On Tue 16 Mar, 1999, mds(a)gbnet.net (mark) wrote:
>To an extent filer clusters are SAN's. I personally think NAS is superior
>to SANs architecturally, even if NAS's use SAN's.
indeedy - the big problem all the plain SAN kit seems to suffer from is
that a filesystem belongs to only one of the hosts, can only be
intepreted by a subset anyway (eg only NT boxes grok NTFS, only SGI's
grok XFS) and doesn't expect to be shared or be sharing with anyone
else ('Hey! The link-count on that directory in that local read-only
filesystem just changed. Oops.' *BANG*).
Enter NFS (or AFS, DFS, Coda..) and systems that are designed to share
their filesystems with others.
>One day we'll have a network for network traffic, another for disk
>traffic, another for backup traffic, another for montoring/maintenance
>traffic, and some bright spark will come along and say 'We could do all
>this with one proper network!' and I'll just shake my head and cry. >
>8)
I still say that I don't want to have to worry about lots of different
networks! :-p
(Or was I arguing to keep them seperate last time? I forget...)
James.