Experience with Hierarchical Storage Management based on GPFS and TSM at INFN-CNAF

摘要

At the INFN-CNAF Tier-1 computing centre we have evaluated the integration between two IBM products, namely the General Parallel File System (GPFS) and the Tivoli Storage Manager (TSM), with the aim of implementing a high performance Hierarchical Storage Management (HSM) system for managing the data of the experiments operating at the Large Hadron Collider. Starting from version 3.2, GPFS allows for the execution of selective migrations of GPFS disk-resident files to external tape pools by means of appropriate policies defined via the Information Lifecycle Management (ILM) interface and specific user programs. As far as recalls of files from tape to disk are concerned, an optimized tape-ordered access is mandatory, and this has been achieved by exploiting new features of the TSM HSM client, preliminarily made available in version 6.1. In this paper we summarize the work made for implementing the full GPFS-TSM integration, as well as some early but significant results obtained during intensive data access activities.