[gpfsug-discuss] Again! Using IBM Spectrum Scale could lead to data loss

[Zeller, Jochen]

Dear community,

this morning I started in a good mood, until I've checked my mailbox. Again a reported bug in Spectrum Scale that could lead to data loss. During the last year I was looking for a stable Scale version, and each time I've thought: "Yes, this one is stable and without serious data loss bugs" - a few day later, IBM announced a new APAR with possible data loss for this version.

I am supporting many clients in central Europe. They store databases, backup data, life science data, video data, results of technical computing, do HPC on the file systems, etc. Some of them had to change their Scale version nearly monthly during the last year to prevent running in one of the serious data loss bugs in Scale. From my perspective, it was and is a shame to inform clients about new reported bugs right after the last update. From client perspective, it was and is a lot of work and planning to do to get a new downtime for updates. And their internal customers are not satisfied with those many downtimes of the clusters and applications.

For me, it seems that Scale development is working on features for a specific project or client, to achieve special requirements. But they forgot the existing clients, using Scale for storing important data or running important workloads on it.

To make us more visible, I've used the IBM recommended way to notify about mandatory enhancements, the less favored RFE:

http://www.ibm.com/developerworks/rfe/execute?use_case=viewRfe&CR_ID=109334

If you like, vote for more reliability in Scale.

I hope this a good way to show development and responsible persons that we have trouble and are not satisfied with the quality of the releases.


Regards,

Jochen







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