IBM Spectrum Scale is a high performance, highly available, clustered file system and associated management software, available on a variety of platforms. IBM Spectrum Scale can scale in several dimensions, including performance (bandwidth and IOPS), capacity and number of nodes* (instances) that can mount the file system. IBM Spectrum Scale addresses the needs of applications whose performance (or performance-to-capacity ratio) demands cannot be met by traditional scale-up storage systems; and IBM Spectrum Scale is therefore deployed for many I/O-demanding enterprise applications that require high performance or scale. IBM Spectrum Scale provides various configuration options, access methods (including traditional POSIX-based file access), and many features such as snapshots, compression, and encryption. Note that IBM Spectrum Scale is not itself an application in the traditional sense, but instead provides the storage infrastructure for applications.