Overview

Enterprises are creating, analyzing and keeping more data than ever before. An organization’s underlying storage must support new-era big data and artificial intelligence workloads along with traditional applications while ensuring security, reliability and high performance. IBM Storage Scale meets these challenges as a high-performance solution for managing data at scale.

This course is intended for IT professionals tasked with administering a Storage Scale storage cluster consisting of Linux nodes. The course includes information on various Storage Scale features that enable remote access to data that is stored in a cluster file system. This includes: multi-cluster support, clustered NFS, cluster export services (CES) and protocol support (NFS, SMB, and Object), Active File Management (AFM), and AFM-based Asynchronous Disaster Recovery (AFM DR). The features are described in lecture materials and implemented in lab exercises.

Audience

This lecture and exercise-based course is for individuals who want to configure a Spectrum Scale cluster to allow remote data access.

Prerequisites

Students must already know the basics of installing, configuring and managing a Storage Scale clustered file system. This prerequisite can be met by attending the following courses:

H010DG - IBM Storage Scale Fundamentals

H011DG - IBM Storage Scale Administration

Objective

• Configure a cluster to allow remote file system access
• Mount a Storage Scale file system from a remote cluster
• Implement Active File Management (AFM)
• Summarize AFM cache modes
• Describe AFM DR
• Differentiate AFM and AFM DR
• Implement AFM DR
• Describe and implement Clustered NFS (CNFS)
• Describe the Cluster Export Services (CES) architecture
• Implement CES protocols (NFS, SMB, and Object)
• Differentiate CNFS and CES NFS

Course Outline

WEEK 1:

Unit/Module 1: IBM Storage Scale Remote Data Access Overview [2 hours]

Topic/Lesson 1: Describing the Multi-Cluster Architecture

Topic/Lesson 2: Configure a cluster environment to allow remote file system access

Topic/Lesson 3: Mounting a file system from a home cluster

Exercise 1: Configuring multi-cluster file system access

Quiz: 30 min

U2V1: AFM Architecture and Summary of AFM Terminology Including Home and Cache Filesets

U2V2: Differentiate AFM Cache Modes and Distinguish Application and Gateway Nodes

U2V3: Create and Manage an AFM Relationship

Exercise 2: Configuring Active File Management (AFM)

Quiz/Project: 30 min

WEEK 2

U3V1: AFM DR Architecture and Summary of AFM DR Terminology Including Primary and Secondary Filesets

U3V2: Differentiating AFM DR and AFM

U3V3: Creating Primary and Secondary Filesets

U3V4: Describing the Failover and Failback Procedures

Exercise 3: Configuring AFM-based Asynchronous Disaster Recovery (AFM DR)

Quiz: 30 min

U4V1: CNFS Architecture and Its Advantages

U4V2: Static and Aliased IP Address Configurations

U4V3: CNFS Failover Process and Group IDs_Designing Implementing and Managing a CNFS Cluster

Exercise 4: Configuring Clustered NFS (CNFS)

Quiz: 30 min

WEEK 3

U5V1: Cluster Export Services CES

U5V2: Open-Source Software and CES Requirements

U5V3: IP Addrss Distribution - CES Cluster and Node Status - Implementing a CES Cluster

Exercise 5: Configuring Cluster Export Services (CES)

Quiz: 30 min

Unit 6: CES NFS protocol support

U6V1: Describe and enable the CES NFS protocol service (Slides 3-6)

U6V2: Configure and manage CES NFS protocol exports (Slides 7-18)

U6V3: Summary of NFS vs. CNFS and configuration (Slides 19-20)

Exercise 6: Configuring CES NFS protocol exports

Quiz: 30 min

WEEK 4

Unit 7: CES SMB protocol support

U7V1: Samba and the CES SMB protocol service (Slides 3-6)

U7V2: Configure and manage CES SMB protocol shares (Slides 7-10)

U7V3: CES SMB configuration steps (Slides 11-16)

Exercise 7: Configuring CES SMB protocol shares

Quiz: 30 min

Unit 8: CES object protocol support

U8V1: Object storage and addressing concepts (Slides 3-5)

U8V2: Introduction to Object storage in Storage Scale (Slides 6-10)

U8V3: Configuring Storage Scale object protocol support (Slides 11-15)

U8V4: Unified file and object access (Slides 16-21)

U8V5: Object multi-region and S3 considerations (Slides 21 - 24)

Exercise 8: Configuring CES object protocol storage

Quiz/Project: 30 min