General Parallel File System™ / GPFS™
Online Storage Management, Scalable Access and Capable of Managing Petabytes of Data and Billions of Files
The General Parallel File System (GPFS) is a high-performance shared-disk clustered file system. Explosions of data, transactions, and digitally-aware devices are straining IT infrastructure and operations, while storage costs and user expectations are increasing. The IBM General Parallel File System™ (GPFS™), high-performance enterprise file management, can help you move beyond simply adding storage to optimizing data management.
GPFS enables:
- A global namespace across platforms
- High performance common storage
- Eliminating copies of data
- Improved storage utilization
- Simplified file management
Supported Platforms
- Linux
- Microsoft Windows
Ideal Uses
The IBM General Parallel File System™ (GPFS™) currently powers many of the world's largest scientific supercomputers and commercial applications requiring high-speed access to large volumes of data such as:
- Digital media
- Engineering design
- Business intelligence
- Financial Analytics
- Seismic data processing
- Geographic information systems
- Scalable file serving
Highlights, Key Features & Benefits
IBM General Parallel File System (GPFS) is a scalable high-performance file management infrastructure for AIX, Linux, and Windows systems.
- A highly available cluster architecture
- Concurrent shared disk access to a global namespace
- Capabilities for high performance parallel workloads
All software features such as snapshots, replication and multi-site connectivity are included in the GPFS license. With no license keys except for client and server to add on, you get all of the features up front.
- Massive namespace support
- Centrally deployed, managed, backed up and grown.
- Seamless capacity and performance scaling
Enhance availability
- Concurrent file access and block-level locking
- Clustered data access
- Data replication
Improve automation
- Policy-driven automation
- Storage pools
- Extensible management and Monitoring infrastructure
Information lifecycle management
The information lifecycle management (ILM) toolset includes:
- Disk storage pools
- External storage pool
- High performance metadata processing
Policy-based storage management provides
- Placement
- Management
- Backups and HSM operations integrated with TSM and HPSS
- Reporting
GPFS is a highly scalable HSM platform
ILM provides an optimized long term archiving solution for storing very large amounts of astronomical data
Due to information having different value to the business at different times, ILM keeps overall cost and complexity down by providing a tiered storage system, that supports data in all lifecycles
An effective ILM strategy enables 80-90% of the archive to be in tape.
Data movement to and from tape is managed automatically on demand. The application still has access to the entire namespace.
Used in:
- Ground-station installations
- Film Libraries
- Audio and Image Media Archives