Enterprises are struggling to provide the right storage infrastructure to keep up with the explosion of unstructured data in addition to facing increased pressure to retain this data for an extended period of time. Object storage is rapidly emerging as a viable method for building scalable big data archiving solutions to address these unstructured data growth challenges.

OpenStack Swift is an emerging open source object storage platform that is widely used for cloud storage. IBM® Spectrum Scale V4.2 delivers a fast, highly available, highly scalable shared file system that enables transparent access to files and objects spanning different storage tiers such as flash, disk, and tape. IBM Spectrum™ Archive Enterprise Edition is designed to enable the use of IBM Linear Tape File System™ (LTFS) for the policy management of tape as a storage tier in IBM Spectrum Scale™ to significantly reduce cost.

This IBM Redpaper™ publication describes how to create an Enterprise class, low-cost, highly scalable object storage infrastructure with IBM Spectrum Scale 4.2, leveraging OpenStack Swift and IBM Spectrum Archive™. It describes benefits of the solution and provides reference architectures, preferred practices, and runtime considerations. It is suitable for IBM clients, IBM Business Partners, IBM specialist sales representatives, and technical specialists.

Chapter 1. IBM Spectrum Scale active archive

Chapter 2. Active archive lab environment

Chapter 3. Adding IBM Spectrum Archive EE node to existing IBM Spectrum Scale protocols cluster

Chapter 4. Swift account, container, and object storage pool placement

Chapter 5. Object heatmap data tiering

Chapter 6. Storing objects in the IBM Spectrum Archive tape tier

Chapter 7. Retrieving objects from the IBM Spectrum Archive tape tier

Chapter 8. Runtime considerations

Chapter 9. Conclusion