In today’s digital landscape, efficient and secure file storage is crucial for enterprises of all sizes. IBM Cloud File Storage has emerged as a flexible and scalable solution to store, organize and share files securely.

We are excited to introduce IBM Cloud File Storage for VPC, designed to meet the evolving needs of modern organizations. IBM Cloud File Storage for VPC is a zonal file storage offering that provides NFS-based file storage services. With File Storage for VPC, you can create file shares in an availability zone within a region, and you can share them with multiple virtual server instances (VSIs), between multiple VPCs within the same or across availability zones.

IBM Cloud File Storage for VPC is catered (but not limited to) cloud-native workloads—such as IBM Cloud Kubernetes Service, Red Hat OpenShift on IBM Cloud and IBM Cloud Databases—as well as dev/test environments, VMware and data warehouses.

Scalability

File share capacity ranges from 10 GB up to 32,000 GB and you pay only for the capacity you need. You can increase capacity of an existing file share and adjust IOPS up or down to meet your performance needs. Billing is adjusted automatically.

Availability and durability of VPC storage

With IBM Cloud File Storage for VPC, we prioritize both the durability and availability of your data. File Storage for VPC is built with a high availability architecture, ensuring that your files remain accessible with a guaranteed availability of five 9’s (99.999%).

We achieve this by leveraging redundant components distributed across multiple physical disks on HA-paired nodes. Each storage node has multiple paths to its own Solid-State Drives (SSDs) and its partner node’s SSDs, as well. This configuration protects against path failure and controller failure because the node can still access its partner’s disks for continued productivity.

Additionally, File Storage for VPC boasts an exceptional durability rate of eleven 9’s (99.999999999%), ensuring that your files are protected against data loss. Think of durability as a measurement of how healthy and resilient your data is. Durability in VPC storage means that your data is stored consistently and intact, without any signs of data decay, influence of drive failures or any other form of corruption. Eleven 9’s durability means that if you store 10 million files, you expect to lose one file every 10,000 years.

With our robust infrastructure and commitment to uptime, you can confidently rely on IBM Cloud File Storage for VPC for seamless access and management of your files.

Granular authorization

This feature will give you access controls on a per-share basis, with per-VSI granularity. By selecting a specific security group that contains custom-defined rules, you can restrict access to the file share from one or more specific virtual server instances.

Security

For your security, file share data is encrypted by default with IBM-managed encryption for data-at-rest. For added security, you can also use your own root keys to protect your file shares.

Encryption-in-transit is an optional feature to help protect the confidentiality and integrity of your data while it is being transmitted between your applications and File Storage for VPC. With encryption-in-transit, all data is encrypted using IPsec before it leaves your application, ensuring that it remains secure during transmission over networks or the internet. This encryption shields your data from potential eavesdropping, interception or tampering by unauthorized entities. By leveraging encryption-in-transit, File Storage for VPC guarantees that your files are protected at every stage of their journey, providing you with peace of mind and reassurance that your data remains secure during transit. When you consider choosing to use encryption-in-transit, balance your requirements between performance and increased security, because encrypting data in transit can decrease data transmission speed.

Data migration and disaster recovery

Asynchronous replication is available and can be set up between the source file share and a replica file share so that if an outage at the primary site was to occur, you can fail over to the replica file share.

Versatility

Both VSI and Bare metal instances are supported. Bare metal support will happen after General Availability and by the end of the third quarter of 2023.

Getting started with IBM Cloud File Storage for VPC

If you are not already an IBM Cloud customer, it’s easy to sign up and get started. If you are already a customer, you can now provision file shares using the IBM Cloud Console, API or CLI.

Get up to USD 1,000 in credits for new file shares and VPC infrastructure by using the code VPC1000 at the time of provisioning or through the billing and usage section in IBM Cloud Console.

To create a file share, simply select a location, enter the share name, select size and IOPS based on your workload needs (data-intensive workloads require more IOPS and throughput than general purpose workloads to sustain performance). During provisioning, you can also select your mount target mode, mount targets and the type of encryption-at-rest you plan to use.