Functionality and Performance Evaluation of File Systems for Storage Area Networks (SAN).
Martha Bancroft, Nick Bear, Jim Finlayson, Robert S. Hill, Richard Isicoff, Hoot Thompson · 2000
The demand for consolidated, widely accessible data stores continues to escalate. With the volume of data being retained mounting as well, a variety of markets are recognizing the advantage of shared data in terms of both cost and performance. Traditionally, common access has been addressed with network-attached fileservers employing data sharing protocols such as the Network File System (NFS). A new approach, poised to deliver high bandwidth access by multiple, heterogeneous platforms to a common storage repository at reduced cost, is beginning to emerge. Storage Area Networking (SAN) is an open-storage architecture designed to eliminate many of the traditional bottlenecks associated with secondary and tertiary storage devices. Conventional high performance computing (HPC) sites and compute-intensive production sites can benefit from such architectures as the need to share computational input and output data sets expands and the mix of computational platforms continues to diversify.