From owner-freebsd-hackers@FreeBSD.ORG  Wed Dec  1 23:37:47 2004
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Date: Wed, 01 Dec 2004 16:37:59 -0700
From: Scott Long <scottl@freebsd.org>
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To: "Jason C. Wells" <jcw@highperformance.net>
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Subject: Re: My project wish-list for the next 12 months
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Jason C. Wells wrote:
> --On Wednesday, December 01, 2004 3:02 PM -0700 Scott Long 
> <scottl@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.

Scott