Shared File Systems and Fibre Channel
Matthew T. O'Keefe · 1998
Shared file systems like Cray's SFS, DEC's VAXcluster file system, and Oracle's Parallel Server exploit network-attached storage by creating serverless distributed file systems that allow efficient, simultaneous access to shared, network-attached storage devices. In the past, these shared file system designs relied on proprietary networkattached storage like DEC's CI network or higher-cost interfaces like HiPPI, or used software to emulate shared storage networks. With the advent of Fibre Channel, a highvolume, open standard in network-attached storage interfaces is now available. In this paper we will review past work in traditional distributed file systems like NFS and AFS and work in shared file systems by Cray, DEC, CMU and others. New file system architectures for shared network storage will also be described. We will