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Status Submitted
Workspace Storage Scale (formerly known as GPFS)
Created by Guest
Created on Jun 12, 2026

RELATED IDEAS

Provide progress reporting for inode scan activities associated with disk recovery operations.

Problem Statement

In large IBM Storage Scale (GPFS) environments, disk recovery operations can take a significant amount of time to complete. For example, our environment contains over 90 PB of data and billions of files across the cluster.

Following a GPFS upgrade and restart, several NSDs were shown as stopped. When the disks were brought back online using mmchdisk start (or equivalent disk recovery operations), the recovery process took more than 12 hours to complete.

Currently, administrators receive little or no progress information during the inode scan phase of the operation. As a result, it is difficult to determine whether:

  • The operation is progressing normally.
  • The operation is stalled or hung.
  • Additional troubleshooting is required.
  • The estimated completion time is acceptable.

During the recovery window, administrators have no visibility into how much of the inode scan has completed or how much work remains. This creates uncertainty, increases operational risk, and may lead to unnecessary support escalations or interruption of a healthy recovery process.

Proposed Enhancement

Provide progress reporting for inode scan activities associated with disk recovery operations.

Possible implementations include:

  • Display percentage complete.
  • Display the number of inodes scanned versus total inodes.

Provide an estimated time remaining (ETA).

Log periodic progress updates to the GPFS log.

Benefits

  • Improved operational visibility.
  • Reduced support cases and troubleshooting effort.
  • Faster identification of genuine hangs versus expected long-running scans.
  • Improved administrator confidence during maintenance and recovery activities.
  • Better planning and communication of maintenance windows.
  • More accurate prediction of disk recovery completion times.
  • Improved production change planning by allowing administrators to estimate the duration of disk bring-up and inode scan activities before and during maintenance windows.
  • Reduced risk of change-window overruns and unplanned service impacts.
Idea priority High

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