> What exactly do you mean by parallel? There's pretty much two clean ways to
> do it. One system has access to the physical disks that hold the filesystem
> or multiple systems have direct access to the physical disks. NFS/SMB/Coda
> use the former. Sequent's CFS and the similar product for
> Digital/Sun/HP/IBM use the latter. In the former you are limited by the
> performace of the system that has access to the disks. In the latter you
> are limited only by the speed of the disks and the interconnect (to the
> disks). I can tell you without even thinking too hard which is faster. :)
There's also a third approach which is sort of a hybrid -- decouple
storage and storage management. You have your central machine which
manages the filesystem and handles acess control, and then your
disks. Clients talk to both the storage manager and the disks directly
over whatever interconnect you like. Our NASD research project uses this
approach.
And yeah, there's no question that you really, really don't want to
put all of your disks behind a single machine.
--nat
-- nat lanza --------------------- research programmer, parallel data lab, cmu scs magus@cs.cmu.edu -------------------------------- http://www.cs.cmu.edu/~magus/ there are no whole truths; all truths are half-truths -- alfred north whitehead- To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-kernel" in the body of a message to majordomo@vger.rutgers.edu Please read the FAQ at http://www.tux.org/lkml/