IBM General Parallel File System ( GPFS )

GPFS (General Parallel File System) is a high-performance shared-disk clustered file system developed by IBM.

Like some other cluster filesystems, GPFS provides concurrent high-speed file access to applications executing on multiple nodes of clusters. It can be used with AIX 5L clusters, Linux clusters, or a heterogeneous cluster of AIX and Linux nodes. In addition to providing filesystem storage capabilities, GPFS provides tools for management and administration of the GPFS cluster and allows for shared access to file systems from remote GPFS clusters.

GPFS has been available on AIX since 1998 and on Linux since 2001, and is offered as part of the IBM System Cluster 1350.

Versions of GPFS.

Versions:

GPFS 3.2, September 2007
GPFS 3.2.1-2, April 2008
GPFS 3.2.1-4, July 2008
GPFS 3.1
GPFS 2.3.0-29

Architecture

GPFS provides high performance by allowing data to be accessed over multiple computers at once. Most existing file systems are designed for a single server environment, and adding more file servers does not improve performance. GPFS provides higher input/output performance by "striping" blocks of data from individual files over multiple disks, and reading and writing these blocks in parallel. Other features provided by GPFS include high availability, support for heterogeneous clusters, disaster recovery, security, DMAPI, HSM and ILM.