IBM Spectrum Scale being software-based storage allows users to utilize any hardware supported or defined by IBM without dependency on physical hardware provided by IBM. This is one of the features I appreciate most because if you have existing infrastructure at your site but don't want to reinvest in hardware, you can purchase IBM Spectrum Scale software and deploy it as software-defined storage.

Users can comfortably access data from their host to the storage host without relying on new network setup when deploying GPFS as it uses the existing corporate network. However, high-speed ethernet network is required. By adding switches to the same network where client hosts reside and deploying GPFS storage array, any file system created on the storage cluster can grant export permissions determining which hosts can access specific file systems. These hosts can directly mount them as remote file systems. The process is simpler compared to defining IQN for providing access to client hosts. Creating a cluster for clients with virtual machines or physical Linux/Windows machines requires installing GPFS services on client nodes, which creates a client cluster. Access is defined on the storage cluster for the particular client cluster, allowing all hosts in that client cluster to mount file systems with granted permissions.

View full review »

I find IBM Spectrum Scale to be an excellent product known for its fast parallel file system. It achieved the best results when integrated with IBM hardware. Even though it is complex, it provided significant performance advantages in large-scale data management. Its fault tolerance mechanisms and integration capabilities make it popular for extensive AI initiatives and data processing tasks for organizations like Daimler Benz and Bosch.

View full review »

The most valuable feature of IBM Spectrum Scale is its ability to perform parallel writing and reading of large files. The data replication functionality and recovery feature are also good. View full review »

We use GPFS Scale for parallel file access, the file management, and it's an essential part of our operations. It's the only feature we are using since we have not explored other options.

View full review »

GPFS monitoring is the best feature. The performance is very good and so is the scalability. 

The NFS CL solution is impressive because if you have a power loss for any reason from the consumer host, the system switches seamlessly to the next available node in this cluster. This happens without any interruption in the data stream, reading or writing. 

When the system is coming back from the maintenance or the reboot cycle, the system switches automatically back to the initial host. This is very good and very friendly. I have never seen this before when comparing to other solutions such as NetApp, and Dell EMC Unity. NetApp is also very good for NFS solutions.

View full review »

The profile share is a valuable feature. We only use the parallel file system at my company.

View full review »

The high performance of the solution is its most valuable aspect. If you compare it to other storage solutions, it's much better.

The pricing is pretty good.

View full review »

The most valuable feature is the ability to share files across different platforms. It is platform agnostic and not attached to IBM, AIX, Windows, or Linux.

View full review »

The ease of use and the stability of the product. It has been pretty reliable throughout the years. As far as capacity is concerned, it can handle most heavy loads, unlike NFS or even NAS. In this particular case, it is seamless. That is the biggest thing.

View full review »

We can have multiple systems within the same file system. The performance right now on the file system is better than NAS.

View full review »

It has less overhead. We do a lot of training on our SAS environment. 

We had JFS2 file systems, and we made things so fast that JFS2 could not keep up with it. It took us down to a crawl. Spectrum Scale reduced the overhead and allowed SAS to perform.

View full review »

Its great servicing high availability. That is what it is used for.

View full review »

The solution's most valuable features are speed, integration with multiple platforms, and the ability to connect to virtualized storage resources.

View full review »