What's new

Each release offers new functions and improvements. IBM is constantly updating the infrastructure, security, and stability of IBM Storage Fusion to improve your experience. Review this information for a high-level summary of the new features and changes in each release.

Note: New IBM Storage Fusion documentation structure:

From the 2.7.x release onwards, the documentation is hosted in separate locations for IBM Storage Fusion and IBM Storage Fusion HCI System variants to cater to audience-specific information.

For more information about what is new in IBM Storage Fusion HCI System 2.7.x, see What is new.

To view earlier documentation versions of the product, see https://www.ibm.com/docs/en/storage-fusion.

What is new in 2.7.1

IBM Storage Fusion 2.7.1 has the following new features:

New in IBM Storage Fusion Backup & Restore service

  • Keep-alive progress for Backup & Restore Jobs

    Prior versions required Backup & Restore jobs to complete within the configured time out values of the product. Despite the progress, if a job takes longer than the default time out, it fails with timed out error. From this release onwards, you do not have to adjust the time out values for long running jobs. Jobs have a keep-alive timer that keeps the job active as long as it is making progress. As a result, jobs time out only when no progress is made within the time out duration.

  • Resource overwrite flexibility enhancement

    Before 2.7.1 release, no resources were overwritten on a restore operation by default, but there was an option to overwrite any existing resources. The recipe of 2.7.1 introduces a new field restoreOverwriteResources in the group definition, providing flexibility to decide whether to overwrite specific resources during restore based on the needs of the restored application.

New in IBM Storage Fusion Data Cataloging service

  • Improved user experience for Single Sign-On (SSO)

    Prior to version 2.7.0, the Single Sign-On (SSO) schema encountered certain limitations in particular deployments regarding authentication actions. In this release, significant enhancements are implemented to address these limitations, which improves the user experience and results in a more resilient and robust SSO experience.

New in IBM Storage Fusion Data Foundation

  • Regional DR

    Regional-DR solution is designed to protect your applications against a wide range of large blast radius failures and disaster scenarios like data center failures. As an IBM Storage Fusion user, you can use Data Foundation to configure the Regional-DR solution that offers Disaster Recovery protection with ODF-based asynchronous volume replication for both block and file volumes. For more information about the solution, see Regional-DR solution for Fusion Data Foundation.

New platform support

You can now deploy IBM Storage Fusion on Google Cloud platform. For more information about installation and supported IBM Storage Fusion services, see Installing IBM Storage Fusion on Google Cloud and IBM Storage Fusion Services support matrix respectively.

Currency support

  • New supported OpenShift Container Platform versions

    IBM Storage Fusion supports OpenShift Container Platform 4.14.

  • New IBM Storage Fusion service versions
Supported Red Hat OpenShift Container Platform version and storage versions for all IBM Storage Fusion versions https://www.ibm.com/support/pages/node/7081324.

What is new in 2.7

IBM Storage Fusion 2.7 has the following new features:

New in IBM Storage Fusion Backup & Restore service

  • Support for application VM protection

    OpenShift VMs that use filesystem-based PVCs can now be backed up and restored just like any other OpenShift workload that run on Bare Metal cluster.

  • Monitor and manage IBM Storage Fusion Backup & Restore service capabilities directly from OpenShift Container Platform

    You can monitor and manage Backup & Restore service-related operations from the OpenShift Container Platform console. For more information about this feature, see Monitoring and managing Backup & restore service OpenShift Container Platform.

  • IBM Storage Fusion Backup & Restore (Legacy) service support removal from 2.7 release

    From this IBM Storage Fusion release, the Backup & Restore (Legacy) service is no longer supported. For the procedure to migrate, see Migrating from Backup & Restore (Legacy). Before you upgrade from earlier IBM Storage Fusion versions to this version, go through the Before you begin section of Upgrade prerequisites for Backup & Restore services.

  • Backup & Restore service hub is now supported on IBM Z and IBM Power Systems platforms

    From this IBM Storage Fusion release, the Backup & Restore hub is supported on Linux on IBM zSystems, zCX, and IBM Power Systems. Prior to this release, only the Backup & Restore service Agent was supported on these platforms.

  • Git library of Backup & Restore recipes for assorted workloads
    The IBM Storage Fusion public GitHub repository provides helpful utilities for IBM Storage Fusion and allows members of the broader IBM Storage Fusion community to share and contribute tools and knowledge.
    • IBM Storage Fusion Backup and Restore recipes
    • Helpful utilities and scripts

      For example, you can run scripts from the command line or command prompt to view recipe workflow logs as well as a complete list of resources that are backed up or restored.

    For the IBM Storage Fusion GitHub repository, see storage-fusion GitHub repository.

    For more information, see IBM Storage Fusion repository for recipes.

  • Cancel Jobs

    Support is now available to cancel a job by using CR. For more information, see Cancel jobs.

New in IBM Storage Fusion Data Foundation service

New in IBM Storage Fusion Data Cataloging service

The Data Cataloging service includes the following new features in the IBM Storage Fusion 2.7 release:
  • SD-Monitor

    You can now publish more observability metrics, including metrics on Kafka messages. For more information about the SD-Monitor, see SD-Monitor.

  • FFDC must-gather image

    Revamped the log collection for Data Cataloging so that it includes more information that the IBM Support team can use to debug issues. For more information about the FFDC must-gather image, see Collecting logs and metrics.

  • Python SDK to enable adding non-root applications

    The Data Cataloging service provides a new functionality that enables the Python SDK to execute non-root applications in cases where non-root access is required. It enables you to run applications without root privileges in OpenShift. For more information about the Python SDK and to enable the adding of non-root applications, see Creating a Data Cataloging application for metadata-based policies.

  • Bulk adding tags to files through REST API

    The Data Cataloging service provides a new feature to add tags to files in a bulk fashion without the need of creating a specific policy for it. With this new capability, you can create a series of tags that are associated to a specific file in a single request with no associated policy interaction. For more information about the bulk adding tags to files through REST API, see /db2whrest/v1/bulk_add_tags/docs: POST.

  • Improvement to the current data backup and restore strategy

    The Data Cataloging service improved the data backup and restore strategy by including a new script to run. For more information about the improvement of the current data backup and restore strategy, see Backup and restore scripts.

Currency support