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IBM's Spectrum Scale gets see-through cloud tiering

Direct support of object storage by parallel file system

IBM's Spectrum Scale parallel file system offering is going to support direct integration of Cleversafe, SoftLayer cloud, and Amazon S3 object storage.

Cleversafe, SoftLayer and S3 become target stores for Spectrum Scale data in the same way, IBM says, as any local disk store. It's at pains to stress that this is not a gateway approach.

Also supported are Swift and Swift S3 emulation. The support requires Spectrum Scale v4.2 or later cluster, uses X86 Linux only, and there is no mixed-node cluster support.

It also says that, as "this is an extension to Spectrum Scale, policy-driven targeting, migration, encryption and unified access are all extended to data stored in a cloud-scale object store."

Spectrum Scale manages file seeking and other metadata operations so the whole set up is transparent to end users. Adding cloud or object storage to a Spectrum Scale cluster will be straightforward, with sysadmins not needing hand-coded copy scripts, complicated archive and restore configurations or, of course, gateway systems that need to be separately maintained.

Spectrum_Scale_Cloud_tiering

Spectrum Scale and cloud tiering

Spectrum Scale v4.2 adds:

  • Improved provisioning and administrator productivity with a new GUI
  • Management of resource contention with Quality of Service (QoS) prioritization and monitoring
  • Storage portfolio visibility with IBM Spectrum Control integration
  • Unified file and object storage with integrated data analytics
  • Policy-based migration to the optimum storage pool and active archive
  • Storage space savings with compression
  • Asynchronous Disaster Recovery remote replication capability
  • Improved design for faster, easier, and more reliable workflows with native
  • Hadoop support, multiprotocol NAS, and proven enterprise capabilities
  • Highly available read and write caching to accelerate applications

Spectrum Scale users could well be very pleased by this added target storage which strikes us here at El Reg as a very realistic thing for IBM to do.

An open beta test of cloud tiering is now under way and you could join in the fun and contribute to the product extension's quality. ®

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