IBM GPFS V3.4

General Parallel File System (GPFS) V3.4 from IBM Corp. offers enhanced Windows support, further improvements to performance, and scalability through extended file attribute support improvements, and a new diagnostic command.

IBM GPFS is a cluster file system designed for high-performance parallel file transfers and parallel I/O to single or multiple files. GPFS delivers proven reliability, multicluster support, scalability, and performance with automated failure recovery, and decentralized data management for simplifying administration.

GPFS V3.4 adds support for:

Enhanced Windows cluster support:

Windows Server 2008 R2 x64.
Directly attached disks support higher bandwidth via local I/O: The use of fully SAN-connected Windows clusters may enable much higher bandwidth to Windows systems using GPFS, and SAN connectivity may provide greater flexibility in configuring GPFS clusters.
Homogeneous Windows clusters: GPFS clusters can now be formed using only Windows nodes; Linux® or AIX® are no longer required as NSD servers. The Windows nodes can perform most of the required management and administrative operations. The exceptions include:
Certain GPFS commands to apply policy, administer quotas and ACLs. The ability to mount DMAPI-enabled file systems. Support for Tivoli Storage Manager (TSM) Backup Archive client or the native Windows Backup utility

Further improvements in performance and scalability:

Extended attributes for a file can now be stored in the file’s i-node. This can improve the performance of applications that use extended attributes and reduce the amount of disk space required to store them. This change enables the high-performance GPFS policy engine to refer to extended attributes with the same scale-out performance as the regular file attributes, providing richer semantics to content managers and middleware.
Support for more than 2,147,483,648 files in a file system.

A new diagnostic command:

The new mmdiag command better enables IBM Service to determine the state of your GPFS cluster.

Planned availability date

July 30, 2010