I have actually been mulling this over a good deal in my mind, but I keep
approaching it from different perspectives.
Here are some random questions that pop up in my mind...
Can we put FibreChannel HBAs in *target* mode into a Linux-based PC and
export LUNs via FibreChannel?
- Do we support multipath in this configuration?
- Zoning? Muli-access LUNs for Clustering?
Where are we on FCoE support?
Where to we stand on ATAoE?
- Coraid, the creaters of ATAoE, were recently listed 3rd on a
"Most Promising Storage Start-Ups in 2012" list[1].
- ATAoE support has been standard in Linux for years.
- The target software is very low-level. It needs an overhaul
and a powerful configuration API.
What about other block-level protocols? My familiarity with these varies.
Chris -)-----
[1]http://www.storagenewsletter.com/news/startups/most-promising-storage-start-ups
Ric Wheeler wrote:
> On 01/24/2012 04:36 PM, J. Bruce Fields wrote:
>> On Tue, Jan 03, 2012 at 02:26:09PM -0500, Jeff Layton wrote:
>>> On Wed, 21 Dec 2011 10:59:43 -0500
>>> Ric Wheeler<rwheeler@xxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
>>>
>>>> One common thing that I see a lot of these days is an increasing
>>>> number of
>>>> platforms that are built on our stack as storage servers. Ranging
>>>> from the
>>>> common linux based storage/NAS devices up to various distributed
>>>> systems.
>>>> Almost all of them use our common stack - software RAID, LVM,
>>>> XFS/ext4 and samba.
>>>>
>>>> At last year's SNIA developers conference, it was clear that
>>>> Microsoft is
>>>> putting a lot of effort into enhancing windows 8 server as a storage
>>>> server with
>>>> both support for a pNFS server and of course SMB. I think that linux
>>>> (+samba) is
>>>> ahead of the windows based storage appliances today, but they are
>>>> putting
>>>> together a very aggressive list of features.
>>>>
>>>> I think that it would be useful and interesting to take a slot at
>>>> this year's
>>>> LSF to see how we are doing in this space. How large do we need to
>>>> scale for an
>>>> appliance? What kind of work is needed (support for the copy
>>>> offload system
>>>> call? better support for out of band notifications like those used
>>>> in "thinly
>>>> provisioned" SCSI devices? management API's? Ease of use CLI work?
>>>> SMB2.2 support?).
>>>>
>>>> The goal would be to see what technical gaps we have that need more
>>>> active
>>>> development in, not just a wish list :)
>>>>
>>>> Ric
>>> Unfortunately, w/o a wishlist of sorts, it's hard to know what needs
>>> more active development ;).
>>>
>>> While HCH will probably disagree, being able to support more
>>> NFSv4/Windows API features at the VFS layer would make it a lot easier
>>> to do a more unified serving appliance. Right now, both knfsd and samba
>>> track too much info internally, and that makes it very difficult to
>>> serve the same data via multiple protocols.
>> By the way, we could really use a
>> Windows/Samba expert if we're going to discuss that.
>>
>> I don't think their list(s) got the announcement?
>>
>> --b.
>
> Adding in three windows/samba people that I know of :)
>
> Ric
>
>>> Off the top of my head, my "wishlist" for better NFSv4 serving would be:
>>>
>>> - RichACLs
>>> - Share/Deny mode support on open
>>> - mandatory locking that doesn't rely on weirdo file modes
>>>
>>> It's always going to be hard for us to compete with dedicated
>>> appliances. Where Linux can shine though is in allowing for more
>>> innovative combinations.
>>>
>>> Being able to do active/active NFS serving from clustered filesystems,
>>> for instance is something that we can eventually attain but that would
>>> be harder to do in an appliance. This sort of discussion might also
>>> dovetail with Benny's proposal about pNFS serving.
>>>
>>> --
>>> Jeff Layton<jlayton@xxxxxxxxxx>
>>> --
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>
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