information placed in a storage area would be one large body of data with no way to tell where one piece of information stops and the next begins. IBM Storage Scale (formerly IBM® GPFS™) is the distributed file system which is being used by some of the supercomputers and many of the largest commercial companies in the world. IBM Storage Scale provides high-speed file access to applications running on multiple nodes of clusters, with concurrent access to a single and multiple file systems. Cluster nodes can be storage area network (SAN)-attached, network-attached, or a mix of SAN- and networkattached.

IBM SAN-attached storage virtualization product, IBM FlashSystem® and older IBM Spectrum Virtualize™ and IBM Storwize products, offers dependable data availability up to 99.999% and can handle the massive amount of block storage data packed with software features such as data tiering, real-time compression, thin provisioning, safeguarded copy, and so on. This white paper describes a high performance file and block access solution that uses IBM Storage Virtualize along with IBM Storage Scale to deliver file interface for any type of workload such as traditional workload (SAP, ERP, database), Cloud Era workloads (web content, web apps, social media) or new workload (Genome analysis, IoT).