Introduction to Active File Management (AFM)

Active File Management (AFM) enables sharing of data across clusters, even if the networks are unreliable or have high latency.

The following figure is a sample of an AFM relationship.

You can use AFM to create associations between IBM Spectrum Scale clusters or between IBM Spectrum Scale clusters and NFS data source. With AFM, you can implement a single namespace view across sites around the world by making your global namespace truly global.

By using AFM, you can build a common namespace across locations, and automate the flow of file data. You can duplicate data for disaster recovery purposes without suffering from WAN latencies.

AFM can be enabled on GPFS-independent filesets only. A dependent fileset can be linked under an AFM fileset, but only up to one level below the AFM-independent fileset. The dependent fileset does not allow nested dependent filesets under the AFM-independent fileset.

Individual files in the AFM filesets can be compressed. Compressing files saves disk space. For more information, see File compression.

Snapshot data migration is also supported. For more information, see ILM for snapshots.

Namespace replication with AFM occurs asynchronously so that applications can operate continuously on an AFM fileset without network bandwidth constraints.

Note: AFM does not offer any feature to check consistency of files across source and destination. However, after files are replicated, you can use any third-party utility to check consistency.