HPSS Installation Guide September 2002 19Release 4.5, Revision 2Chapter 1 HPSS Basics1.1 IntroductionThe High Performance Storage System (HPSS) is software that provides hierarchical storagemanagement and services for very large storage environments. HPSS may be of interest insituations having present and future scalability requirements that are very demanding in terms oftotal storage capacity, file sizes, data rates, number of objects stored, and numbers of users. HPSSis part of an open, distributed environment based on OSF Distributed Computing Environment(DCE) products that form the infrastructure of HPSS. HPSS is the result of a collaborative effort byleading US Government supercomputer laboratories and industry to address very real, very urgenthigh-end storage requirements. HPSS is offered commercially by IBM Worldwide GovernmentIndustry, Houston, Texas.HPSS provides scalable parallel storage systems for highly parallel computers as well as traditionalsupercomputers and workstation clusters. Concentrating on meeting the high end of storagesystem and data management requirements, HPSS is scalable and designed to store up to petabytes(1015) of data and to use network-connected storage devices to transfer data at rates up to multiplegigabytes (109) per second.HPSS provides a large degree of control for the customer site to manage their hierarchical storagesystem. Using configuration information defined by the site, HPSS organizes storage devices intomultiple storage hierarchies. Based on policy information defined by the site and actual usageinformation, data are then moved to the appropriate storage hierarchy and to appropriate levels inthe storage hierarchy.1.2 HPSS CapabilitiesA central technical goal of HPSS is to move large files between storage devices and parallel orclustered computers at speeds many times faster than today’s commercial storage system softwareproducts, and to do this in a way that is more reliable and manageable than is possible with currentsystems. In order to accomplish this goal, HPSS is designed and implemented based on theconcepts described in the following subsections.1.2.1 Network-centered ArchitectureThe focus of HPSS is the network, not a single server processor as in conventional storage systems.HPSS provides servers and movers that can be distributed across a high performance network to
