Enhanced system flexibility

With GPFS, your system resources are not frozen. You can add or delete disks while the file system is mounted.

When the time is favorable and system demand is low, you can rebalance the file system across all currently configured disks.

With the QoS capability, you can prevent I/O-intensive, long running administration commands from dominating file system performance and significantly delaying other tasks.

You can also add or delete nodes without having to stop and restart the GPFS daemon on all nodes.

Note: GPFS allows many quorum nodes to facilitate maintaining quorum and continued cluster operation. GPFS also allows a tiebreaker disk configuration to further enhance cluster availability. For additional information, refer to Quorum.

If the physical connection to the disk is broken, GPFS dynamically switches disk access to the server nodes and continues to provide data through NSD server nodes. GPFS falls back to local disk access when it discovers that the path is repaired.

After GPFS is configured for your system, depending on your applications, hardware, and workload, you can re-configure GPFS to increase throughput. You can set up your GPFS environment for your current applications and users, secure in the knowledge that you can expand in the future without jeopardizing your data. GPFS capacity can grow as your hardware expands.