IBM Fusion: Fast-Track Hosted Cluster Creation with Built-In Data Services and Intelligent Add-Ons
In today’s hybrid cloud landscape, speed and simplicity are everything. Hosted control planes help meet these demands by offering the flexibility needed to deploy and manage workloads with ease.
IBM Fusion simplifies this entire process. It’s not just about spinning up clusters fast — it’s about making them workload-ready in minutes, with storage, backup, and recovery services deployed automatically through Fusion’s intelligent add-on framework.
IBM Fusion is a hyperconverged infrastructure (HCI) appliance that comes pre-integrated with compute, networking, and storage — all preconfigured within one or more racks. This tightly integrated setup allows for rapid deployment and scalability. With the Hosted Control Plane (HCP) feature, you can carve this appliance into multiple isolated OpenShift clusters, enabling true cluster-on-demand capabilities, ideal for dynamic workloads and fast-paced environments.
Fusion-Powered Hosted Clusters: Built for Speed and Scale
IBM Fusion enables hosted control plane clusters using OpenShift Virtualization or Bare Metal nodes. These clusters are provisioned on demand, with control plane components hosted as pods on the Fusion HCI management cluster.
What makes this powerful?
- No need for dedicated control nodes
- Lower hardware footprint
- Deployment of data services in minutes
- Support for internal and external bare metal compute
- GPU-ready infrastructure for AI/ML workloads
Add-On Driven Deployment: Workload-Ready in Minutes
You can preconfigure hosted clusters with essential services — no need to log in after creation. Key add-ons include:
- Fusion Data Foundation — Offers dynamic storage for apps, with light weight storage client.
- Backup & Restore — Protects applications with smart, label-based hooks for easy recovery.
- Global Data Platform — Access your existing data from Storage Scale for applications.
These services can be automatically deployed by attaching service labels during cluster creation. For example:
labels:
isf.ibm.com/fusion-base=''
isf.ibm.com/fusion-fdf=''
isf.ibm.com/fusion-backup=''Your environments are ready to run workloads out of the gate.
Real-World Impacts
IBM Fusion turns what used to be multi-hour operations to have a ready for workloads OCP cluster into minutes getting your workloads running faster than ever.
Why IBM Fusion?
IBM Fusion isn’t just a provisioning tool — it’s a platform for operational efficiency. With its add-on driven architecture, hosted clusters are born ready, equipped with storage, protection, and observability from the start.
If you’re building hosted control planes and want to reduce operational overhead while accelerating workload onboarding, IBM Fusion delivers a uniquely integrated experience that’s ready for scale.
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𝐃𝐢𝐬𝐜𝐥𝐚𝐢𝐦𝐞𝐫: The views and opinions expressed in this guide are solely my own and do not reflect those of my employer. This is shared for informational purposes only and should not be considered as official guidance or advice.
