The IBM® General Parallel File System (GPFS™) is a cluster file system. This means that it provides concurrent access to a single file system or set of file systems from multiple nodes. These nodes can all be SAN attached or a mix of SAN and network attached. This enables high performance access to this common set of data to support a scale-out solution or provide a high availability platform.
GPFS has many features beyond common data access including data replication, policy based storage management, and multi-site operations. You can create a GPFS cluster of AIX® nodes, Linux nodes, Windows server nodes, or a mix of all three. GPFS can run on virtualized instances providing common data access in environments, leverage logical partitioning, or other hypervisors. Multiple GPFS clusters can share data within a location or across wide area network (WAN) connections.