On Mon, 29 Mar 1999, Dave Hitz wrote:
If you make the data look like locally attached storage, then all the different hosts will access it using their own local filesystems, so the different hosts will each use a different format, and the data on disk cannot be shared.
Yes, but if you made the "disk" REALLY intelligent it would be able to emulate each of the boxes' filesystem. This requires a lot of knowledge by the disk about who accesses it and in which way.
If you want the data to be shared, then you have to find some industry standard filesystem sharing techniques that everyone has implemented.
This is much better, easier, and cheaper than making the disk VERY smart.
Today the only such standards are the NAS standards (like NFS, HTTP, Windows Networking).
Well, there are FTP, AFS, and some others. As you see they really aren't that standard, afterall there are at least three of them.
There are a variety of theoretically possible solutions that we could develop, possibly involving new file sharing protocols that could run over SCSI, or "global file systems" that everyone agrees to run on their system. But there are lots of tricky issues to resolve, and the standards work has barely begun, so even in the best possible case, it'd be many years before we could get a true heterogeneous data sharing solution.
I think it will be years before Microsoft agrees with the others. I think that UN*X people will come to agreement much earlier than that.
Tom