GPFS (General Parallel File System) is a high-performance clustered file system developed by IBM that can be deployed in shared disk or shared-nothing distributed parallel modes. It was created to address the growing imbalance between increasing CPU, memory, and network speeds, and the relatively slower growth of disk drive speeds. GPFS provides high scalability, availability, and advanced data management features like snapshots and replication. It is used extensively by large companies and supercomputers due to its ability to handle large volumes of data and high input/output workloads in distributed, parallel environments.
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IBM GPFS
1. GPFS: General Parallel File
System
Why is it needed?
What is GPFS and its features?
Where it is being used?
3. Growth Rate of Components
CPU speed performance has increased 8
to 10 times.
DRAM speed performance has increased 7
to 9 times.
Network speed performance has increased
100 times.
Bus speed performance has increased 20
times.
But Hard disk drive (HDD) speed
performance has increased only 1.2 times.
4. Three Important Functions
of Enterprise Storage
Store data
Protect data from being lost
Feed data to the computers processors
(so they can keep doing work)
5. Existing Solutions Inability
DAS, NAS, SAN [alone]
Many data centers have become victims of
filer-sprawl
Data administration and management
(such as migration, backups, archiving)
costs to skyrocket!
I/O performance & application workflow
6. What is GPFS
The General Parallel File System (GPFS) is a high
performance clustered file system. It can be
deployed in shared disk or shared nothing
distributed parallel modes.
Developer(s): IBM
Operating system: AIX / Linux / Windows Server
License: Proprietary
System Introduced: 1998 (AIX)
Max. volume size: 8 YB
Max. file size: 8 EB
Max. number of files: 264 per file system
File system permissions: POSIX
7. GPFS Current Usage
It is used by many of the world's largest commercial
companies, as well as some of the supercomputers on
the Top 500 List.
For example, GPFS was the filesystem of the ASC
Purple Supercomputer which was composed of more
than 12,000 processors and 2 petabytes of total disk
storage spanning more than 11,000 disks.
IBM,s GPFS is extensively used across multiple
industries like Government, Oil and Gas, Life Sciences,
Media/Entertainment, Financial services
8. GPFS Features
Standard file system interface with POSIX semantics
Metadata on shared storage
Distributed locking for read/write semantics
Highly scalable
High capacity (up to 2^99 bytes file system size, up to 2^63 files per file
system)
High throughput (TB/s)
Wide striping
Large block size (up to 16MB)
Multiple nodes write in parallel
Advanced data management
ILM (storage pools), Snapshots
Backup HSM (DMAPI)
Remote replication, WAN caching
High availability
Fault tolerance (node, disk failures)
On-line system management (add/remove nodes, disks, ...)
9. References
GPFS official homepage
GPFS resources (including download)
GPFS at Almaden
GPFS Mailing List
GPFS User Group
IBM GPFS Product Documentation
IBM GPFS Wiki