back to article IBM intros Elastic Storage - as used by HPC brain Watson

IBM has announced Elastic Storage as a component of its software-defined storage portfolio, and it's actually a repackaging and renaming of the venerable GPFS product. GPFS is IBM’s General Parallel File System for parallel access to massive numbers of files. The IBM announcement says Elastic Storage “offers unprecedented …

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  1. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    Integration with TSM

    GPFS has integrated with TSM Hierarchical Storage Manager for ages, allowing data to be written to tape to free up disk. I understand that this works quite well.

    It's a real shame that it is not better integrated with the core TSM backup and archive services.

    You either have to put up with TSMs unpleasantly slow file-tree-walk scan to identify files that need to be backed up (this is not really TSM's fault, it's just that GPFS filesystems can be huge), or submit yourself to the absolute crap set of shell and perl scripts that they call mmbackup, which throws away almost all of the TSM mature features, and drives TSM as a basic simple tape filestore using selective backups.

    The version I use (pre-GPFS 4.1, so it may have changed in the new release) does not even allow the use of GPFS snapshots to freeze views of the filesystem to make consistent backups. GPFS developers blame a lack of TSM function rather than their own crude code.

    Really, IBM should have integrated the fast GPFS policy scans into a dedicated TSM backup/archive client for GPFS, and allowed it to be used just like any other TSM client.

    It's a real shame, as individually both GPFS and TSM are really capable at doing what they are designed for.

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