On Tue 16 Mar, 1999, mds@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.