IBM Spectrum Scale

IBM Spectrum Scale is at the forefront of storage technologies and continues to innovate with every release. We welcome your participation in the process by providing feedback to help us ensure IBM continues fulfilling your storage needs today and in the future.

New in IBM Spectrum Scale 5.0 [December 2017 Release]

IBM Spectrum Scale V5.0 is designed to provide an industry-leading, unprecedented level of performance for the easiest, most flexible, and data-efficient software-defined storage solution. As data volumes grow and applications become more capable, more companies need the fast, highly available, and highly scalable data access of Spectrum Scale to drive their business. Spectrum Scale V5.0 spans the enterprise storage portfolio, including flash, disk, tape, local, and cloud storage.

IBM Spectrum Scale delivers software-defined storage for cloud, big data and analytics, and data-intensive technical workflows, with enhanced security, flash accelerated performance, and usability. Spectrum Scale is used for diverse workloads across every industry to deliver the performance, reliability, and availability of data that are essential to the business

IBM Spectrum Scale Standard Edition offers a choice of licensing: Client, Server, or File Placement Optimizer (FPO), and is licensed by the number of sockets on the server, or virtual server, available to IBM Spectrum Scale.

IBM Spectrum Scale Data Management Edition does not distinguish between Client, Server, or FPO license types, all are included in the license. Additionally, it includes encryption of data at rest, secure erase, asynchronous multi-site disaster recovery, and all the features of Standard Edition. Data Management Edition is licensed by capacity, with a terabyte metric.

Highlights:

A new level of storage performance and efficiency

• Dramatic improvements in i/o performance
• Significantly reduced inter-node software path latency to support newest low-latency, high-bandwidth hardware such as NVMe
• Improved performance for many small and large block size workloads simultaneously from new 4MB default block size with variable sub-block size based on block size choice
• Improved metadata operation performance to a single directory from multiple nodes

Simpler, more powerful system administration

• Faster and simpler out-of-the-box experience with tuning of an additional 20+ communication protocol and buffer management parameters now handled automatically, aiding setup for optimal performance
• Enhanced GUI features for many capabilities including performance, capacity, network monitoring, AFM (multi-cluster management), transparent cloud tiering, and enhanced maintenance and support including interaction with IBM remote support

Efficient storage for diverse workloads

• 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

Security and compliance

• File audit logging capability to track user accesses to filesystem and events supported across all nodes and all protocols. (Data Management Edition only).
• Parseable data stored in secure retention-protected fileset (Data Management Edition only). File-level immutability (independent certification pending for version 5.0)
• Data security following removal of physical media protected by on- disk encryption (Data Management Edition only)
• Protocols include encryption of data in motion

Speedy big data analytics

• Faster, easier, and reliable workflows with native Hadoop support, multiprotocol NAS, and proven enterprise capabilities
• Highly available read and write caching accelerate applications

For more details: Spectrum Scale 5.0 Summary of Changes

The IBM Spectrum Scale team is interested in your feedback on what enhancements would benefit your business, especially around your Big Data challenges. We invite you to share your feedback with us via the Forum or open a requirement using the Request for Enhancement button.

The IBM Spectrum Scale community covers many industries from financial analytics to digital media, from product engineering and design to biotech research. You will find pointers here to engage with a world-wide user group of IBM Spectrum Scale administrators and the IBM Spectrum Scale development team.

Getting Started

• More details about IBM Spectrum Scale(like datasheets, solution briefs etc) can be found at the product website
• IBM Spectrum Scale product documentation
• IBM Spectrum Scale frequently asked questions

How to Engage

• IBM Spectrum Scale Wiki – Learn, discover, and share information
• IBM Spectrum Scale Forum – Share feedback and discuss technical IBM Spectrum Scale issues
• Become a member of the ‘GPFS user group’ community
• IBM Spectrum Scale announce forum – Keep up with the latest IBM Spectrum Scale product announcements
• IBM Spectrum Scale trials:
  • Prospective customers can try IBM Spectrum Scale free for 90 days. Please contact your IBM sales representative for more information.
  • ISVs can get software and licenses via ‘IBM PartnerWorld Software Access Catalog’

Media Gallery

Featured videos:

Documentation

Featured publications:

• Journey of GPFS [On making GPFS truly general]
• A Deployment Guide for IBM Spectrum Scale Object

Featured tooling:

• Develop mobile apps with IBM MobileFirst Object Store Adapter for Spectrum Scale
• Tooling for IBM Spectrum Scale monitoring

Featured blogs/links

• IBM Spectrum Scale Monthly Partner Calls
• Spectrum Scale user talking about protocol support with 4.1.1 release
• Implement WORM for regulatory compliance with IBM Spectrum Scale
• Learn why Spectrum Scale is a good choice for OpenStack Object Store environments
• Elastic Storage Server as a replacement for traditional RAID
• GPFS user group activities
• IBM Spectrum Scale with OpenStack
• IBM Spectrum Scale object encryption at rest
• GPFS Native RAID + TSM on 40 GBit ethernet

IBM Spectrum Scale Trial on the AWS Cloud

IBM Spectrum Scale is now available as a trial on Amazon Web Services (AWS) Cloud via a Quick Start. You are invited to test the functionality provided by the Quick Start, which deploys an IBM Spectrum Scale (version 4.2.3) Cluster on AWS Cloud creating Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) instances and Elastic Block Storage (EBS). The number of instances launched and storage configured is based on some configuration parameters provided to the CloudFormation template used by the Quick Start. Additional details about the deployment, use, licensing & restrictions are provided in the deployment guide which is linked on the Quick Start page. Use IBM Spectrum Scale Forum or mail to scale@us.ibm.com to ask questions and to give your feedback.

Use IBM Spectrum Scale Forum or mail to scale@us.ibm.com to ask questions and to give your feedback.

Date	Type	Description	Download
September 2017	Open Trial	IBM Spectrum Scale Trial on AWS Cloud using Quick Start	Quick Start Launch

IBM Spectrum Scale Trial VM

This Trial VM offers fully pre-configured IBM Spectrum Scale instance in a virtual machine based on IBM Spectrum Scale 5.0 GA version. The download bundle includes the virtual image and the requisite guides (Quick Start guide, Explore guide and Advanced guide) allowing you to try the key features in minutes. Use the Quick Start guide for installation instructions. The Explore guide provides step-by-step instructions to try our unified file & Object as well as GUI functionality.

Use IBM Spectrum Scale Forum or mail to scale@us.ibm.com to ask questions and to give your feedback.

Date	Type	Description	Download
9 April 2018	Evaluation	VM with pre-configured IBM Spectrum Scale	Download

IBM Spectrum Scale Object Metadata Search Open Beta

One of the unique features of an object storage solution is the ability to set user-defined metadata to containers and objects. But, without an ability to efficiently search the containers/objects based on this metadata (key/value pairs), the object storage industry has not been able to leverage the full potential of this valuable asset. Now with IBM Spectrum Scale Object Metadata Search, users can search for containers or objects based on a specific set of metadata. This open beta program introduces object metadata search function and provides the instructions on how to configure, deploy and use the object metadata search feature on top of the Spectrum Scale Object Storage offering.You can use this functionality on top of your existing 4.1+ installation of Spectrum Scale Object Storage.

For quick introduction to this feature, take a look at the presentation:

Mail to nilesh.bhosale@in.ibm.com to ask questions and to give your feedback.

Date	Type	Description	Download
28 Mar 2016	Open Beta	IBM Spectrum Scale Object Metadata Search Open Beta	Download

IBM Spectrum Scale GUI Open Beta

The IBM Spectrum Scale GUI (Graphical User Interface) is the graphical interface for IBM Spectrum Scale. You are invited to test the latest GA version of our GUI here. You can try this GUI with your existing 4.2.x installs of Spectrum Scale but to use all features we suggest the latest GA version which is 4.2.2 to test all new features. Great new features are added we described in the documentation of the package.

Try the beta build below. Use IBM Spectrum Scale forum or mail to GUI Feedback to ask questions and to give your feedback.

Date	Type	Description	Download
Dec 2016	Open Beta	IBM Spectrum Scale GUI	Download

This GUI will be part of IBM Spectrum Scale release builds and is meant to serve for single cluster deployments. Customers can also leverage IBM Spectrum Control to manage IBM Spectrum Scale across multiple clusters. You can try IBM Spectrum Control’s integration with IBM Spectrum Scale here.