IBM Spectrum Scale Version 4.2

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IBM Spectrum Scale™ Version 4.2 is a proven, scalable, high-performance data and file management solution that is based upon the IBM® General Parallel File System (GPFS™).

Spectrum Scale provides comprehensive storage management with a high degree of scalability, flash-accelerated performance, and automatic policy-based storage. Furthermore, it can considerably reduce storage costs while improving security and management efficiency in cloud, big data, and analytics environments.

IBM Spectrum Scale 4.2 includes various integrated Information Lifecycle Management (ILM) tools that allow you to automatically move data based on policies. This can significantly reduce operational costs, since fewer system administrators can manage larger storage infrastructures.

Note: To see which Spectrum Scale functions are supported for your Spectrum Scale version or operating system, refer to the IBM Spectrum Scale FAQs.
Software Defined Storage lets you build your infrastructure your way:
  • Easy to scale with relatively inexpensive commodity hardware while maintaining world class storage management capabilities.
  • Supports any combination of flash, spinning disk, and tape.
  • Supports various cluster configurations that include storage area networks (SANs), Network Shared disk, and Shared Nothing clusters.
  • Supports addition of more storage capacity without affecting the application to greatly simplify administration.
  • Spectrum Scale is available for IBM z Systems™.
Spectrum Scale 4.2:
  • Provides global data access across geographic distances and unreliable WAN connections.
  • Provides proven reliability with use in the most demanding commercial applications.
  • Protects data from most security breaches, unauthorized access, or being lost, stolen, or improperly discarded with native file encryption for data at rest and secure erase.
  • Provides multi-site support, connecting local Spectrum Scale cluster to remote clusters to provide Disaster Recovery configurations.
IBM Spectrum Scale provides additional protocol access methods in the Standard and Advanced editions of the product. Providing these additional file and object access methods and integrating them with Spectrum Scale offers several benefits:
  • It enables users to consolidate various sources of data efficiently in one global name space.
  • It provides a unified data management solution and enables not just efficient space utilization but also avoids having to make unnecessary data moves just because access methods may be different.
The additional protocol access methods integrated with Spectrum Scale are file access using Network File System (NFS) and Server Message Block (SMB) and object access using OpenStack Swift. While each of these server functions (NFS, SMB, and Object) uses open source technologies, this integration adds value by providing the ability to scale and by providing high availability using the clustering technology in Spectrum Scale.
  • IBM Spectrum Scale provides policy-driven compression to reduce the size of data at rest.
  • IBM Spectrum Scale provides block storage for OpenStack deployments via its cinder driver support.
  • IBM Spectrum Scale is a POSIX-compliant file system that offers an enterprise-class alternative to HDFS and is a preferred platform for data analytics where it’s Hadoop compatibility extensions help replace HDFS in a Hadoop ecosystem, with no changes required to Hadoop applications.
Figure 1. IBM Spectrum Scale at a glance

This graphic shows how IBM Spectrum Scale is used to manage data across geographic regions.

Spectrum Scale powers many of the world's largest scientific supercomputers and commercial applications that require high-speed access to large volumes of data such as digital media, engineering design, business intelligence, financial analytics, seismic data processing, geographic information systems, and scalable file serving.