Re: Disable read/write caching to disk?

Chad Leigh -- Shire.Net LLC wrote:

> 
> On May 26, 2005, at 8:49 PM, Eric Anderson wrote:
> 
>>
>> So it sounds dangerous, but not disastrous..  Sounds like soft- 
>> updates would help this alot, so I'll turn them back on for this  
>> filesystem (I typically do use it).
>>
>> At a minimum, it would be awesome to even have a way to do one host  
>> rw and several doing ro.  Think of the case of a web server farm,  
>> where it's nearly all reads.
>>
>> Thanks for the details and information!
> 
> 
> 
> use NFS or something. Not ideal but it allows you to have lots of  
> clients using the same space without the disasters.
> 
> Chad
> 

NFS and Coda/AFS require that you have an intelligent node, i.e. a
computer, in front of each disk.  The whole idea of a Fibre Channel
or iSCSI SAN is that you have a network of disks connected to a network
of computers, all able to communicate with each other and not have to
be fronted by a computer.  This is quite important for high-availability
storage networks that want the reliability and scalability of not having
a single computer be the choke point or single-point-of-failure for a
particular set of data.  Granted it's still somewhat of a niche, but as
persistent storage and data mining become more part of the mainstream,
it'll start becoming very important.  Right now FreeBSD simply isn't an
option, while Solaris, NT, and Linux are.

Scott