IT and Society: Next-Generation storage architecture unveiled

IBM has unveiled a new storage architecture design, created by IBM specialists, that will convert terabytes of pure information into actionable insights twice as fast as previously possible. Ideally suited for cloud computing applications and data-intensive workloads such as digital media, data mining and financial analytics, this new architecture will shave hours off of complex computations without requiring heavy infrastructure investment.

Running analytics applications on extremely large data sets is becoming increasingly important. Created at IBM Research–Almaden, the new General Parallel File System-Shared Nothing Cluster (GPFS-SNC) architecture is designed to provide higher availability through advanced clustering technologies, dynamic file system management and advanced data replication techniques. By "sharing nothing," new levels of availability, performance and scaling are achievable.

GPFS-SNC is a distributed computing architecture in which each node is self-sufficient; tasks are then divided up between these independent computers and no one waits on the other.

IBM's current GPFS technology offering is the core technology for IBM's High Performance Computing Systems, IBM's Information Archive, IBM Scale-Out NAS (SONAS), and the IBM Smart Business Compute Cloud. These research lab innovations enable future expansion of those offerings to further tackle tough big data problems.