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

On Wed, Dec 01, 2004 at 04:37:59PM -0700, Scott Long wrote..
> Jason C. Wells wrote:
> >--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.
> >
> >Later,
> >Jason C. Wells
> 
> Well, AFS requires an intelligent node in front of each disk.  True SAN
> clustering means that you have a web of disks directly connected to the
> SAN (iSCSI, FibreChannel, etc), and two or more servers on the SAN that
> see those disks as a single filesystem (actually a bit more complicated
> than this, but you get the point).  If one server goes down, no access
> to data is lost since the disks can be reached from any other server on
> the SAN that is participating in the clustered FS.

Find a friendly TruCluster somewhere and take a look.  Really Neat(tm).
Alternatively find a friendly OpenVMS cluster, they have forgotten more
about clusters now than Unix will ever learn (I am afraid).

While we are talking storage: multipathing support for SANs is a
very neat thing to have.  Devices uniquely identified by WWN etc.

-- 
Wilko Bulte				wilko_at_FreeBSD.org