Re: Object Oriented FS

[Steven Cole <elenstev@mesatop.com>]

On Monday 27 October 2003 11:56 am, Andreas Dilger wrote:
> On Oct 27, 2003  21:23 +0300, Hans Reiser wrote:
> > darren wrote:
> > > allows very high throughput by scaling
> >
> > Do you know what that  means?  (Seriously, I don't....)
>
> Panasas (from what little I have seen of it) looks to be very similar to
> Lustre.  Clients do not access disks directly, but rather have a mapping
> layer between offsets and actual data on disk (similar to LVM and VM
> abstractions of block devices/memory).  Once client has this mapping (very
> small in lustre, on the order of a few hundred bytes at most), it
> can do IO directly to one or more storage devices hence scaling of
> throughput proportional to number of storage targets.
>
> In Lustre at least, the client knows nothing about the physical layout of
> blocks in the file on disk, but rather just accesses one or more objects
> via object identifyer, offset, length so the actual layout of the on disk
> data can change.
>
> Lustre is GPL, don't know about Panasas.
>
> Cheers, Andreas

Reading the following, it appears that something _should_ be GPL...

From http://www.panasas.com/object_storage_arch.html

"Panasas is committed to drive the development of standards for the 
object-based storage. Through the ANSI T10 committee, Panasas is working with 
industry leaders including EMC, IBM, Intel, and Seagate to ensure that 
open-source, reference implementations of object-based storage designs are 
available and driven through an open standards process."

From http://www.panasas.com/directflow.html

"For the operating system on client server nodes to directly read and write 
data objects, an installable file system must be deployed. The DirectFLOW 
client installs as a local file system under Linux and is transparent to the 
operating system and applications above it. This installable file system 
manages the striping of data objects across StorageBlades on a per-object 
basis, and unlike standard RAID arrays, has the ability to optimize data 
layout and RAID level by each object. DirectFLOW thereby enables 
high-performance simultaneous data access for large numbers of clients to 
many files."

The fairly large .pdf files available for download seem to be short (2-page), 
prettied-up versions of the information available at the above URLs.

Steven