The system relies heavily on ethernet networking, and when issues occur, we must consult with the network team to investigate. While logs may indicate network errors, the situation differs from previous SAN setups where Fiber Channel was under our control. The storage team could directly identify and resolve Fiber Channel network issues. GPFS should consider enhanced integration with network monitoring to enable quick detection and resolution of network layer issues rather than depending extensively on the networking team. From a functionality perspective, I cannot think of additional improvements or enhancements needed for the future.
There can be improvements in fault tolerance and making erasure coding faster. Additionally, it would be beneficial to have example configurations or applications that assist in setup and configuration.
The solution would benefit from being simplified. The scalability could be a bit better. It needs to be more flexible when it comes to expanding. It would be helpful if there was a graphical user interface that could walk you through the deployment process. The instructions surrounding setup aren't the best. They need to be more step-by-step.
The pricing and licensing model for this solution are complex and it is sometimes difficult to explain it to customers. It is not always easy to sell this product because certain aspects seem complicated for the customer.
Senior Expert Solution Architect at a comms service provider with 10,001+ employees
Real User
Dec 23, 2019
The biggest problem is that it is not able to provide block storage. It can consume block storage, you can put it on from the storage and present the span over the fiber channel or iSCSI. The problem is that they have not been able to provide block storage consumable to the customer host. This is only a side-based solution. We can install the GPFS into the customer environment but I don't think that is the best solution. The initial setup has room for improvement, it is not straightforward. Spectrum scale is very good from the performance perspective, but from the application perspective, you have to take care if you want to use a database as a service that you can consume. For example, a database, or being able to read and write it, doesn't have a deployment solution. It is missing.
IBM Spectrum Scale is a cluster file system that provides concurrent access to a single file system or set of file systems from multiple nodes. The nodes can be SAN attached, network attached, a mixture of SAN attached and network attached, or in a shared nothing cluster configuration. This enables access to this common set of data to support a scale-out solution or to provide a high availability platform. IBM Spectrum Scale has many features beyond common data access including data...
The system relies heavily on ethernet networking, and when issues occur, we must consult with the network team to investigate. While logs may indicate network errors, the situation differs from previous SAN setups where Fiber Channel was under our control. The storage team could directly identify and resolve Fiber Channel network issues. GPFS should consider enhanced integration with network monitoring to enable quick detection and resolution of network layer issues rather than depending extensively on the networking team. From a functionality perspective, I cannot think of additional improvements or enhancements needed for the future.
There is room for improvement in the web interface. There could be more information available, such as charts and graphs to monitor performance.
There can be improvements in fault tolerance and making erasure coding faster. Additionally, it would be beneficial to have example configurations or applications that assist in setup and configuration.
I wish there were some graphical user interface to access the GPFS file system creation and monitoring.
The solution's pricing could be better.
I rate this solution a nine out of ten. I believe there is no graphic user interface, so they should include it.
The solution would benefit from being simplified. The scalability could be a bit better. It needs to be more flexible when it comes to expanding. It would be helpful if there was a graphical user interface that could walk you through the deployment process. The instructions surrounding setup aren't the best. They need to be more step-by-step.
Integration with other vendors is not available. This feature would be very helpful.
The pricing and licensing model for this solution are complex and it is sometimes difficult to explain it to customers. It is not always easy to sell this product because certain aspects seem complicated for the customer.
The biggest problem is that it is not able to provide block storage. It can consume block storage, you can put it on from the storage and present the span over the fiber channel or iSCSI. The problem is that they have not been able to provide block storage consumable to the customer host. This is only a side-based solution. We can install the GPFS into the customer environment but I don't think that is the best solution. The initial setup has room for improvement, it is not straightforward. Spectrum scale is very good from the performance perspective, but from the application perspective, you have to take care if you want to use a database as a service that you can consume. For example, a database, or being able to read and write it, doesn't have a deployment solution. It is missing.