Antivirus software

If more than one GPFS Windows node is running antivirus software that scans directories and files, shared files only need to be scanned by one GPFS node. It is not necessary to scan shared files more than once.

When you run antivirus scans from more than one node, schedule the scans to run at different times to allow better performance of each scan, as well as to avoid any conflicts that might arise because of concurrent exclusive access attempts by the antivirus software from multiple nodes. Note that enabling real-time antivirus protection for GPFS volumes could significantly degrade GPFS performance and cause excessive resource consumption.

Tip: Consider using a single, designated Windows node to perform all virus scans.

Most antivirus, antimalware, and endpoint security products on Windows like Microsoft Defender (and many third-party solutions) provide real-time, file-scanning capabilities. During these real-time scans, security endpoints might map files into memory even when the files are not actively accessed by user applications. On IBM Storage Scale file systems, the background process of mapping files into memory can lead to performance degradation. Therefore, IBM recommends to exclude IBM Storage Scale drives and volumes from real-time security scans. Another side effect of this background memory-mapping of GPFS files by antivirus programs is that an attempt to compress or uncompress GPFS files from these Windows nodes might fail. For more information, see File compression and memory mapping.