On Mon, 29 Mar 1999, Sam Schorr wrote:
Why not a box with a special OS (ala WAFL) that runs on what servers recognize as a fibre hub, intercepts the SCSI calls from all attached servers, and does all the nifty stuff needed to make the SAN(?) look like locally attached storage? Advantage? Separate file I/O from TCP session traffic but still allow file sharing in some form or another.
I thought about this, but if you really want to take it to the extreme, then the switch has to know exactly how it is used. Imagine any "erver" box that uses mirroring or striping. Unless you know exactly how data is placed you won't be able to recognize how the filesystem looks. Then there is caching. Usually systems don't worry about cache coherency on locally attached storage. The assume (fairly correctly too) that they are the only ones using the storage.
Tom