Welcome to www.ClusterGate.RU

• File systems and Storage Lab (FSL) Researchers and students in the FSL group perform research in operating systems with focus on file systems, storage, security, and networking. Emphasis is given to new methods, interfaces, and APIs that increase system security, usability, and performance significantly, improve the portability of operating system code, speed the productivity of development of new code, and more.
• File systems HOWTO This small HOWTO is about filesystems and accessing filesystems. It is not Linux- or Unix-related document as you probably expect. You can find there also a lot of interesting information about non-Unix (file)systems, but Unix is my primary interest :-). More information and the latest version of this document can be found at http://martin.hinner.info/fs/.
• File systems Linux has many file system types. Here is one of the attempt to review of them.
• XFS one of popular file systems for Linux with good speed characteristics
• Raiser journalling file system
• ZFS is a new kind of file system that provides simple administration, transactional semantics, end-to-end data integrity, and immense scalability. ZFS is not an incremental improvement to existing technology; it is a fundamentally new approach to data management. We've blown away 20 years of obsolete assumptions, eliminated complexity at the source, and created a storage system that's actually a pleasure to use.

Virtual, Distributed and Parallel file systems

• GnomeVFS -- is a library that allows applications to transparently access various types of filesystems through a uniform interface. GnomeVFS modules include support for things such as WebDAV, ftp, local filesystem, gzip, bzip2, cdda, and others. GNOME VFS is currently used as one of the foundations of the Nautilus file manager
• FUSE is mechanizm to create new file systems with desired features. With FUSE it is possible to implement a fully functional filesystem in a userspace program. Features include:
  • Simple library API
  • Simple installation (no need to patch or recompile the kernel)
  • Secure implementation
  • Userspace - kernel interface is very efficient
  • Usable by non privileged users
  • Runs on Linux kernels 2.4.X and 2.6.X
  • Has proven very stable over time
• SSHFS - SSH Filesystem.
  • Based on FUSE (the best userspace filesystem framework for linux ;-)
  • Multithreading: more than one request can be on it's way to the server
  • Allowing large reads (max 64k)
  • Caching directory contents
• Andrew File System (Open AFS) oldest distributed file system. Till now the system is in wide use.
• The Distributed-Parallel Storage System (DPSS) The Distributed-Parallel Storage System (DPSS) at LBL is a scalable, high-performance, distributed-parallel data storage system orginally developed as part of the DARPA -funded MAGIC Testbed, with additional support from the U.S. Dept. of Energy, Energy Research Division, Mathematical, Information, and Computational Sciences Office.
  The DPSS is a data block server, which provides high-performance data handling and architecture for building high-performance storage systems from low-cost commodity hardware components. This technology has been quite successful in providing an economical, high-performance, widely distributed, and highly scalable architecture for caching large amounts of data that can potentially be used by many different users.
• Parallel virtual file system -- PVFS. The goals PVFS project are to provide both a testbed for parallel I/O research as well as a freely available, production level parallel file system for use in the cluster community.
• PVFS again
• Red Hat Global File System Red Hat GFS allows a cluster of Linux servers to share data in a common pool of storage, allowing you to:
  • Greatly simplify your data infrastructure:
    • Install and patch applications once, for the entire cluster
    • Reduce the need for redundant copies of data
    • Simplify back-up and disaster recovery tasks
  • Maximize use of storage resources and minimize your storage costs:
    • Manage your storage capacity as a whole vs. by partition
    • Decrease your overall storage needs by reducing data duplication
  • Scale clusters seamlessly, adding storage or servers on the fly:
    • No more partitioning storage with complicated techniques
    • Add servers simply by mounting them to the common file system
  • Achieve maximum application uptime:
    • Red Hat Cluster Suite is included with Red Hat GFS
• Lustre this is another parallel file system
• Another parallel file system - Panasas By combining a parallel file system with object-based storage, the Panasas Storage Cluster delivers scalable bandwidth and random I/O to accelerate application throughput and streamlines operations within single scalable namespace to accelerate productivity.
• IBM General Parallel File System GPFS provides high-performance I/O by "striping" blocks of data from individual files across multiple disks (on multiple storage devices) and reading/writing these blocks in parallel. In addition, GPFS can read or write large blocks of data in a single I/O operation, thereby minimizing overhead.
• OCFS Oracle Cluster File System (OCFS) presents a consistent file system image across the servers in a cluster. OCFS allows administrators to take advantage of a files system for the Oracle database files (data files, control files, and archive logs) and configuration files. This eases administration of the Oracle Real Application Clusters.
  Project Description: Oracle Clustered File System License: GPL
  
• GlusterFS is a clustered file-system capable of scaling to several peta-bytes. It aggregates various storage bricks over Infiniband RDMA or TCP/IP interconnect into one large parallel network file system. Storage bricks can be made of any commodity hardware such as x86-64 server with SATA-II RAID and Infiniband HBA).