High-speed I/O workloads are moving away from the SAN to Ethernet and IBM® Spectrum Scale is pushing the network limits. The IBM Spectrum® Scale team discovered that many infrastructure Ethernet networks that were used for years to support various applications are not designed to provide a high-performance data path concurrently to many clients from many servers.

IBM Spectrum Scale is not the first product to use Ethernet for storage access. Technologies, such as Fibre Channel over Ethernet (FCoE), scale out NAS, and IP connected storage (iSCSI and others) use Ethernet though IBM Spectrum Scale as the leader in parallel I/O performance, which provides the best performance and value when used on a high-performance network. This IBM Redpaper publication is based on lessons that were learned in the field by deploying IBM Spectrum Scale on Ethernet and InfiniBand networks.

This IBM Redpaper® publication answers several questions, such as, “How can I prepare my network for high performance storage?”, “How do I know when I am ready?”, and “How can I tell what is wrong?” when deploying IBM Spectrum Scale and IBM Elastic Storage® Server (ESS).

This document can help IT architects get the design correct from the beginning of the process. It also can help the IBM Spectrum Scale administrator work effectively with the networking team to quickly resolve issues.

Chapter 1. IBM Spectrum Scale introduction

Chapter 2. Network planning and best practices for IBM Spectrum Scale and IBM Elastic Storage System

Chapter 3. Implementation recommendations

Chapter 4. Network monitoring and troubleshooting

Appendix A. GPFS lease configuration variables effect on expel timing flows

Appendix B. nsdperf command examples