IT abroad: IBM demonstrates highly-efficient storage performance

IBM Researchers have demonstrated the future of large-scale storage systems by successfully scanning 10 billion files on a single system in just 43 minutes, shattering the previous record of one billion files in three hours by a factor of 37.

IBM says that growing at unprecedented scales, this advance unifies data environments on a single platform, instead of being distributed across several systems that must be separately managed. It also dramatically reduces and simplifies data management tasks.

In 1998, IBM Researchers unveiled a clustered file system called General Parallel File System (GPFS) that enabled to deal with large amounts of data and high-speed access to large volumes of data. At that time GPFS positioned itself as the basis for critically important apps dealing with corporate archives.

IBM now boasts important improvements of GPFS and its optimization for modern eight core processors. The breakthrough was achieved using GPFS running on a cluster of 10 eight core systems and solid state storage.

IBM announces that GPFS's advanced algorithm makes possible the full use of all processor cores in all phases of the task, what contributes to excellent performance. What is more, the new version upgrades metadata storage allowing users to easily find necessary data.