What is spectrum scale?
IBM Spectrum Scale is a global file system with a single namespace. This allows files to be shared between different servers, clients, and applications. This allows everyone to read and edit the same file simultaneously at any time without interfering with each other.
Spectrum Scale is one of the cluster file systems that can be distributed across multiple nodes. This makes the file system large enough for most of us, even if the data volume is a yottabyte—which is truly an incredible amount of data. At Cristie, we don't currently know of any company that manages a septillion bytes. Even analysts at IDC predict a total volume of "only" 163 zettabytes worldwide by 2025.
A major advantage of clustered file systems is the ability to share them across multiple clients. This means that an application or individual user has unlimited storage space available. The data to be backed up can be written to the Spectrum Scale File System via a local mount point, via shares (NFS/CIFS), or as an object (S3).
Data is managed using policies. This also allows data to be automatically moved to different storage tiers. This auto-tiering ensures optimal use of available media. Hot data—data that needs to be accessed quickly and frequently—ends up on SSDs, while cold data is stored on cheaper but slower hard drives or tapes. Data can also be backed up or offloaded to the cloud via the S3 interface. Spectrum Scale supports both private and public cloud computing platforms. One of the storage tiers can also be IBM Spectrum Protect.
What is SPFS?
Our SPFS stands for Spectrum Protect Filesystem and has nothing to do with the Russian SWIFT clone. SPFS is a virtual file system that, as a backup and archive file system, offers useful features such as WORM (Write Once Read Many), versioning, encryption, data redundancy, data reduction techniques, and data filtering. In fact, SPFS is just a small binary file that translates file system operations into API calls for Spectrum Protect. SPFS requires no local storage, even temporary storage. All I/O operations are sent directly to the Spectrum Protect server. This allows the company to continue using its current backup and recovery tools as usual, saving time and money.
SPFS is very easy to use and behaves like a normal Linux file system. Backups can be automated with the "ls" command or with small scripts such as pg_dump> /backup/pg.dmp. All other commands such as "cp," "rm," "mkdir," "rmdir," etc. also work as usual. This makes it easy to integrate SPFS into any application. In addition, SPFS caches metadata and features read-ahead technology. This saves valuable time during queries or restores.
Data is transferred asynchronously, deduplicated, and compressed. The file system can be deployed as a backup or archive. No special agents are required to protect databases. Versioning provides additional security: If a file is overwritten, SPFS automatically renames the old file to Spectrum Protect.
So what is the difference between SPFS and Spectrum Scale?
Each SPFS installation requires its own node in Spectrum Protect.
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