IBM Storage Scale S3 Available

This article, published on August 20, 2024, was written by Madhu Punjabi, IBM Corp.

Great News ! IBM Storage Scale S3 is now Generally Available

IBM Storage Scale 5.2.1 GA supports the S3 (Simple Storage Service) access protocol. It provides high-performance and scalable S3 object access to data, which is stored in IBM Storage Scale file systems. It is optimised for multi-protocol data access to enable workflows which access the same instance of data using S3 and other protocols like POSIX, NFS, SMB and CSI. It is also integrated with Cluster Export Services (CES) to provide highly available S3 access service in an Storage Scale cluster.

Features supported for CES S3 with Storage Scale 5.2.1 GA:

It’s optimised for multi-protocol data access to which allows access the same instance of data using object protocol S3 and file protocols like POSIX, NFS, SMB and CSI.
High-performant, highly available and scalable S3 object access to data which is stored in Storage Scale filesystems.
Support for S3 API calls which are required to process data which is stored in Storage Scale filesystems.
Files and directories in Storage Scale filesystems are represented 1:1 as S3 objects and S3 buckets.
•Installation and deployment support with Storage Scale installation toolkit.
Support for S3 service management with the existing CES commands.
Allow administrators to manage S3 configuration, S3 accounts and S3 buckets using the new CES S3 command.
Backup and restore of S3 configuration data.
Health monitoring of S3 protocol stack.
Secure storage of S3 keys with encrypted S3 secret keys.
Support for ILM including Tiering to Tape (RPQ).
Support for S3 access to AFM managed data and AFM S3 to CES S3
Stretch cluster support

Performance benchmark results with Storage Scale 5.2.1
The performance of IBM Storage Scale S3 is highly dependent on your underlying infrastructure and your workload. IBM publishes the following performance benchmark results for CES S3:

COSBench using large size (1GB) and small size objects against a 3-node Storage Scale CES cluster running S3 services and using IBM Elastic Storage System 3200 as back-end storage, achieving:
- 63GB/s aggregated throughput for read workloads for 1GB objects
- 25GB/s aggregated throughput for write workloads for 1GB objects
- 56,000 ops/s for read workloads for 4K objects
- 5.600 ops/s for write workloads for 4K objects

Scaling limits (tested limits) supported with Storage Scale 5.2.1

Up to 10TB single object size
Up to 5,000 S3 accounts
Up to 5,000 S3 buckets
Up to 100 million objects per S3 bucket

Architecture, OS and cluster size supported with Storage Scale 5.2.1

Up to 10-node CES cluster
For each CES node:
- OS: RHEL 8.x or RHEL 9.x
- Architecture: x86_64, Power (ppc64le), Z – s390x (RH 9.x)

To get more information about S3 protocol support with IBM Storage Scale please refer to Storage Scale 5.2.1 documentation section S3 protocol Overview.