224 IBM NeXtScale System Planning and Implementation Guide
Helping eliminate the cost of moving data across congested networks
Write affinity enables applications to dictate the layout of files on different
nodes, which maximizing write and read bandwidth
Support for variable data block sizes provides efficient support for a wide
variety of workloads.
Typical open source Hadoop file systems offer only large, fixed data block sizes,
which are inefficient for processing small data sets or streaming data workloads.
The metablock approach that is used by GPFS FPO enables large and small
block sizes to coexist in the same file system to more optimally meet the needs of
real customer environments.
8.3.2 IBM System x GPFS Storage Server
Deploying solutions for technical computing, HPC, analytics, and cloud
environments can place a significant burden on IT.
The IBM System x GPFS Storage Server, which is fulfilled through the IBM
Intelligent Cluster, uses decades of IBM experience to reduce the complexity of
deployment with integrated, delivered, and fully supported solutions that match
best-in-industry components with optimized solution design.
The GPFS Storage Server combines the performance of System x servers with
industry-leading GPFS software to offer a high-performance, scalable
building-block approach to modern storage needs. External storage arrays with
traditional RAID 6 designs can be performance bottlenecks and suffer from
substantially long rebuild times with today’s high-capacity disk technology. GPFS
Storage Server solution extends the use of the new GPFS Native RAID capability
that is integrated with System x Hardware to obtain four to six times faster rebuild
time and new 8+3 RAID reliability.
Figure 8-4 on page 225 shows the traditional storage approach of dedicated
storage controllers versus the GPFS Storage Server where controller features
are moved to System x servers. System x servers are so powerful, with so much
I/O capability, that they can migrate all of the functionality that was contained in
external storage controllers directly into the System x server.
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