This IBM® RedpaperTM publication takes you on a journey that surveys cloud computing to answer several fundamental questions about storage cloud technology. What are storage clouds? How can a storage cloud help solve your current and future data storage business requirements? What can IBM do to help you implement a storage cloud solution that addresses these needs? This paper shows how IBM storage clouds use the extensive cloud computing experience, services, proven technologies, and products of IBM to support a smart storage cloud solution designed for your storage optimization efforts. Clients face many common storage challenges and some have variations that make them unique. It describes various successful client storage cloud implementations and the options that are available to meet your current needs and position you to avoid storage issues in the future. IBM CloudTM Services (IBM Cloud Managed Services® and IBM SoftLayer®) are highlighted as well as the contributions of IBM to OpenStack cloud storage. This paper is intended for anyone who wants to learn about storage clouds and how IBM addresses data storage challenges with smart storage cloud solutions. It is suitable for IBM clients, storage solution integrators, and IBM specialist sales representatives.

This IBM® Redbooks® publication provides information to help you with the sizing, configuration, and monitoring of hybrid cloud solutions using the transparent cloud tiering (TCT) functionality of IBM SpectrumTM Scale. IBM Spectrum ScaleTM is a scalable data, file, and object management solution that provides a global namespace for large data sets and several enterprise features. The IBM Spectrum Scale feature called transparent cloud tiering allows cloud object storage providers, such as IBM CloudTM Object Storage, IBM Cloud, and Amazon S3, to be used as a storage tier for IBM Spectrum Scale. Transparent cloud tiering can help cut storage capital and operating costs by moving data that does not require local performance to an on-premise or off-premise cloud object storage provider. Transparent cloud tiering reduces the complexity of cloud object storage by making data transfers transparent to the user or application. This capability can help you adapt to a hybrid cloud deployment model where active data remains directly accessible to your applications and inactive data is placed in the correct cloud (private or public) automatically through IBM Spectrum Scale policies. This publication is intended for IT architects, IT administrators, storage administrators, and those wanting to learn more about sizing, configuration, and monitoring of hybrid cloud solutions using IBM Spectrum Scale and transparent cloud tiering.

The digital enterprise has resulted in an explosion of data, and data volumes are expected to grow in zettabyte scale in the next few years. This explosive growth is largely fueled by unstructured data, such as video, social media, photos, and text. IBM® Cloud Object Storage (previously known as Cleversafe®) provides organizations the flexibility, scalability, and simplicity required to store, manage, and access today's rapidly growing unstructured data. Cloud Object Storage (COS) provides access to your unstructured data via a self-service portal from anywhere in the world with RESTful APIs, including OpenStack Swift API and S3-compatible API, enterprise availability, and security. IBM COS is available in the following deployment models: Private on-premises object storage Dedicated object storage (single-tenant) Public object storage (multi-tenant) Hybrid object storage (a mix of on-premises, dedicated or public offerings) This IBM Redbooks® publication focuses on the IBM COS public offering, IBM COS Public Services, and hybrid solutions leveraging this offering. This book is for solution developers, architects, and IT specialists who are implementing Cloud Object Storage solutions.

IBM® Cloud Private is an application platform for developing and managing containerized applications across hybrid cloud environments, on-premises and public clouds. It is an integrated environment for managing containers that includes the container orchestrator Kubernetes, a private image registry, a management console, and monitoring frameworks. This IBM Redbooks® publication covers tasks that are performed by IBM CloudTM Private application developers, such as deploying applications, application packaging with helm, application automation with DevOps, using Microclimate, and managing your service mesh with Istio. The authors team has many years of experience in implementing IBM Cloud Private and other cloud solutions in production environments. Throughout this book, we used the approach of providing you the recommended practices in those areas. As part of this project, we also developed several code examples, which can be downloaded from the Redbooks GitHub web page. If you are an IBM Cloud Private application developer, this book is for you. If you are an IBM Cloud Private systems administrator, you can see the IBM Redbooks publication IBM Private Cloud Systems Administrator's Guide, SG248440.

IBM® Cloud Private is an application platform for developing and managing containerized applications across hybrid cloud environments, on-premises and public clouds. It is an integrated environment for managing containers that includes the container orchestrator Kubernetes, a private image registry, a management console, and monitoring frameworks. This IBM Redbooks covers tasks performed by IBM Cloud Private system administrators such as installation for high availability, configuration, backup and restore, using persistent volumes, networking, security, logging and monitoring. Istio integration, troubleshooting and so on. As part of this project we also developed several code examples and you can download those from the IBM Redbooks GitHub location: https://github.com/IBMRedbooks. The authors team has many years of experience in implementing IBM Cloud Private and other cloud solutions in production environments, so throughout this document we took the approach of providing you the recommended practices in those areas. If you are an IBM Cloud Private system administrator, this book is for you. If you are developing applications on IBM Cloud Private, you can see the IBM Redbooks publication IBM Cloud Private Application Developer's Guide, SG24-8441.

IBM® Spectrum Virtualize is a key member of the IBM Spectrum® Storage portfolio. It is a highly flexible storage solution that enables rapid deployment of block storage services for new and traditional workloads, whether on-premises, off-premises, or a combination of both. The initial release of IBM Spectrum Virtualize for Public Cloud is now available on Amazon Web Services (AWS). This IBM RedpaperTM publication gives a broad understanding of the IBM Spectrum Virtualize for Public Cloud on AWS architecture. It also provides planning and implementation information about the common use cases for this new product. This publication helps storage and networking administrators plan, implement, install, modify, and configure the IBM Spectrum Virtualize for Public Cloud on AWS offering Version 8.3.1. It also provides a detailed description of troubleshooting tips.

Today, organizations are responding to market demands and regulatory requirements faster than ever by extending their applications and data to new digital applications. This drive to deliver new functions at speed has paved the way for a huge growth in cloud-native applications, hosted in both public and private cloud infrastructures. Leading organizations are now exploiting the best of both worlds by combining their traditional enterprise IT with cloud. This hybrid cloud approach places new requirements on the integration architectures needed to bring these two worlds together. One of the largest providers of application logic and data services in enterprises today is IBM Z, making it a critical service provider in a hybrid cloud architecture. The primary goal of this IBM Redpaper publication is to help IT architects choose between the different application integration architectures that can be used for hybrid integration with IBM Z, including REST APIs, messaging, and event streams.

This IBM® Redbooks® publication discusses the real world experience of an enterprise that developed and implemented IBM z/OS® cloud services. This book shares the experience of a team at Walmart Technology, Walmart Stores, Inc.® and some of the decisions they made to create business critical cloud services. These experiences and approaches relate to the z/OS platform, and might not apply to other hybrid cloud approaches. This book highlights the strengths and characteristics of z/OS that led the Walmart infrastructure and software engineers to use this platform as they transitioned from a traditional IT deployment to a cloud model. Embarking on a cloud strategy can be overwhelming. No shortage of approaches to cloud computing exists. This book focuses on a pragmatic approach for enterprises that are struggling to take advantage of their business assets in the cloud. This book introduces the basic cloud concepts as defined by the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST). Each chapter explains the importance of a particular NIST characteristic, the z/OS role in accomplishing the characteristic, and how it was implemented by the Walmart Technology team. This book is intended for IT professionals who are considering extending their IBM z SystemsTM environment to a hybrid cloud by unleashing the power of cloud services on z/OS. For information about creating cloud services that are hosted in IBM CICS®, see How Walmart Became a Cloud Services Provider with IBM CICS, SG24-8347.

Describing various successful client storage cloud implementations, this IBM Redpaper is intended for anyone who wants to learn about storage clouds and how IBM addresses data storage challenges with smart storage cloud solutions. --

Today, new business models in the marketplace coexist with traditional ones and their well-established IT architectures. They generate new business needs and new IT requirements that can only be satisfied by new service models and new technological approaches. These changes are reshaping traditional IT concepts. Cloud in its three main variants (Public, Hybrid, and Private) represents the major and most viable answer to those IT requirements, and software-defined infrastructure (SDI) is its major technological enabler. IBM® technology, with its rich and complete set of storage hardware and software products, supports SDI both in an open standard framework and in other vendors' environments. IBM services are able to deliver solutions to the customers with their extensive knowledge of the topic and the experiences gained in partnership with clients. This IBM RedpaperTM publication focuses on software-defined storage (SDS) and IBM Storage Systems product offerings for software-defined environments (SDEs). It also provides use case examples across various industries that cover different client needs, proposed solutions, and results. This paper can help you to understand current organizational capabilities and challenges, and to identify specific business objectives to be achieved by implementing an SDS solution in your enterprise.