IBM says it could have several uses. Engineers working on a project in different countries can access the same set of data and make changes to it locally without worrying about the cached versions getting out of synch.

It could also reduce the time it takes to replicate virtual machines between data centers, researchers here said. Applications running inside a virtual machine access data from a virtual LUN, typically stored as a file in the data center. When a new virtual machine is configured or restarted from a failure, the OS image and its virtual LUN have to be transferred between sites, causing delays before the application is ready for use.

Panache can maintain a cache of the OS and its virtual LUN at the remote site, so it's there when needed. IBM researchers say this would greatly reduce the time and complexity of configuring new virtual machines and moving them across a wide area network. It could also help companies to reduce data center costs. Instead of hosting 20,000 virtual machines in one large data center, the faster migration capabilities would provide the option of hosting the VMs across 20 smaller data centers.

Some large cluster file systems already exist, like IBM's GPFS (General Parallel File System) and Sun's Lustre, now maintained by Oracle. Panache is unique because of its high level of parallelism, according to IBM, which allows multiple nodes to read and write to their local data cache even when they are temporarily offline.

"Panache is the first file system cache to exploit parallelism in every aspect of its design -- parallel applications can access and update the cache from multiple nodes while data and metadata is pulled into and pushed out of the cache in parallel," according to (PDF).