High Performance Storage System

High Performance Storage System

Developer(s)	IBM in conjunction with DOE National Labs
Stable release	7.5.1 / October 2016
Operating system	cross-platform
Type	Hierarchical Storage Management
License	Proprietary
Website	hpss-collaboration

High Performance Storage System (HPSS) is a flexible, scalable, policy-based Hierarchical Storage Management product developed by IBM in collaboration with various DOE National Labs. It provides scalable hierarchical storage management (HSM), archive, and file system services using cluster, LAN and SAN technologies to aggregate the capacity and performance of many computers, disks, disk systems, tape drives and tape libraries.

HPSS supports a variety of methods for accessing and creating data. Among them are support for FTP, parallel FTP, VFS (Linux), as well as a robust client API with support for parallel I/O.

The current 7.5 release of HPSS has full support on Linux. The HPSS client API is supported on AIX, Linux, and Solaris.

The implementation is built around IBM's DB2, a scalable relational database management system.

The collaboration which produced HPSS began in the fall of 1992, and involved IBM's Houston Global Services and five United States Department of Energy (DOE) National Laboratories (Lawrence Berkeley, Lawrence Livermore, Los Alamos, Oak Ridge, and Sandia). At that time, the DOE national laboratory and IBM HPSS design team recognized there would be a data storage explosion driven by computing power rising to teraops/petaops requiring data stored in HSMs to rise to petabytes and beyond, data transfer rates with the HSM to rise to gigabytes/s and higher, and daily throughput with a HSM in 10s of terabytes/day. Therefore, the collaboration set out to design and deploy a system that would scale by a factor of 1,000 or more and evolve from the base above toward these expected targets and beyond.