To start with, there is the new Clustered Watch feature, which enhances and builds upon file audit logging and watch folder functionality by allowing you to:

• Watch file operations across clusters using a single scalable, resilient, centralized tool


• Similar to file audit logging, clustered watch monitors activity on a file system.  Additionally, clustered watch can monitor activity on a fileset or inode space


• Events are consumed by a conduit that is configured to send these events to an external ‘sink’


• The external ‘sink’ is an externally managed Kafka queue outside of the Spectrum Scale cluster 


• Allows greater flexibility to handle and react to file events

Further enhancements were made across the entire Spectrum Scale product. A few of those highlights are:


Filesystem

• CCR Recovery Enhancements – additional options to help with broken cluster recovery


• Support for additional file compression libraries for genomics workloads
  
  
  
  • Support for the new compression libraries: zfast, alphae, and alphah
  
  
  
  


• Enhancements to mmnetverify for RDMA networks



• Linux filesystem stat enhancements for compatibility
  
  
  
  • Report in units of blocks or subblocks for filesystem sizes and free space
  
  


• Enhancement to mmkeyserv to show certificate expiration dates


• QoS improvements in large clusters – data collection frequency is dynamically changed based on cluster size


• Performance improvements for file creation, specifically for a large number of nodes simultaneously creating files in the same directory


• NSD servers periodically poll internal disks for I/O errors


• Fsck improvements
  
  
  
  • Estimate run time without scanning inodes
  
  


• Repair block allocation map without taking a filesystem offline

• Quota management enhancements
  
  
  
  • Define capacity and inode quotas for filesets, users, and groups
  
  
  • Enhanced default quota management to define and manage default quotas for filesets, users, and groups
  
  
  • Improved usability to perform quota tasks such as enabling and disabling quotas, setting quota scope, grace time, etc
  
  
  • Introduced daily quota reports, where recipients receive reports of exceeded quotas
  
  


• GUI support for Integrated Archive Mode (IAM), to support file retention policies


• New panels to configure the GUI to utilize an external LDAP server for GUI user access management


• Navigation and menu improvements


• Default user is no longer enabled (security enhancement)


• Improved management and monitoring of NFS and SMB shares


• New GUI wizard for configuring and modifying file (SMB/NFS) authentication


• ILM policy editor has enhanced support for external pools

• Proactive Network Reconnect for improved network resiliency
  
  
  
  • Attempts to reconnect to a remote client if a connection is slow or stalled
  
  
  • See mmchconfig man page for details on how to enable this feature
  
  


• Callhome improvements
  
  
  
  • Simplified setup
  
  
  • Improved scalability and performance
  
  
  • Heartbeat data collection
  
  
  • Trigger callhome on certain critical events
  
  


• NVMe drive monitoring


• mmhealth usability enhancements


• mmhealth state resync to force synchronization of status across the cluster


• Filesystem maintenance mode improvements


• NFS enhanced health checks for lock manager


• CES protocol services are no longer automatically started on suspended nodes

• Filesystems can be mounted or unmounted using the API


• Ability to view and update default quotas on filesets

• GUI support for NFSv4 pseudo path


• Support for SMB 3.1.1


• Improved handling for the SYNCHRONIZE ACL bit over SMB

• Automatic container spillover feature
  
  
  
  • Use another cloud container when enough objects have been migrated to the first
  
  


• Microsoft Azure support


• Client assisted recalls for greater speed and flexibility when recalling files

• SLES 15 support for install, deployment, and upgrade for x86 and Linux on Z


• Upgrade flow changes to minimize I/O disruptions


• Mixed OS support


• Pre-checks determine exactly what packages must be upgraded, and post-checks ensure that all packages have been upgraded


• Enhanced dependency checking

• New configuration parameters to configure refresh of cache data in asynchronous mode

• Support for Hortonworks Data Platform 3.1 and Management Pack 2.7.0.2


• Support for SLES 12 SP3 for new installs on x86_64

• Clustered Watch support


• Transparent Cloud Tiering support


• IBM Storage Enabler for Containers


• KVM host support
  
  
  
  • Spectrum Scale can now be utilized for KVM storage pools (directory pool only) for virtual disks (qcow2 and raw) on a KVM on IBM Z host
  
  


• Currency:
  
  
  
  • SLES 15 support