Access and Feeds

Storage: More than a billion served…

By Dick Weisinger

Files that is. IBM is pushing the envelope in supporting super-fast access to files across a shared-disk clustered file system. They call the new technology the General Parallel File System (GPFS).

Typically a file server is a single machine that is available for clients to access files from. But if the data traffic is high, performance can’t easily be improved by just adding more servers. Scaling up might involve creating complicated data replication schemes.

GPFS solves the problem by storing files across multiple machines. When file data is written, strips of the file are stored on different machines, and reading and writing the file strips can be done in parallel. The latest release of IBM’s GPFS adds policy-driven rules-based Information Lifecycle Management (ILM) capabilities for identifying and migrating files to storage on media that best balances access performance against storage cost efficiency.

IBM’s GPFS is an all-inclusive system; it does not rely on any additional clustering software.

GPFS can scale from managing files in systems with just a single machine to systems that use thousands of files as part of the file system. Billions of files can be stored across the many clustered machines and total data stored may be well into the petabytes. File access is incredibly fast from any node of the network.

GPFS file system

Data-intensive applications need technologies like GPFS. Applications like aerospace, defense, risk management, financial analysis, engineering design, digital media, weather modeling, and scientific research.

This is cool stuff, and it’s interesting how business ILM capabilities are being hardwired into a traditionally infrastructure technology like the file system. Very similar to what’s happening with disk storage.

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