Re: My project wish-list for the next 12 months

From: Dan Nelson <dnelson_at_allantgroup.com>
Date: Wed, 1 Dec 2004 17:47:36 -0600
In the last episode (Dec 01), Jason C. Wells said:
> --On Wednesday, December 01, 2004 3:02 PM -0700 Scott Long 
> <scottl_at_freebsd.org> wrote:
> 
> >5.  Clustered FS support.  SANs are all the rage these days, and
> >clustered filesystems that allow data to be distributed across many
> >storage enpoints and accessed concurrently through the SAN are very
> >powerful.  RedHat recently bought Sistina and re-opened the GFS source
> >code, so exploring this would be very interesting.
> 
> This sounds very close to OpenAFS.  I don't know what distinguishes a
> SAN from other types of NAS.  OpenAFS does everything you mentioned
> in the above paragraph.  OpenAFS _almost_ works on FreeBSD right now.

OpenAFS is a network-centric system that replicates data across its
nodes, I think, and each node has a cache.  A clustered filesystem uses
a single block of shared storage (usually on a fibre-channel SAN, but
you can also use shared scsi on a 2-machine cluster) that all servers
access directly.  The magic is getting the locking right to make sure
the servers don't stomp on each other's data.  Extremely useful for
server farms that need to share large files, or even lots of small
files (webservers for example).

-- 
	Dan Nelson
	dnelson_at_allantgroup.com
Received on Wed Dec 01 2004 - 22:47:37 UTC

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