I’m also interested in the “solution” to this problem. I’d love to
know the name of one commercially successful (success==real market share)
product that “solves” this problem.
-----Original Message-----
From: Eric Lee Steadle [mailto:xxxxx@spinnakernet.com]
Sent: Monday, April 22, 2002 6:32 PM
To: File Systems Developers
Subject: [ntfsd] Re: How to share storage device on logical block acce ss
level?
> First, its a hard problem.
Hard? Well, the implementation is not trivial. But it is definitely a
*solved* problem, so the issue is not with uncharted territory.
I’m interested in how this problem was “solved”.
Theoretically, or practically – I don’t care.
Can you provide details, or a link, maybe?
No, a good NAS box does something significantly different. In fact, the
*best* NAS box would likely be a box containing an internal cluster of
nodes
using a clustered file system to serve the data to the rest of the NAS
world.
Yes, I agree 100% 
While there are certainly limits to the degree to which existing
distributed
lock managers can scale, those limits are significantly higher than the
limits to which a ‘good NAS box’ can scale - at least when considered as an
alternative for intense server-style cluster applications (the kind that a
‘cluster file system’ is designed to support) as opposed to light access by
possibly very large numbers of casual clients (where a NAS-style approach
is
entirely appropriate).
It’s been my experience that the scalability of a NAS box is limited by
the network and processing resources needed by the CIFS protocol. NFS needs
very
little of either to get good performance. CIFS seems to require gobs of
both,
just to piddle along. Distributed Lock Managment seems like it wouldn’t
affect
CIFS performance all that much. I’m interested in your opinion on the
matter.
ERX
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