GPFS: Administration and Programming Reference - IRA Home

Summary of changes
The following sections summarize changes to the GPFS licensed program and the GPFS library for V3.1
Summary of changes
for GPFS 3.1
as updated, April 2006
Changes to GPFS for this release include:
v New information:
– GPFS now provides for Information Lifecycle Management (ILM) with the introduction of storage
pools, policy-based file management, and filesets.
Storage pools allow you to manage your file system’s storage in groups. You may now partition your
storage based on such factors as performance, locality, and reliability. Files are assigned to a
storage pool based on defined policies.
Policies provide for:
- File placement to a specific storage pool when it is created.
- Migration of a file from one storage pool to another.
- Deletion of a file based on characteristics of the file.
Filesets provide a means of partitioning the namespace of a file system, allowing administrative
operations at a finer granularity than the entire file system:
- You can define per-fileset quotas on data blocks and inodes. These are analogous to existing per
user and per group quotas.
- Filesets can be specified in the policy rules used for placement and migration of file data.
Details on these features are provided in the chapter Policy-based data management for GPFS of
General Parallel File System: Advanced Administration Guide.
New commands in support of storage pools, policies, and filesets include:
- mmapplypolicy
- mmchfileset
- mmchpolicy
- mmcrfileset
- mmdelfileset
- mmlinkfileset
- mmlsfileset
- mmlspolicy
- mmrestripefile
- mmunlinkfileset
New subroutines in support of storage pools and filesets include:
- gpfs_igetstoragepool()
- gpfs_igetfilesetname()
– The requirements for IP connectivity in a multi-cluster environment have been relaxed. In earlier
releases of GPFS, 'all-to-all' connectivity was required. Any node mounting a given file system had to
be able to open a TCP/IP connection to any other node mounting the same file system, irrespective
of which cluster either of the nodes belonged to.
In GPFS 3.1, a node mounting a file system from a remote cluster is only required to be able to
open a TCP/IP connection to nodes in the cluster that owns the file system, but not any other nodes
from other clusters that may be mounting the same file system.
– Enhanced file system mounting supported by three new commands:
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