IBM General Parallel File System - Information Lifecycle Management (ILM) Tools

Information Lifecycle Management (ILM) Tools

Storage pools allow for the grouping of disks within a file system. Tiers of storage can be created by grouping disks based on performance, locality or reliability characteristics. For example, one pool could be high performance fibre channel disks and another more economical SATA storage.

A fileset is a sub-tree of the file system namespace and provides a way to partition the namespace into smaller, more manageable units. Filesets provide an administrative boundary that can be used to set quotas and be specified in a policy to control initial data placement or data migration. Data in a single fileset can reside in one or more storage pools. Where the file data resides and how it is migrated is based on a set of rules in a user defined policy.

There are two types of user defined policies in GPFS: File placement and File management. File placement policies direct file data as files are created to the appropriate storage pool. File placement rules are determined by attributes such as file name, the user name or the fileset. File management policies allow the file's data to be moved or replicated or files deleted. File management policies can be used to move data from one pool to another without changing the file's location in the directory structure. File management policies are determined by file attributes such as last access time, path name or size of the file.

The GPFS policy processing engine is scalable and can be run on many nodes at once. This allows management policies to be applied to a single file system with billions of files and complete in a few hours.