Overview of GPFS

GPFS™ is a cluster file system that provides concurrent access to a single file system or set of file systems from multiple nodes. The nodes can be SAN attached, network attached, a mixture of SAN attached and network attached, or in a shared nothing cluster configuration. 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.