance Spectrum Scale functionality and performance, in response to recent hardware advancements and evolving workloads. This talk will discuss key enhancements delivered with Spectrum Scale 5.1.1 including installation toolkit enhancements based on Ansible, improved network performance and failover using multiple TCP/IP connections, multi-factor authentication for the management GUI as well as the latest news on Spectrum Scale BDA, ECE and CNSA/CSI.

 

Download slides here

Related material

User Group Host: Simon Thompson

Speaker

Speaker NamePhotoBioSocial connections
Chris MaestasChris MaestasChris is an Executive Architect for IBM File and Object Storage Solutions with over 20 years of experience deploying and designing IT systems for clients in various spaces. He has experience scaling performance and availability with a variety of file systems technologies. He has developed benchmark frameworks to test out systems for reliability and validate research performance data. He also has led global enablement sessions online and face to face where discussing how best to position mature technologies like Spectrum Scale with emerging technologies in Cloud, Object, Container or AI spaces.Twitter: @cdmaestas
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/cdmaestas
Ismael Solis MorenoIsmael Solis MorenoIsmael works in the Spectrum Scale development team in Guadalajara Mexico as a data scientist and performance analyst. He is responsible for evaluating Spectrum Scale new features and releases performance. Part of his role is to analyze datasets to identify points of performance improvement providing insights to the development teams.LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/ismaelsm

SSUG::Digital: 012 – Lenovo: Spectrum Scale and NVMe Storage (Held in conjunction with CIUK)

In this SSUG::Digital Expert Talk, we will cover several NVMe-related topics: The Lenovo DSS-G100 is an NVMe-rich server that can be used with Scale’s DAE, DME, and ECE. We will present how to use the TRIM support that has been introduced with Scale 5.0.x on its internal NVMe drives. The NetApp EF600 is an all-NVMe storage subsystem that is triggering the rebirth of the Spectrum Scale “SAN model” with NVMe-over-Fabrics. We will present its architecture, and show how to configure and use it with Spectrum Scale. Finally, we will discuss how the “Unified Namespace” concept of the emerging DAOS storage stack could be used for a namespace integration of this new technology with Spectrum Scale.

Download slides here

Related material

Speaker NamePhotoBio
Michael HenneckeMichael HenneckeMichael Hennecke is Lenovo’s Chief Technologist for HPC Storage and Networking. He has 27 years of experience in High Performance Computing. Michael has been working with IBM Spectrum Scale since GPFS version 1.1 and is one of the “fathers” of the GPFS Storage Server (GSS), which Lenovo has evolved into the Distributed Storage Solution for IBM Spectrum Scale RAID (DSS-G). He holds a masters degree in physics from Ruhr-Universität Bochum (Germany), and a “Distinguished IT Specialist” certification from The Open Group.

Please note that this talk starts slightly earlier than other events at 15:30 GMT. It is followed by a second expert talk at 16:00 GMT.

The last 2020 SSUG::Digital event will take place on December 4th and is being held in conjunction with Computing Insight UK 2020. The main CIUK conference will take place on 3rd December with the user group event on 4th December.

Held in association with CIUK:

SSUG::Digital: 013 – Event driven data management and security using Spectrum Scale Clustered Watch Folder and File Audit Logging (Held in conjunction with CIUK)

Spectrum Scale provides various methods for automated data management: The Policy Engine enables rule-based data placement and data management. File Audit Logging  enables you to audit file accesses for compliance reasons. The Clustered Watch folder feature enables you to watch and respond to file system activity.  This session starts with a customer talk by DESY about their use of the policy engine to automate data-intensive workflows. Then IBM provides an overview of File Audit Logging and Clustered Watch along with use cases and recent architectural enhancements with examples.

Download slides here

 

Speaker NamePhotoBio
Jürgen Hannappel (DESY)Jürgen Hannappel works in the scientific computing group of the DESY IT department on data management for EuXFEL and Petra III. With a background in particle physics his interests shifted towards computing over time as his place of work moved from CERN and Bonn University to DESY
John Olson (IBM)John OlsonJohn Olson is a senior software engineer and the Spectrum Scale Security Architect. He has been with IBM for 21 years and has been working on Spectrum Scale since 2014. Previously, John worked on SoNAS, virtual tape servers and tape controller RAS. John was the lead developer of file audit logging in 5.0.0 and continues to architect the new solutions.
Jake Tick (IBM)Jake TickJake is a development manager for Spectrum Scale. In his almost 6 years at IBM, he has been on the Spectrum Scale system test team, FVT test team, and has now moved into management to help lead the file audit logging and watch folder team.
Luis Teran (IBM)Luis TeranLuis, who has been with IBM for about 4 years, is the lead developer for clustered watch folder and file audit logging. Luis started his work with system test on Spectrum Scale then shortly after moved into a development role. Luis now owns development for the file audit logging and cluster watch components.

The last 2020 SSUG::Digital event will take place on December 4th and is being held in conjunction with Computing Insight UK 2020. The main CIUK conference will take place on 3rd December with the user group event on 4th December.

Held in association with CIUK: