Require key auth SSH only for Storage Insights, SpectrumScale

System: IBM Spectrum Control Storage Insights
Actor: Organisation needing new auth-method enabled to be able to consume platform

UQ has evolved data governance, capacity management and growth metrics as a key import factor in project planning and future sustainability. IBM Spectrum Control Storage Insights is a key technology for UQ to map trends in its multi-peta-scale research storage environment. With the most senior executive of the organisation mandating that better visibility is requisit for management and data-driven decision making, this technology grows in importance by the day.

The scale of UQs investment in IBM SpectrumScale has just grown large and significant. Commensurate with this is a better approach to capacity management. With such a large client base (50,000+ people) and an extreme international interaction with collaboration "at the edge" UQ has stricter and stricter adherance to security policy.

One place of importance is SSH keys. UQ does not support password-based SSH between spectrumScale clusters "at the edge". As a result, we find that the Storage Insights tool (despite needing it urgently) cannot be used on our clusters.

This is at odds, as we note that key-based SSH methods are supported in Storage Insights for other storage systems IBM supports - but not Spectrum Scale. We need an urgent revision of Storage Insights to allow a key-auth SSH passwordless approach, so that we can monitor and maintain our systems without needing to compromise our security premise.