Storage Scale User Group

CANCELLED: Worldwide/UK 2020 Spectrum Scale User Group
2020-05-13 - 2020-05-14 | IBM South Bank, 76/78 Upper Ground, London, SE1 9PZ, United Kingdom
Due to the ongoing COVID-19 outbreak, this in-person event is cancelled. We hope to bring a digital version!

This year’s Spectrum Scale user group event has a fantastic agenda of Spectrum Scale experts and will take place over 2-days, again at IBM’s client centre overlooking the River Thames in London. 2020 sees 10 years of the user group in the UK! The event will provide you with the opportunity to hear the latest Spectrum Scale updates from filesystem experts as well as hear from other users on their experiences. Similar to previous years, we’re also holding smaller interactive workshops to allow for more detailed discussion.
In addition to the main event, we’re also running a new user day on 12th May. Please note that registration for the new user day is separate.
Sponsors
This event wouldn’t be possible without the support of our sponsors and we thank them for their support!

Agenda
The agenda is currently being developed, the outline agenda to give an indication of timings is given below but is subject to change.
Day 1 – May 13th 2020

StartEndTitleSpeaker

6009:0010:00ARRIVALS & REGISTRATION

3010:0010:30Opening, welcome & pop quizSimon Thompson (Chair)

6012:0013:00LUNCH

3014:4515:15BREAK

4016:5017:30Meet the Devs - Ask us AnythingAll

1017:3017:40WRAP UPSimon Thompson (Chair)

13518:3022:45User Group Networking / DinnerRegistration and Badge/Lanyard required

Day 2 – May 14th 2020

StartEndTopicSpeaker

3008:3009:00ARRIVALS

3008:3009:00Spectrum Scale Licensing

6009:0010:00

6010:0011:00

6011:0012:00

6012:0013:00LUNCH

3013:0013:30

3013:3014:00

3014:0014:30BREAK

2014:3014:50

2014:5015:10

2015:1015:30

2015:3015:50

1015:5016:00CLOSESimon Thompson (Chair)

IBM Virtual User Groups Day
2020-05-19 - 2020-05-20
IBM are hosting an Virtual User groups day which includes a focus on Spectrum Scale

SSUG::Digital: 001 - What is new in Spectrum Scale 5.0.5?
2020-06-18 16:00 - 17:30 (Europe/London) | Digital Event
At each of our user group events, we pretty much always start off with “What’s new in XXX release?” and with Spectrum Scale 5.0.5 having just been release, we’re doing the same with the new series of SSUG::Digital events.

Download slides here

Blog Post: What is new in Spectrum Scale 5.0.5?
Q&A
Q: How would one go about obtaining an IBM Contact?
A: Do you have an IBM Sales rep already? That would be the first person to contact. If you purchased through a business partner, that is your first point of contact.
Q: Will EUS releases going to be consumed preferentially by the ESS code distributions? Maybe would make it easier to coordinate Spectrum Scale and ESS code levels when we need to update Spectrum Scale.
A: That’s the intention. Of course, based on exact timing of releases and ESS needs for new functions, it might not work out in all cases.
Q: Regarding Thin Provisioning support: Are there any test cycle for other vendors like Hitachi already happening?
A: Contact IBM to discuss the specific vendor requirements. If you have a specific piece of hardware you want to see supported, file an RFE.
Q: Does the support of compression mean that you will also support the FCM Modules in an ESS 3000 or in storages like the IBM Flash Systems 9000/7000/5000?
A: It is under evaluation to support FCM Modules of IBM Flash Systems and future ESS models with future Spectrum Scale releases.
Q: Any estimate on performance differences between Spectrum Scale 4.2.3 and Spectrum Scale 5.0.5?
A: There are incremental performance improvements in every Spectrum Scale releases. There is a significant performance jump from Spectrum Scale 4.2.3 to Spectrum Scale 5.0.0 to meet the performance commitments for CORAL. Some performance improvements have been covered at previous User Group Meetings and are available on (https://stg-a6b951f9.gpfsug.org/presentations). It is also planned to provide a performance update in a future Expert Talk.
Q: Are there plans to set the all-to-all daemon connections to defaults?
A: No as default at the moment. See Expert Talk 004 “Performance Update” for more details:
https://stg-a6b951f9.gpfsug.org/event/ssugdigital-spectrum-scale-expert-talks-update-on-performance-enhancements-in-spectrum-scale
Q: Is all-to-all connection establishment limited to the nodes inside a cluster or does it include all nodes from remote clusters that are already connected to a FS?
A: Local and remote.
Q: ”cp –preserver=xattr” feature is it something that 5.0.5 will enable for copies to “5.0.5”? Aka migrating data from 4.X to 5.X, or only from 5.0.5 to future versions?
A: You can copy files from Spectrum Scale 5.0.5 to previous and further version preserving extended attributes. You cannot copy the extended attributes from previous versions of Spectrum Scale to Spectrum Scale 5.0.5.
Q: Is the “cp –preserve…” a function of the RHEL release, or is there a version of cp included with Spectrum Scale?
A: The system calls listxattr, getxattr, and setxattr were extended to retrieve ACLs as extended attributes.
Q: So, then the version of the Spectrum Scale filesystem doesn’t matter, just the version of RHEL? (for the cp question).
A: Those system calls are extended by Spectrum Scale Scale at the VFS layer, so it would depend on the version of Spectrum Scale (and kernel extensions).
Q: Are there any plans for Scale Protocols to support SMB transparent failover?
A: As functionality is introduced into Samba code base, IBM look into how they can pick support up for that. It’s a topic being discussed in the Samba community for this type of failover. However, it’s known to be a hard problem.
Q: Any news on NFS4.1 support?
A: It is in plan to support it later this year (subject to IBM plan commitment disclaimer).
Q: On Spectrum Scale 4.2.3 and RHEL 7, we’ve had problems with the Ganesha daemon using steadily more memory over time, requiring us to failover / stop / start / failback periodically. Has Ganesha’s memory requirements been reduced in Spectrum Scale 5.0.5, or is there better visibility into what is driving memory usage?
A: This issue was traced back to a C library memory allocation fragmentation issue. There was a fix put into the Ganesha code to force the release of this unused fragmented memory. This fix was made available last year in the 5.0.x release stream.
Q: Hallo All, what is now the strategy to support object protocols like S3. It is missing the currency.
A: We have renewed focus on Object protocol. We plan to support the Train release in the fall release. Going forward we will try to update the Swift/S3 version once a year to make sure it stays current (subject to IBM plan commitment disclaimer). If you have specific interest in S3 applications, please contact us as we would like to hear about your requirements and use cases.
Q: We are working on a deployment of CSI 1.1.0. When is snapshot support happening.?
A: Snapshot support is planned to be available in a CSI driver update coming in late 3Q early 4Q 2020 (subject to IBM plan commitment disclaimer).
Q: Are there any news about the restriction of GUI HA with CSI?
A: This is a high priority requirement for the fall release. It’s not officially committed yet, but we are definitely trying to squeeze it in (subject to IBM plan commitment disclaimer).
User group host: Simon Thompson
Speakers:

Speaker NamePhotoBioSocial connections

Chris MaestasChris is an Executive Architect for IBM File and Object Storage Solutions with over 20 years of experience deploying and designing IT systems for clients in various spaces. He has experience scaling performance and availability with a variety of file systems technologies. He has developed benchmark frameworks to test out systems for reliability and validate research performance data. He also has led global enablement sessions online and face to face where discussing how best to position mature technologies like Spectrum Scale with emerging technologies in Cloud, Object, Container or AI spaces.Twitter: @cdmaestas
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/cdmaestas

Mathias DietzMathias works in the Spectrum Scale development team in Kelsterbach (Germany) as a software architect responsible for Reliability, Availability and Serviceability (RAS). Part of his role is to drive reliability improvement into Spectrum Scale and improve Health & Performance monitoring, Proactive Services and CES failover.

Ismael Solis MorenoIsmael works in the Spectrum Scale development team in Guadalajara Mexico as a data scientist and performance analyst. He is responsible for evaluating Spectrum Scale new features and releases performance. Part of his role is to analyze datasets to identify points of performance improvement providing insights to the development teams.LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/ismaelsm

SSUG::Digital: 002 - Best Practices for building a stretched cluster
2020-07-13 16:00 - 17:30 (Europe/London) | Digital Event
Talk 2 in the SSUG::Digital series looks at how to build a stretched cluster. What are the best practices? What pitfalls are there? Why would you consider a stretched cluster built with Spectrum Scale, as opposed to one of the alternative approaches to high availability? How do stretched clusters work, and what considerations go into planning a successful stretched cluster? We will examine the theory behind Spectrum Scale stretched clusters, review some best practices for designing stretched clusters, and talk about a few cases where stretched clusters have been successfully deployed.

Download slides here

Q&A
Q: For DR use case where ClusterA and ClusterB are the 2 separate data centres (DC A and DCB), do I need my Tiebreaker Quorum node installed in Data Centre C?
A: (This is covered in the presentation). It is recommended to have the tiebreaker quorum node at a third site but it could be in one of the sites with the caveat that if that site goes down the second site will not be able to stay up.
Q: The documentation shows a high speed shared storage is needed…does it mean that san fabric should be merged over ISL for volume allocation across site?
A: When using Spectrum Scale replication for stretch clusters there is no need to for the SAN to be extended across the sites. The stretched cluster architecture described in the presentation works even when underlying storage does not replicate the data across sites.
Q: Will there be any performance difference between extended SAN and accessing NSD over network using their owner?
A: Well aside from the protocol difference block vs file, it depends on the type of connectivity you have to SAN vs network. Spectrum Scale has been placing more resiliency in recent releases for what to do for network behaviour (eg recently proactiveReconnet feature was added to Spectrum Scale).
Q: Does 10ms latency required between SiteA, SiteB and also Tiebreaker quorum node? Can my tiebreaker quorum node have higher latency?
A: Yes, the third site can have a higher latency but it should still be “within reason”. So maybe double that number ie 20ms. It is recommended to keep it under a second.
Q: Is tiebreaker node hosted on AWS or any other Cloud Providers a supported configuration?
A: Yes, we have customers who using a public cloud for their third site.
Q: What is the RPO and RTO?
A: Remember that this is synchronous replication. So as long as you don’t run out of space on your storage there is 0 RPO. RTO answer depends on your workload and infrastructure. It depends on the rate of change of data change, your storage and the WAN.
Q: How to check/measure the rate of data change?
A: This really depends on the application and the rate of data change by the application. If you already have implemented Spectrum Scale, you can use the historical data from performance monitoring within Spectrum Scale to estimate the rate of data change.
Q: Do you have any general tips/recommendations regarding CES in a stretched cluster?
A: The CES nodes in your cluster need to be split between the two sites as they are still part of single cluster. SMB performs its own locking with ctdb component. Thus the latency between the CES nodes needs to be fairly small value. Also be aware if you have different address spaces on two sites, there may not be an automated failover of services and you may need to manually perform the same.

User group host: Bill Anderson
Speakers:

Speaker NamePhotoBioSocial connections

Lindsay ToddAs part of the Software Defined Infrastructure team at the IBM Washington Systems Center (WSC), Lindsay provides deep technical expertise with Spectrum Scale (GPFS), leveraging prior experience he gained while using it as a customer himself at a university supercomputing center. Lindsay continues exploring and using Spectrum Scale for WSC infrastructure needs, as well as helping many clients use it to build innovative solutions to their business problems.Blog: https://parallelstorage.com
LinkedIn: https://linkedin.com/in/rltodd

SSUG::Digital: 003 - Strategy Update
2020-07-27 16:00 - 17:30 (Europe/London)
Spectrum Scale Strategy UpdateToday is the AI era and we are going through huge explosion of data. Besides the AI revolution, we have clouds, hybrid clouds and data is moving from “on-prem” to various clouds, multi-clouds and back. Coupled with this data growth, Hardware is evolving with an increasing factor of 10. The IBM Spectrum Scale team continues to Invest heavily in adding exciting new features and technology to maintain its leadership as a premier file system. In this session, Wayne Sawdon (CTO) and Ted Hoover (Program Director) of the Spectrum Scale development team will give an overview of recent, upcoming features and strategy for Spectrum Scale.

Download slides here
Q&A
None
User group host: Bob Oesterlin
Speakers:

Speaker NamePhotoBio

Wayne SawdonWayne joined IBM in 1982 and worked on a variety of research projects including the QuickSilver Transactional Operating System. He spend most of the 90's on educational leave at Carnegie Mellon University working on Distributed Shared Memory and Software Defined Computer Architecture. Upon returning he joined the TigerShark research project which became IBM's General Parallel File System. Although Wayne has worked on most of the file system, he only admits to working on its data management. These days, Wayne serves as the CTO for Spectrum Scale and ESS.

Ted HooverTed Hoover is a Program Director within IBM’s Spectrum Scale product development organisation. Ted is responsible for the worldwide development of Spectrum Scale cloud, container, and performance engineering teams.

Spectrum Scale Usergroup Australia
2020-08-27 10:00 - 16:00 (Australia/Sydney) | Digital Event
Hello so the next Australian Usergroup will be online.
All details including the draft program can be found at: https://bit.ly/2P1CXF5
Please pick up a ticket if you are interested in attending as only those on the attendees list will be sent the event link in coming weeks.
The event will be recorded for sharing later.
See you there!

SSUG::Digital: 004 - Update on Performance Enhancements in Spectrum Scale
2020-09-10 16:00 - 17:30 (Europe/London) | Digital Event
Update on File Create and MMAP performance, optimised code for small DIO.
Spectrum Scale is a highly scalable, high-performance storage solution for file and object storage. IBM continues to enhance Spectrum Scale performance, in response to recent hardware advancements and evolving workloads.
This presentation will discuss performance related improvements in Spectrum V5, focusing on enhancements made in support of AI and HPC use cases, including improvements to MMAP reads, file create performance, and small direct IO. In addition we will review some performance numbers measured on the IBM ESS 5000.

Download slides here
Q&A
Q: I assume copy of these charts will be posted to Spectrum Scale User Group “Presentations” web page?
A: Yes, for all episodes the slides and video should be posted afterwards.
Q: Please expand on other areas of performance improvements within GPFS that IBM is working on now?
A: Which areas would you like to see improved?
Q: Will prefetch still happen after the slow second IO?
A: Regarding ‘will prefetch still happen after the slow second IO’ – I know that Ulf said we should handle any more prefetch questions in another talk, but let me just comment on one case: we make decisions to prefetch after the associated I/Os are complete, so prior to prefetch kicking in, a slow I/O might delay the decision to start prefetching.
User group host: Simon Thompson
Speakers:

Speaker NamePhotoBio

John Lewars (IBM)John Lewars is a Senior Technical Staff Member leading performance engineering work in the IBM Spectrum Scale development team. He has been with IBM for over 20 years, working first on several aspects of IBM's largest high performance computing systems, and later on the IBM Spectrum Scale (formerly GPFS) development team. John's work on the Spectrum Scale team includes working with large customer deployments and improving network resiliency, along with co-leading development of the team's first public cloud and container support deliverables.

Jürgen Hannappel (DESY)Jürgen Hannappel works in the scientific computing group of the DESY IT department on data management for EuXFEL and Petra III. With a background in particle physics his interests shifted towards computing over time as his place of work moved from CERN and Bonn University to DESY

Olaf Weiser (IBM)Olaf works with GPFS for over 15 years now. He started his GPFS career in one of the worlds biggest telecommunication companies as a technical administrator. Since more than 10 years, Olaf is with IBM as storage consultant and performance specialist. Recently, he joined IBM Research and Development and works on enhancements in Spectrum Scale to adopt client and customer's needs in the product.

Support Webinar: AFM – Deep Dive and Debugging (NA/EU Session)
2020-09-16 11:00 - 12:00 (America/New_York)
IBM Spectrum Scale Webinars are hosted by IBM Spectrum Scale Support to share expertise and knowledge of the Spectrum Scale product, as well as product updates and best practices. This webinar will focus on AFM functionality in IBM Spectrum Scale.
>> Register here <<
Agenda:

Introduction to AFM
AFM basics and architecture
AFM commands for monitoring and debugging
AFM internal directories
AFM debugging workflow
Common AFM failures
AFM configuration parameters

Support Webinar: AFM – Deep Dive and Debugging (AP/JP Session)
2020-09-17 13:30 - 14:30 (Asia/Singapore)

SSUG::Digital: 005 - Update on functional enhancements in Spectrum Scale (inode management, vCPU scaling, considerations for NUMA)
2020-09-22 16:00 - 17:30 (Europe/London) | Digital Event
Spectrum Scale is a highly scalable, high-performance storage solution for file and object storage. It started more than 20 years ago as research project and is now used by thousands of customers. IBM continues to enhance Spectrum Scale, in response to recent hardware advancements and evolving workloads.
This presentation will discuss selected improvements in Spectrum V5, focusing on improvements for inode management, vCPU scaling and considerations for NUMA.
Part 1 (inode management):

Part 2 (vCPU scaling and NUMA considerations):

Download slides here
Q&A – inode management
Q: If I make the block size 8k, can an inode stuff a file of that size?
A: No , the max inode size is 4K. As discussed on the call, changing the blocksize (including the metadata blocksize) doesn’t impact the size of an inode, which is currently limited to 4K.
Q: When files are created an inode number is assigned from 1-Max. 32bit applications can only address inodes up to 4b. With millions of temp files created during application runs, inodes get used up very quickly. But once the job is finished the files are deleted, but the inodes are not recycled. This results in filling the inodes while the file system isn’t full. Can inodes/files that have been deleted, have their inode recycled for future use?
A: Inodes do get reused after deletion. How many independent filesets do you have? If you only had the root fileset and you set the maxInodes to less than 4b, then you can never have an inode number greater than 4b.
Q: Do we have any idea how long it takes to re-layout the inode allocation map? And can that be done while the FS is mounted?
A: The run-time for this operation will depend on the size of the existing inode allocation map file since we will be migrating data from the exiting map to the new map. In one customer engagement, the migration completed in an hour and in another case it took 18 hours.
While this operation can theoretically be done while fs is mounted, we have currently restricted it to be done with file system offline for safety reasons. We are evaluating to make this operation online in a future release. The re-layout parameters can however be tested with file system mounted.
Q: Are there counters that report the lock collisions/waiters for lock contention that would indicate whether a re-layout is desirable?
A: ‘mmfsadm dump ialloc’ provides counters on segment search. Grep for ‘inodes allocated from’. Ideally, we expect allocations to happen from ‘inodes allocated from list of prefetched/deleted inodes’ or ‘inodes allocated from current ialloc segment’. Also, long waiters during file creation is indication of inode space pressure.
Q: Why does a large number of NumNodes influence mmdf run time? (seen some minutes)
A: mmdf fetches cached data. This should not be impacted by cluster size.
Q: How does NumNodes relate to the number of segments?
A: The number of inode allocation map segments are chosen such that every node can find a segment with free inodes even if 75% of all segments are full. This has to do with the inode expansion getting triggered only when the inode space is 75% full. We want inode allocation to continue while the inode expansion is taking place. This means that the number of segments would be roughly 4 times NumNodes.
Q: Are there any general recommendations for initial inode allocation? I know this depends on the filesystem’s expected use. We typically just base it roughly off existing systems.
A: Use the default value of allocated inodes (by omitting NumInodesToPreallocate argument of –inode-limit option of mmcrfs/mmcrfileset) when creating file system/independent fileset and let the inodes expand on demand.
Q: How is the inode allocation map, and its segmentation, affected if metadata NSDs are added or deleted?
A: The inode allocation map is not affected by newly added NSDs as it only tracks inode state. The block allocation map is the one that tracks free/used disk blocks and will get updated on new disk add/delete.
Q: Can we shrink the inode space, if we by mistake allocate a large inode space using –inode-limit?
A: No.
Q: When files are deleted, does the recovery of free inode happen in lazy way? One customer has just reported that after deleting data from 5TB filesystem, free space is not reflecting on the filesystem.
A: Yes. The files are deleted asynchronously in the background. You can run ‘mmfsadm dump deferreddeletions’ to see the number of inodes that are queued for deletion in mounted file systems.
Q: At what version is automatic inode expansion available?
A: Since the earliest spectrum scale versions.
Q: How do you indentify the metanode?
A: Here is an example:
ls -i testfile
68608 testfile
Then find this inode number in ‘mmfsadm dump files’. (note that the mmfsadm dump command should be avoided in production)
===== dump files =====
[… search on inode]
inode 68608 snap 0 USERFILE nlink 1 genNum 0x49DE6F0F mode‑
The above is an example of how you might lookup the metanode for a file.
You can map the cluster name by looking at the ‘tscomm’ section of a dump, e.g.:
===== dump tscomm =====
[…]
Domain , myAddr <c1n2> (was: <c1p0>)[…]
UID domain 0x1800DF65038 (0xFFFFB6768DF65038) Name “c202f06fs04a-ib1.gpfs.net”
Q: Is metanode transient?
A: A metanode is a per file assignment. It lasts for as long as there are open instances of the file. The assignment is dynamic and the metanode role may automatically migrate to other nodes for better performance.
Q: If some of the node went down and if metanode unable to get update from those failed nodes: In such situation how updates are maintained by the metanode?
A: A non-metanode will sends its updates to the metanode before it writes any dependent blocks to disk. If the non-metanode went down before it could send its updates, then log recovery will ensure that there are no inconsistent modifications to disk data by the non-metanode. Spectrum Scale only guarantees persistence of data/metadata from the last sync window.
Q: Can we limit metanode to migrate to remote node? Also, will it help in improving performance if limit metanode in storage cluster?
A: Metanode performance depends on how many nodes are sending metanode updates and how expensive the network send is. The file system uses such heuristics to determine the optimal metanode placement. In most cases it is best to let the file system make this decision. The only known use case for preventing metanode migration to remote node is if the remote node is in a compute cluster which cannot afford the overhead of a metanode operation. For this rare case we have an undocumented configuration parameter to force the metanode to be in the storage cluster.
Q: Sometime when we delete large data, it takes significant time to show free space in df -h command output. Do we need to run mmrestripfs to reclaim the deleted space faster?
A: ‘df -h’ would return cached information on free space. It is likely that the large file that was deleted has not freed up its space as file deletes happen in the background. You can use ‘mmfsadm dump deferreddeletions’ to get a count of number of inodes that are queued for background deletion. If the node is not overloaded on I/O and you find that the number of to-be-deleted inodes are not reducing at a reasonable rate (depending on the file size and I/O througput of the node), then we would need to investigate further by collecting dumps and traces. Please open a ticket with IBM support in such a case. The mmrestripefs command is for restoring/rebalancing data and metadata replicas. It would not have any impact on speeding up background file deletion.
Q&A – vCPU scaling and NUMA considerations
Q: We see in the mmfs log now following messages, what does it mean? What is missing?
[W] NUMA BIOS/platform support for NUMA is disabled or not available. NUMA results are approximated and GPFS NUMA awareness may suffer.
A: That means libnuma was found but numa_available() returned false. This is a platform firmware functionality shortcoming. Spectrum Scale can still get a lot of information as some is derivable from /proc . File a ticket with your server vendor that libnuma :: numa_available() returns false .
Q: So, any recommendations on POWER9 for SMT settings? AIX versus Linux on Power? We used to suggest smaller SMT modes in the past.
A: We are running SMT-4 on some large POWER9 systems. Evaluate based on I/O vs workload needs as discussed verbally.
Q: Are there any special NUMA considerations for AMD systems which are different to NUMA considerations for Intel systems?
A: This is highly dependent upon the processor and chip set independent of brand and based on what that processor and chipset offer for tuning. We do not have any prescriptive guidance.
User group host: Simon Thompson
Speakers:

Speaker NamePhotoBio

Michael HarrisMike is a Senior Software Engineer on the Spectrum Scale Core Team. Mike has a deep background on OS kernel, device drivers, virtualization, and system software with focus on NUMA, atomics and concurrency, high cpu count concurrency. On GPFS focusing on NUMA and scaling as well as DMAPI and host file system integration and system calls.

Karthik IyerKarthik Iyer is a Senior Software Engineer in Spectrum Scale Core. Karthik has 18 years of design and development experience in distributed system software, specifically in the areas of file system core and database management. Karthik also specialises in trouble shooting Spectrum Scale corruption related issues.

SSUG::Digital: 006 - Persistent Storage for Kubernetes and OpenShift environments
2020-10-06 16:00 - 17:00 (Europe/London) | Digital Event
This episode will discuss the Spectrum Scale Container Storage Interface (CSI). CSI is a standard for exposing arbitrary block and file storage systems to containerized workloads on container orchestration systems like Kubernetes and OpenShift. Spectrum Scale CSI provides your containers fast access to files stored in Spectrum Scale with capabilities such as dynamic provisioning of volumes and read-write-many access.

Download slides here
Episode 2: Best Practices for building a stretched cluster
Q&A
Q: This slide (titled Spectrum Scale CSI Driver – Architecture) shows CPU architecture is x86
A: Yes, with Spectrum Scale CSI Driver 2.0.0 only x86 is supported. The support for other architectures (IBM Power and IBM Z) will be provided in upcoming releases (IBM usual roadmap disclaimers apply).
Q: Is the management of storage class available via Ansible?
A: Setting up a storage class is a one-time operation. While it might be done using Ansible (and Kubernetes integration modules), clients usually do the management using the Kubernetes or Openshift CLI or GUI.
Q: Will the slides be provided post this presentation?
A: Yes. You will find the chart decks, recordings, Q&A and related information for all past talks including this one at https://stg-a6b951f9.gpfsug.org/experttalks/.
Q: Once you have CSI driver support for non x86_64 platforms, will the Spectrum Scale cluster be able to be heterogeneous (AIX, Linux, x86_64 and ppc64le)? Will this cluster support AIX NSD only nodes?
A: In the first release for non x86_64 platforms, all worker nodes that have Spectrum Scale client installed need to be of same CPU architecture and the same operating system. If there are AIX NSD nodes, those must be outside of Kubernetes cluster. AIX NSD only nodes might be integrated by remote mounting the storage cluster to a client Spectrum Scale cluster that runs the Kubernetes workload.
Q: Is Network Load Balancer a per-requisite must have for the CSI deployment?
A: No it isn’t.
Q: Is there a possibility to have Spectrum Scale clients installed within containers?
A: We are working on a capability called Container Native Spectrum Scale (CNSS) where Spectrum Scale will run inside a container. The initial release is planned for December 2020. (Disclaimer: All dates are subject to change; IBM usual roadmap disclaimers apply)
Q: Do we need to have an x86 “only” Spectrum Scale/OpenShift cluster and a ppc64le “only” Spectrum Scale/OpenShift cluster?
A: The requirement of same CPU architecture and same operating system is only for Spectrum Scale Client node which are part of Kubernetes/ Openshift cluster. NSD server can be of other platform (as per Spectrum Scale support matrix at https://www.ibm.com/support/knowledgecenter/STXKQY/gpfsclustersfaq.html)
Q: Any plans for ability to self-provision Spectrum Scale clusters with containers?
A: Container Native Spectrum Scale (CNSS) will have an Operator that will deploy and configure a Spectrum Scale cluster automatically. It will also remote mount the filesystem from a Spectrum Scale Storage Cluster.
Q: One of the issues that we are trying to solve is to isolate Spectrum Scale IO with respect to each tenant/application/user on a single server just like how we can isolate cpu/network with cgroups. Would spectrum scale on containers help us in isolating or qos with storage IO?
A: Running Spectrum Scale in a container or CSI by itself will not address QoS. A new fileset based QoS capability, with CSI, will be able to handle this in a future release. (Disclaimer: All dates are subject to change; IBM usual roadmap disclaimers apply)
Q: Does OpenStack have to be managed via the web gui. Can it be controlled via a CLI?
A: You are free to use either CLI or GUI.
User group host: Bill Anderson
Speakers:

Speaker NamePhotoBio

Smita RautSmita Raut is a Senior Software Engineer with IBM Storage Labs in Pune, India. She works with the IBM Spectrum Scale development team as the architect for persistent storage for containers. In her nine years with IBM, she has lead the development on various projects, including Object protocol for IBM Spectrum Scale and enablement of IBM Spectrum Scale on public cloud. She is an active technical blogger and has published several blogs on object protocol and container storage interface driver.

Harald SeippHarald Seipp is a Senior Technical Staff Member with IBM Systems in Germany. He is the founder and Technical Leader of the Center of Excellence for Cloud Storage as part of the EMEA Storage Competence Center. He is providing guidance to worldwide IBM teams across organizations, and works with customers and IBM Business Partners across EMEA to create and implement complex storage cloud architectures. His more than 25 years of technology experience includes previous job roles as Software Developer, Software Development Leader, Lead Developer, and Architect for successful software products, and co-inventor of an IBM storage product. He holds various patents on storage and networking technology.

Renar GrunenbergRenar Grunenberg is since 27 years at HuK-Coburg. He leads the backup and storage team and is responsible for all the storage and backup stuff in his department and company. Renar has 15 years experience with Spectrum Scale including CES, CSI, ESS and normal core function. In this episode Renar will discuss a use case for Kafka self-service with K8s and Spectrum Scale CSI.

Simon ThompsonSimon Thompson is the Research Computing Infrastructure Architect within Advanced Research Computing at the University of Birmingham. He oversees the infrastructure and systems team, running the University's HPC and research data systems. This involves experimenting (and breaking) new technology. Simon is also chair of the Spectrum Scale user group in the UK.

SSUG::Digital: 007 - Manage the lifecycle of your files using the policy engine
2020-10-21 16:00 - 17:00 (Europe/London) | Digital Event
This episode will provide a comprehensive introduction to the IBM Spectrum Scale policy engine. It highlights the underlying architecture and how policies are executed in a IBM Spectrum Scale cluster. This episode also discusses example rules and policies facilitating Information Lifecycle Management accompanied with practical tips.

Download slides here
References

Whitepaper: IBM Spectrum Scale ILM and Archiving Policies – A practical Guide
Spectrum Scale ILM policy examples and scripts
Apache Tika

Q&A
Q: Which type of nodes participate in policy execution?
A: Depends on the nodes specified with the -N option of the mmapplypolicy command. If the -N option is not specified, then the command runs parallel instances of the policy code on the nodes that are specified by the defaultHelperNodes attribute of the mmchconfig command. If -N is specified then the command runs parallel instances on the nodes or node class specified with the -N option. For more information see the IBM Spectrum Scale knowledge center: https://www.ibm.com/support/knowledgecenter/STXKQY_5.0.5/com.ibm.spectrum.scale.v5r05.doc/bl1adm_mmapplypolicy.htm
Q: Can I somehow identify the type of a file via the policy engine, e.g. via the magicbyte? Or do I have to rely on the file extension?
A: The policy engine does not allow access to the data – only the file’s metadata including extended attributes can be evaluated by the policy engine. To identify the type of a file with the policy engine an EXTERNAL LIST rule can be used along with an external script that determines the type of files.
Q: Will the external tool process the filelist in parallel on all nodes, which are used to generate the filelist?
A: Yes, if an external tool or interface script is defined in an EXTERNAL POOL rule then this script is executed on all nodes that are specified with the -N option of the mmapplypolicy command. This assumes that all node specified with the -N option have access to the interface script. If this is not the case, then the policy run fails. You can control the number of instances of the external tool pool with the option -m and the number of files passed to one instance of the external pool with the option -B of the mmapplypolicy command.
Q: Are they any limitations or recommendations around length of rules in policy files? For example, we have ~750 filesets we want to place data on a specific pool. Should we just have one rule, or many rules for this?
A: Placement policies will be stored in a single file. The challenge is not so much the length of the file but the number of placement rules contained in the policy files. Whenever a file is created the policy engine must walk through all rules to find a match. If there are many rules, this will delay the file creation. Therefore I recommend to keep the number of placement rules low. For example, you could organize the placement policies by storage pools. There is a limit of eight storage pools, thus this would lead to maximal eight placement rules. In each rule you can use the FILESET statement to specify multiple filesets to be placed on a pool.
User group host: Bob Oesterlin
Speakers:

Speaker NamePhotoBio

Nils HausteinNils Haustein is Senior Technical Staff Member with IBM Systems. He is responsible for design and implementation of backup, archiving, file and object storage solutions. Nils provides guidance to IBM teams and consults with clients and business partners world wide. Nils has co-authored the book "Storage Networks explained". As leading IBM Master Inventor he has created more than 170 patents and is a respected mentor for the technical community world wide.

SSUG::Digital: 008 - Scalable multi-node training for AI workloads on NVIDIA DGX, Red Hat OpenShift and IBM Spectrum Scale
2020-11-04 16:15 - 17:45 (Europe/London) | Digital Event
Nvidia and IBM did a complex proof-of-concept to demonstrate the scaling of AI workload using Nvidia DGX, Red Hat OpenShift and IBM Spectrum Scale at the example of ResNet-50 and the segmentation of images using the Audi A2D2 dataset. The project team published an IBM Redpaper with all the technical details and will present the key learnings and results.

Download slides here
Related material

IBM Redpaper: Deployment and Usage Guide for Running AI Workloads on Red Hat OpenShift and NVIDIA DGX Systems with IBM Spectrum Scale
Episode 6: Persistent Storage for Kubernetes and OpenShift environments

User group host: Bob Oesterlin
Speakers:

Speaker NamePhotoBio

Thomas SchoenemeyerThomas Schoenemeyer is a Senior Solution Architect and works for the NVIDIA EMEA Automotive Enterprise Team in Munich since March 2019. His area of expertise covers defining the computing architecture and infrastructure for the development of autonomous vehicles. He is helping customers to solve their technical challenges by integrating NVIDIA datacenter products such as the DGX family, the DriveSim/Constellation and NVIDIA Mellanox Networking solutions.

Gero SchmidtGero Schmidt is a Software Engineer at IBM Germany Research and Development GmbH in the IBM Spectrum Scale development group.
He joined IBM in 2001 working at the European Storage Competence Center in Mainz, Germany, providing technical presales support for a broad range of IBM storage products with a primary focus on enterprise storage solutions, system performance, and IBM POWER systems. He participated in the product rollout of the IBM System Storage DS6000/DS8000 series, co-authored several IBM Redbooks and has been a frequent speaker at IBM international conferences. In 2015 he joined the storage research group at the IBM Almaden Research Center in California, USA, where he worked on IBM Spectrum Scale, compression of genomic data in next generation sequencing pipelines, and the development of a cloud-native backup solution for containerized applications in Kubernetes/Red Hat OpenShift. In 2018 Gero joined the Big Data & Analytics team in the IBM Spectrum Scale development group.

Simon LorenzSimon Lorenz is an IT Architect at IBM Research and Development in Frankfurt, Germany. He joined IBM Germany in 1993 and has held various positions within IBM and IBM Research and Development. During international assignments, he helped to improve fully automated chip factories in Asia and US. Simon joined the IBM Spectrum Scale development team in 2014 and since then worked on: Openstack Swift integration, designing and building System Health and Proactive Services solutions. Since March 2019 he is the world wide leader of the IBM Spectrum Scale Big Data and Analytics team. His role includes designing and building solutions in the area of AI such as the Data Accelerator for AI and Analytics.

SC20 Meeting (Session 1): Storage for AI
2020-11-16 11:00 - 12:30 (America/New_York)
The Spectrum Scale user group meets annually at the SC conference. For 2020 the user group will be split into two 90 minute digital sessions. The second session will be on Wednesday Nov 18th, 11 am EST
>> Session 2: What is new in Spectrum Scale 5.1? <<
This session will focus on Storage for AI including a customer case study and a deep dive in new Spectrum Scale features which optimize the analysis of datasets stored in a data lake. Live Q&A will be available.
The session will be hosted by IBM and moderated by the user group.
>> Please register here to join the session. <<
Continental: Deep Thought – An AI Project for Autonomous Driving Development
Continental, a tier-1 automotive supplier, runs a new high-performance cluster based on NVIDIA DGX, IBM Spectrum Scale and IBM ESS to boost autonomous driving development performance. Continental uses this system for deep learning, simulation, virtual data generation and related workloads. The new cluster reduces development time from weeks to hours. Speakers from Continental and the business partner SVA will present business requirements and derived workloads, the Spectrum and ESS implementation, and first operational experience.
https://www.continental.com/en-us/press-/press-releases/continental-supercomputer-nvidia-228624
Data Accelerator for AI and Analytics (DAAA)
This talk focuses on the need of data orchestration in enterprise data pipelines. It provides details about data orchestration and how to address typical challenges that customers face when dealing with large and ever-growing amounts of data for data analytics. While the amount of data increases steadily, AI workloads need to speed up in order to be able to deliver insights and business value in a timely manner. IBM addresses these requirements with the Data Accelerator for AI and Analytics (DAAA), an expertly engineered solution based on new features delivered with Spectrum Scale 5.1. The session will include a demo of a complex proof-of-concept and present the key learnings and results.

SSUG::Digital: 009 - Deep Thought: An AI Project for Autonomous Driving Development
2020-11-16 16:00 - 17:00 (Europe/London) | Digital Event
Continental, a tier-1 automotive supplier, runs a new high-performance cluster based on NVIDIA DGX, IBM Spectrum Scale and IBM ESS to boost autonomous driving development performance. Continental uses this system for deep learning, simulation, virtual data generation and related workloads. The new cluster reduces development time from weeks to hours. Speakers from Continental and the business partner SVA will present business requirements and derived workloads, the Spectrum and ESS implementation, and first operational experience.

Download slides here
Q&A
Did Continental ever look at Spectrum Discover for tagging? Any feedback on pros/cons for its usefulness at Continental?
We did not have a chance to look into Spectrum Discover.
Related material

Continental: Automotive supercomputer
Continental press release

User Group Host: Bill Anderson
Speaker

Speaker NamePhotoBio

David EnenkelDavid Enenkel is the Head of IT Operations at Continental - ADC GmbH. He has over 20 years of IT-Infrastructure experience and moved into the area of ADAS 2,5 years ago. He and his team are supporting the ADC engineers to find and establish feasible IT solutions/services for the specific ADAS demands as well as operating the platforms and data centers. He led the Supercomputer project as the IT project manager and is happy to give an insight into all ups and downs building up such an environment.

Viktor PálViktor Pál is working as a Deep Learning Infrastructure Architect at Continental and is currently also acting as Technical Team Lead. He has more than 14 years of IT Infrastructure experience and started working at Continental two years ago. Viktor and his team are supporting AI development by designing, implementing and operating the environment that enables Deep Learning at Continental. He contributed to the Supercomputer project as a Solution Architect and he will talk about the challenges of AI Infrastructure as Code.

Jochen ZellerJochen is IT Architect at www.sva.de. He has more than 20 years of IT experience, is part of the SVA IT Architects team and technical leader of the Spectrum Scale team. His Spectrum Scale and infrastructure projects span various industries and fields, such as HPC, health care, autonomous driving, banking, insurance, etc. When he is not working with his customers, he sits in his glider and flies away - at least in summer.

SSUG::Digital: 010 - Data Accelerator for Analytics and AI (DAAA)
2020-11-16 17:00 - 18:00 (Europe/London) | Digital Event
This talk focuses on the need of data orchestration in enterprise data pipelines. It provides details about data orchestration and how to address typical challenges that customers face when dealing with large and ever-growing amounts of data for data analytics. While the amount of data increases steadily, AI workloads need to speed up in order to be able to deliver insights and business value in a timely manner. IBM addresses these requirements with the Data Accelerator for AI and Analytics (DAAA), an expertly engineered solution based on new features delivered with Spectrum Scale 5.1. The session will include a demo of a complex proof-of-concept and present the key learnings and results.

Download slides here
Related material

Redpaper: Data Accelerator for Analytics and AI (DAAA)

User Group Host: Bill Anderson
Speakers

Speaker NamePhotoBio

Simon LorenzSimon Lorenz is an IT Architect at IBM Research and Development in Frankfurt, Germany. He joined IBM Germany in 1993 and has held various positions within IBM and IBM Research and Development. During international assignments, he helped to improve fully automated chip factories in Asia and US. Simon joined the IBM Spectrum Scale development team in 2014 and since then worked on: Openstack Swift integration, designing and building System Health and Proactive Services solutions. Since March 2019 he is the world wide leader of the IBM Spectrum Scale Big Data and Analytics team. His role includes designing and building solutions in the area of AI such as the Data Accelerator for AI and Analytics.

Gero SchmidtGero Schmidt is a Software Engineer at IBM Germany Research and Development GmbH in the IBM Spectrum Scale development group.
He joined IBM in 2001 working at the European Storage Competence Center in Mainz, Germany, providing technical presales support for a broad range of IBM storage products with a primary focus on enterprise storage solutions, system performance, and IBM POWER systems. He participated in the product rollout of the IBM System Storage DS6000/DS8000 series, co-authored several IBM Redbooks and has been a frequent speaker at IBM international conferences. In 2015 he joined the storage research group at the IBM Almaden Research Center in California, USA, where he worked on IBM Spectrum Scale, compression of genomic data in next generation sequencing pipelines, and the development of a cloud-native backup solution for containerized applications in Kubernetes/Red Hat OpenShift. In 2018 Gero joined the Big Data & Analytics team in the IBM Spectrum Scale development group.

SC20 Meeting (Session 2): What is new in Spectrum Scale 5.1?
2020-11-18 11:00 - 12:30 (America/New_York)
The Spectrum Scale user group meets annually at the SC conference. For 2020 the user group will be split into two 90 minute digital sessions. The first session will be on Monday Nov 16th, 11 am EST.
>> Session 1: Storage for AI <<
This session will focus on recent enhancements in Spectrum Scale followed by an open discussion. Live Q&A will be available.
The session will be hosted by IBM and moderated by the user group.
>> Please register here to join the session. <<
What is new in Spectrum Scale 5.1?
Spectrum Scale is a highly scalable, high-performance storage solution for file and object storage. IBM continues to enhance Spectrum Scale performance, in response to recent hardware advancements and evolving workloads. This talk will discuss key enhancements delivered with Spectrum Scale 5.1 including Fileset QoS, AFM to object storage, NFSv4.1 support, IPv6 for Cluster Export Services (CES), and integration with ESS 3000 and ESS 5000.
Ask us anything
The second half of this session will be used for an open discussion between the users and IBM. Senior leaders of Spectrum Scale development and program management will be available.

SSUG::Digital: 011 - What is new in Spectrum Scale 5.1?
2020-11-18 16:00 - 17:00 (Europe/London) | Digital Event
Spectrum Scale is a highly scalable, high-performance storage solution for file and object storage. IBM continues to enhance Spectrum Scale performance, in response to recent hardware advancements and evolving workloads. This talk will discuss key enhancements delivered with Spectrum Scale 5.1 including Fileset QoS, AFM to object storage, NFSv4.1 support, IPv6 for Cluster Export Services (CES), and integration with ESS 3000 and ESS 5000.

Download slides here
Related material

Episode 10: Data Accelerator for Analytics and AI (DAAA)
Episode 12: Event driven data management and security using Spectrum Scale Clustered Watch Folder and File Audit Logging
Episode 1: What is new in Spectrum Scale 5.0.5?

User Group Host: Kristy Kallback-Rose
Speaker

Speaker NamePhotoBioSocial connections

Chris MaestasChris is an Executive Architect for IBM File and Object Storage Solutions with over 25 years of experience deploying and designing IT systems for clients in various spaces. He has experience scaling performance and availability with a variety of file systems technologies. He has developed benchmark frameworks to test out systems for reliability and validate research performance data. He also has led global enablement sessions online and face to face where discussing how best to position mature technologies like Spectrum Scale with emerging technologies in Cloud, Object, Container or AI spaces.Twitter: @cdmaestas
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/cdmaestas

Ismael Solis MorenoIsmael works in the Spectrum Scale development team in Guadalajara Mexico as a data scientist and performance analyst. He is responsible for evaluating Spectrum Scale's new features and releases performance. Part of his role is to analyze datasets to identify points of performance improvement providing insights to the development teams.LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/ismaelsm

Support Webinar: Call Home and New Features and Enhancements in Spectrum Scale 5.1.0 (NA/EU Session)
2020-12-02 11:00 - 12:00 (America/New_York) | Digital Event
IBM Spectrum Scale Webinars are hosted by IBM Spectrum Scale Support to share expertise and knowledge of the Spectrum Scale product, as well as product updates and best practices. This webinar will focus on Call Home in Spectrum Scale, as well as new features and enhancements in Spectrum Scale 5.1.0.
>>> Register here <<<
Agenda
Call Home

Proactive Service / Call Home Benefits​
Health Checker​
Customer Insights​
Outlook

New Features and Enhancements in Spectrum Scale 5.1.0

Platform Updates
Spectrum Scale Core Improvements#
Erasure Code Edition Changes
MAPS Updates
Protocol Improvements
Active File Management (AFM)

Support Webinar: Call Home and New Features and Enhancements in Spectrum Scale 5.1.0 (AP Session)
2020-12-03 16:00 - 17:00 (Asia/Shanghai) | Digital Event

SSUG::Digital: 012 - Lenovo: Spectrum Scale and NVMe Storage (Held in conjunction with CIUK)
2020-12-04 15:30 - 16:00 (Europe/London) | Digital Event
In this SSUG::Digital Expert Talk, we will cover several NVMe-related topics: The Lenovo DSS-G100 is an NVMe-rich server that can be used with Scale’s DAE, DME, and ECE. We will present how to use the TRIM support that has been introduced with Scale 5.0.x on its internal NVMe drives. The NetApp EF600 is an all-NVMe storage subsystem that is triggering the rebirth of the Spectrum Scale “SAN model” with NVMe-over-Fabrics. We will present its architecture, and show how to configure and use it with Spectrum Scale. Finally, we will discuss how the “Unified Namespace” concept of the emerging DAOS storage stack could be used for a namespace integration of this new technology with Spectrum Scale.

Download slides here
Related material

Speaker NamePhotoBio

Michael HenneckeMichael Hennecke is Lenovo’s Chief Technologist for HPC Storage and Networking. He has 27 years of experience in High Performance Computing. Michael has been working with IBM Spectrum Scale since GPFS version 1.1 and is one of the “fathers” of the GPFS Storage Server (GSS), which Lenovo has evolved into the Distributed Storage Solution for IBM Spectrum Scale RAID (DSS-G). He holds a masters degree in physics from Ruhr-Universität Bochum (Germany), and a “Distinguished IT Specialist” certification from The Open Group.

Please note that this talk starts slightly earlier than other events at 15:30 GMT. It is followed by a second expert talk at 16:00 GMT.
The last 2020 SSUG::Digital event will take place on December 4th and is being held in conjunction with Computing Insight UK 2020. The main CIUK conference will take place on 3rd December with the user group event on 4th December.
Held in association with CIUK:

SSUG::Digital: 013 - Event driven data management and security using Spectrum Scale Clustered Watch Folder and File Audit Logging (Held in conjunction with CIUK)
2020-12-04 16:00 - 17:30 (Europe/London) | Digital Event
Spectrum Scale provides various methods for automated data management: The Policy Engine enables rule-based data placement and data management. File Audit Logging enables you to audit file accesses for compliance reasons. The Clustered Watch folder feature enables you to watch and respond to file system activity. This session starts with a customer talk by DESY about their use of the policy engine to automate data-intensive workflows. Then IBM provides an overview of File Audit Logging and Clustered Watch along with use cases and recent architectural enhancements with examples.

Download slides here

Speaker NamePhotoBio

Jürgen Hannappel (DESY)Jürgen Hannappel works in the scientific computing group of the DESY IT department on data management for EuXFEL and Petra III. With a background in particle physics his interests shifted towards computing over time as his place of work moved from CERN and Bonn University to DESY

John Olson (IBM)John Olson is a senior software engineer and the Spectrum Scale Security Architect. He has been with IBM for 21 years and has been working on Spectrum Scale since 2014. Previously, John worked on SoNAS, virtual tape servers and tape controller RAS. John was the lead developer of file audit logging in 5.0.0 and continues to architect the new solutions.

Jake Tick (IBM)Jake is a development manager for Spectrum Scale. In his almost 6 years at IBM, he has been on the Spectrum Scale system test team, FVT test team, and has now moved into management to help lead the file audit logging and watch folder team.

Luis Teran (IBM)Luis, who has been with IBM for about 4 years, is the lead developer for clustered watch folder and file audit logging. Luis started his work with system test on Spectrum Scale then shortly after moved into a development role. Luis now owns development for the file audit logging and cluster watch components.

The last 2020 SSUG::Digital event will take place on December 4th and is being held in conjunction with Computing Insight UK 2020. The main CIUK conference will take place on 3rd December with the user group event on 4th December.
Held in association with CIUK:

SSUG::Digital: 014 - What is new in Spectrum Scale 5.1.1?
2021-05-19 16:00 - 17:00 (Europe/London) | Digital Event
Spectrum Scale is a highly scalable, high-performance storage solution for file and object storage that can be deployed in traditional bare-metal and Cloud environments. IBM continues to enhance Spectrum Scale functionality and performance, in response to recent hardware advancements and evolving workloads. This talk will discuss key enhancements delivered with Spectrum Scale 5.1.1 including installation toolkit enhancements based on Ansible, improved network performance and failover using multiple TCP/IP connections, multi-factor authentication for the management GUI as well as the latest news on Spectrum Scale BDA, ECE and CNSA/CSI.

Download slides here
Related material

Episode 11: What is new in Spectrum Scale 5.1?
Episode 1: What is new in Spectrum Scale 5.0.5?

User Group Host: Simon Thompson
Speaker

Speaker NamePhotoBioSocial connections

Chris MaestasChris is an Executive Architect for IBM File and Object Storage Solutions with over 20 years of experience deploying and designing IT systems for clients in various spaces. He has experience scaling performance and availability with a variety of file systems technologies. He has developed benchmark frameworks to test out systems for reliability and validate research performance data. He also has led global enablement sessions online and face to face where discussing how best to position mature technologies like Spectrum Scale with emerging technologies in Cloud, Object, Container or AI spaces.Twitter: @cdmaestas
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/cdmaestas

Ismael Solis MorenoIsmael works in the Spectrum Scale development team in Guadalajara Mexico as a data scientist and performance analyst. He is responsible for evaluating Spectrum Scale new features and releases performance. Part of his role is to analyze datasets to identify points of performance improvement providing insights to the development teams.LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/ismaelsm

SSUG::Digital: 015 - Spectrum Scale Container Native Storage Access (CNSA)
2021-06-29 16:00 - 17:30 (Europe/London) | Digital Event
IBM Spectrum Scale Container Native Storage Access (CNSA) allows the deployment of Spectrum Scale in a Red Hat OpenShift cluster. Using a remote mount attached file system, CNSA provides a persistent data store to be accessed by the applications via the IBM Spectrum Scale Container Storage Interface (CSI) driver using Persistent Volumes (PVs). This talk provides a field update on CNSA and a deep dive on technical aspects of this technology.

Download slides here
Q&A
How does the entitlement key work for partners looking to run in their labs for educational purposes?
The way it’s currently set up is that we require entitlement (a purchase) of Data Management Edition (DME) or Data Access Edition (DAE) in order to gain access to the container images. If you are entitled to these editions of Specturm Scale, the container images should be accessible via the entitlement key.
What is with air gap installations?
The switch to IBM Cloud Registry (ICR) improves air gap installations as you can replicate the container images in the same way as you do with your OCP images.for details, please see https://www.ibm.com/docs/en/scalecontainernative?topic=appendix-airgap-setup-network-restricted-red-hat-openshift-container-platform-clusters.
Is it mandatory to have access to IBM Cloud or GitHub site? What if we have a secure site?
There is an air gap install available. You can mirror the registry and pull the images yourself and then serve them internally to your own OpenShift cluster. For GitHub, you would take the command-sets, pre-download the yamls and then use them internally. You would need these all before starting your install on an air gap setup.
Now CNSA only supports mounting one remote filesystem. Is it foreseen to deploy NSD servers in OpenShift pods in the future? Moreover, one worker node can host just one Core pod, because cluster and node files are put in directories mounted from the host in order to make them persistent. If you have a bare metal cluster with, say, static physical machine worker nodes, you are forced to deploy just one Core pod per node even if your physical node can provide computing resources to host multiple Core pods.
We’re looking at ECE and shared nothing local disks. You will first see some of this in the Spectrum Fusion product and then into our CNSA side of things. You’ll also see more filesystems available for remote mount.
Is it foreseen to make multiple Core pods deployable on the same worker node in future releases?
Not anytime soon. We will look into this once we managed to get rid of the kernel module and support FUSE based deployment. We are working on FUSE but have no timeline so far.
What’s the support for other types of containers like? Singularity for example?
Currently we’re sticking with the K8s related environments but we have heard other requests for Singularity.
For CNSA a integration of CSI are great but importantly rolling update is a must.
Agreed. We’re working on rolling upgrade!!!
If you have a fixed number of bare metal worker nodes, and one node fails, it would be useful to start the lost Core pod on one of the remaining worker nodes.
Well, we are infrastructure not an application. With current CNSA (remote mount) we are basically just an interface to the storage cluster. One per pod is fine. Down the line when we add local storage it would be nice to reschedule a failed pod to another node, but unfortunately this does not work either cause it cannot transfer the disks.
When will the Helm charts for CNAS 5.1.1.1 available.?
Meanwhile they are available here:
https://community.ibm.com/community/user/storage/blogs/gero-schmidt1/2021/07/02/helm-charts-ibm-spectrum-scale-container-native
Note that in the future, we’re going to combine CSI/CNSA installs in order to simplify things. At this point, HELM will be less necessary as well.
Related material

Episode 8: Scalable multi-node training for AI workloads on NVIDIA DGX, Red Hat OpenShift and IBM Spectrum Scale
Episode 6: Persistent Storage for Kubernetes and OpenShift environments
Episode 3: Spectrum Scale Strategy Update

User Group Host: Simon Thompson
Speaker

Speaker NamePhotoBio

Laura O. BravermanLaura is a Senior Software Engineer for IBM. She has over 20 years in the Enterprise Storage industry at both IBM and Oracle, with a breadth of experience ranging from system level testing to full stack development to leading software development teams. In her current role, she serves as Scrum Master and developer with the IBM Spectrum Scale Container Native storage access team, bringing Spectrum Scale into Red Hat OpenShift Container Platform to support containerized workloads.

Harald SeippHarald Seipp is a Senior Technical Staff Member with IBM Systems in Germany. He is the founder and Technical Leader of the Center of Excellence for Cloud Storage as part of the IBM EMEA Storage Competence Center. He provides guidance to worldwide IBM teams across organizations, and works with customers and IBM Business Partners across EMEA to create and implement complex storage cloud architectures. In the past 28 years with IBM and other companies he had job roles as Software Developer, Software Development Leader, and Lead Architect for successful software products. Harald was co-inventor of an IBM storage product and holds various patents on storage and networking technology. He is member of the IBM Academy of Technology (AoT), leading the AoT Storage Core team.

Support Webinar: Upgrading IBM Elastic Storage System (ESS) (US Session)
2021-07-14 11:00 - 12:00 (America/New_York) | Digital Event
IBM Spectrum Scale and ESS webinars are hosted by IBM Spectrum Scale and ESS Support to share expertise and knowledge of the Spectrum Scale and ESS products, as well as product updates and best practices.
This webinar focuses on how to upgrade IBM Elastic Storage Server (ESS). Note that our webinars are free-of-charge and held via WebEx.
Audience: ESS users and administrators
>> Register here <<<
For any questions, contact the host.

Support Webinar: Upgrading IBM Elastic Storage System (ESS) (AP Session)
2021-07-15 13:00 - 14:00 (Asia/Shanghai) | Digital Event

Support Webinar: Information Lifecycle Management (ILM) (US Session)
2021-10-20 11:00 - 12:00 (America/New_York) | Digital Event
IBM Spectrum Scale and ESS webinars are hosted by IBM Spectrum Scale and ESS Support to share expertise and knowledge of the Spectrum Scale and ESS products, as well as product updates and best practices.
This webinar focuses on Information Lifecycle Management (ILM).
Note that Support webinars are free-of-charge and held via WebEx.
Audience: Spectrum Scale users and administrators
>> Register here <<<
For any questions, contact the host.

Support Webinar: Information Lifecycle Management (ILM) (AP Session)
2021-10-21 13:00 - 14:00 (Asia/Shanghai) | Digital Event

SC21 Users Group Meeting
2021-11-02 15:00 - 17:00 (America/Chicago) | T-Rex Meeting Center, 911 Washington Ave, St Louis, MO, United States
IBM Spectrum Scale Development and Product Management team will be attending Super Computing 2021 in person. We will be hosting our yearly gathering on Monday, November 15, from 3:00-5:00 PM. This global user meeting provides an opportunity for peer-to-peer learning and interaction with IBM’s technical leadership team on the latest IBM Spectrum Scale roadmaps, latest features, ecosystem, and applications for AI.
This is a free event, but registration in advance is required: https://www.ibm.com/events/event/pages/ibm/nz48hgmb/1581037797007001PJAd.html
IBM Spectrum Scale User Meeting (Face to Face only)
Monday, November 15, 2021
3:00 pm – 5:00 pm CST
T-Rex Meeting Center
911 Washington Ave, 5th Floor, Morgan Stanley Room
St Louis, Missouri

SSUG @CIUK 2021
2021-12-10 10:00 - 12:00 (Europe/London) | Manchester Central, Windmill St, Manchester, M2 3GX, United Kingdom
SSUG will be returning to CIUK for 2021 … our agenda is still to be confirmed, but the plan is to run 10:00 – 12:00 on Friday 10th December.
To attend this user group event, you must be registered to attend CIUK, registration is online at https://www.scd.stfc.ac.uk/Pages/CIUK2021.aspx
Agenda:
10:00 – Welcome, Simon Thompson – Group Chair
10:05 – Spectrum Scale Update, Indulis Bernsteins
10:30 – User Group Matters, Simon Thompson – Group Chair
10:40 – Research Storage at the Crick – Steve Hindmarsh, Francis Crick Institute
11:00 – Erasure code edition and HPE – Daniel Kidger, HPC
11:25 – Spectrum Discover with Spectrum Scale, Indulis Bernsteins
11:45 – Anything else? … otherwise … Wrap up and close, Simon Thompson – Group Chair
