IBM unveils breakthrough storage performance

Researchers from IBM yesterday 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.

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, allowing more information to be stored in the same technology, rather than continuing to buy more and more storage.

In 1998, IBM Researchers unveiled a highly scalable, clustered parallel file system called 'general parallel file system (GPFS), which was furthered tuned to make this breakthrough possible.

GPFS represents a major advance of scaling for storage performance and capacity, while keeping management costs flat.

This innovation could help organisations cope with the exploding growth of data, transactions and digitally-aware sensors and other devices that comprise Smarter Planet systems.

It is ideally suited for applications requiring high-speed access to large volumes of data such as data mining to determine customer buying behaviors across massive data sets, seismic data processing, risk management and financial analysis, weather modeling and scientific research.