Advanced File Storage Area on Spectrum Scale

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

For the single ECM node study, XFS was replaced by the IBM Spectrum Scale filesystem at a later stage. This enabled a comparison to be made between the capabilities of IBM Spectrum Scale and a non-clustered high-performance filesystem.

The following example shows how the Spectrum Scale File Storage Area is populated with the data that is shown in Table 1.
# df -hT
Filesystem                          Type   Size  Used Avail Use% Mounted on
/dev/dasda1                         ext3    20G   15G  4.2G  78% /
...
/dev/FSData                         gpfs   600G  337G  264G  57% /data/FSData

Note: The ECM node runs FNP8 CPE and the ICN in the same Linux™ node. Therefore, this node is the only node in the Spectrum Scale cluster for this part of the study. The follow-on Part 2 white paper addresses the multi-node Spectrum Scale cluster scale-out, either as ‘Shared Disk’ or ‘Network Shared Disk’ model.

This example shows a Spectrum Scale cluster with single ECM node:
# mmlscluster

GPFS cluster information
========================
  GPFS cluster name:         ECM_1_node
  GPFS cluster id:           714383681xxxxxxxxx
  GPFS UID domain:           ECM_1_node
  Remote shell command:      /usr/bin/ssh
  Remote file copy command:  /usr/bin/scp
  Repository type:           CCR

 Node  Daemon node name  IP address     Admin node name  Designation
---------------------------------------------------------------------
   1   ECMnod1           xx.xxx.xx.xxx  ECMnod1           quorum-manager
This example shows six 100 GiB FCP/SCSI disks for the File Storage Area that are directly attached to the ECM node:
# mmlsnsd

File system     Disk name      NSD servers 
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
FSData          nsd14cb        (directly attached) 
FSData          nsd15cb        (directly attached) 
FSData          nsd14cc        (directly attached) 
FSData          nsd15cc        (directly attached) 
FSData          nsd14cd        (directly attached) 
FSData          nsd15cd        (directly attached)