Storage pools

Physically, a storage pool is a collection of disks or RAID arrays. Storage pools also allow you to group multiple storage systems within a file system.

Using storage pools, you can create tiers of storage by grouping storage devices based on performance, locality, or reliability characteristics. For example, one pool could be an enterprise class storage system that hosts high-performance Fibre Channel disks and another pool might consist of numerous disk controllers that host a large set of economical SATA disks.

There are two types of storage pools in GPFS™, internal storage pools and external storage pools. Internal storage pools are managed within GPFS. External storage pools are managed by an external application such as IBM Spectrum Protect™. For external storage pools, GPFS provides tools that allow you to define an interface that your external storage manager uses to access your data. GPFS does not manage the data placed in external storage pools. Instead, GPFS manages the movement of data to and from external storage pools. Storage pools allow you to perform complex operations such as moving, mirroring, or deleting files across multiple storage devices, providing storage virtualization and a single management context.