By Chris Mellor, The Register
The IT universe is seeing a massive collision taking place as the worlds of high-performance computing, big data and warehousing intermingle. IBM is pushing its General Parallel File System (GPFS) further to broaden its footprint in this space, with the 3.5 release adding big data and async replication features as well as customer metadata and more performance.

GPFS is a large-scale file system running on Network Shared Disk (NSD) server nodes with the file data spread over a variety of storage devices and users enjoying parallel access. We got the GPFS 3.5 news from Crispin Keable, IBM’s HPC architect based at Basingstoke.

The new release has Active File Management, an asynchronous version of the existing GPFS multi-cluster synchronous replication feature, which enables a central GPFS site to be mirrored with other remote sites, where users then get file access to the mirrored at local instead of wide area network speed. The link is duplex, so updates at either side of it are propagated across.

Full Story