Skip to Main Content
IBM System Storage Ideas Portal


This portal is to open public enhancement requests against IBM System Storage products. To view all of your ideas submitted to IBM, create and manage groups of Ideas, or create an idea explicitly set to be either visible by all (public) or visible only to you and IBM (private), use the IBM Unified Ideas Portal (https://ideas.ibm.com).


Shape the future of IBM!

We invite you to shape the future of IBM, including product roadmaps, by submitting ideas that matter to you the most. Here's how it works:

Search existing ideas

Start by searching and reviewing ideas and requests to enhance a product or service. Take a look at ideas others have posted, and add a comment, vote, or subscribe to updates on them if they matter to you. If you can't find what you are looking for,

Post your ideas
  1. Post an idea.

  2. Get feedback from the IBM team and other customers to refine your idea.

  3. Follow the idea through the IBM Ideas process.


Specific links you will want to bookmark for future use

Welcome to the IBM Ideas Portal (https://www.ibm.com/ideas) - Use this site to find out additional information and details about the IBM Ideas process and statuses.

IBM Unified Ideas Portal (https://ideas.ibm.com) - Use this site to view all of your ideas, create new ideas for any IBM product, or search for ideas across all of IBM.

ideasibm@us.ibm.com - Use this email to suggest enhancements to the Ideas process or request help from IBM for submitting your Ideas.

Status Submitted
Created by Guest
Created on Nov 19, 2025

Provide helper to determine metadata size

We have a GNR cluster with > 650 million files, distributed over two filesystems. All disks are DataAndMetadata. Policy runs and mmbackup are taking very long. One speedup suggestion of the GPFS support was to use explicit metadata storage. Unfortunately no-one can tell what size is required for that storage because the space occupied by metadata is not shown anywhere and is quite complicated to calculate. We are completely in the dark about the required size of this storage. mmdf does not show this.

The only ones that can do the calculations correctly are the developers. So I my idea to provide a tool that scans the system and reports the size of the metadata. It could also offer a quick mode that calculates some lower and upper limits which would already help in ruling out some storage offers.

A more preferable option was the integration into the filesystem so that mmdf would show the metadata size also for this GNR setup.

Idea priority High