Messages in this thread | | | Subject | Re: Ken Thompson interview in IEEE Computer magazine (fwd) | From | Nat Lanza <> | Date | 08 May 1999 01:16:54 -0400 |
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Ian D Romanick <idr@cs.pdx.edu> writes:
> What exactly do you mean by parallel? There's pretty much two clean ways to > do it. One system has access to the physical disks that hold the filesystem > or multiple systems have direct access to the physical disks. NFS/SMB/Coda > use the former. Sequent's CFS and the similar product for > Digital/Sun/HP/IBM use the latter. In the former you are limited by the > performace of the system that has access to the disks. In the latter you > are limited only by the speed of the disks and the interconnect (to the > disks). I can tell you without even thinking too hard which is faster. :)
There's also a third approach which is sort of a hybrid -- decouple storage and storage management. You have your central machine which manages the filesystem and handles acess control, and then your disks. Clients talk to both the storage manager and the disks directly over whatever interconnect you like. Our NASD research project uses this approach.
And yeah, there's no question that you really, really don't want to put all of your disks behind a single machine.
--nat
-- nat lanza --------------------- research programmer, parallel data lab, cmu scs magus@cs.cmu.edu -------------------------------- http://www.cs.cmu.edu/~magus/ there are no whole truths; all truths are half-truths -- alfred north whitehead
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