IBM Upgrades GPFS to V3.5 for Big Data

The IBM Corp.’s General Parallel File System (GPFS) is a cluster file system designed for performance, parallel file access and management.

It delivers reliability, multicluster support, scalability and performance with automated failure recovery, and decentralized data management for simplifying administration. It provides several essential to allow to effectively manage growing quantities of structured and unstructured data.

The new features in GPFS V3.5 allow to manage very large amounts of unstructured file data better than before. With improved small file performance, finer granularity namespace management, increased performance for some administration tasks, and an approach to expanding the global namespace, managing large volumes becomes tractable.

New features include:

• Active File Management. For Linux nodes, GPFS introduces a scalable, performance remote file data caching solution integrated with the GPFS cluster file system. It leverages the inherent scalability of GPFS to provide a scalable, multi-node, consistent cache of data exported by a remote file system cluster.
• IPv6 Support. To address the growing number of addressable end-points on the Internet that require or create data.
• Efficient File Copy Creation. Through clones of files, including files in snapshots, without incurring the overhead of copying all of the data blocks.
• Snapshot Support of Filesets. Cloud computing customers can now carve out a piece of storage that looks more like an independent file system. These file system-like entities allow certain kinds of management on less than full file system granularity.
• Improved User and Group Quotas. Each fileset owner now has the ability to control quotas for users and groups of their fileset.
• Windows Native Port. Currently, GPFS on Windows requires the Subsystem for UNIX-based Applications (SUA) from Microsoft for its operation. This requirement is being reduced over time. In this release of GPFS, the GPFS daemon no longer uses SUA. The use of the Posix Threads (PThreads) API to provide an implementation of the POSIX standard thread API on Windows is introduced. SUA continues to be required for the use of GPFS administrative commands.

Planned availability date:
April 20, 2012