Re: [LSF/MM TOPIC][ATTEND] linux servers as a storage server - what's missing?

["J. Bruce Fields" <bfields@fieldses.org>]

On Tue, Jan 03, 2012 at 02:32:40PM -0500, Chuck Lever wrote:
> 
> On Jan 3, 2012, at 2:26 PM, Jeff Layton wrote:
> 
> > On Wed, 21 Dec 2011 10:59:43 -0500
> > Ric Wheeler <rwheeler@redhat.com> 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.
> > 
> > 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
> 
> To add a few more NFSv4 related items:
> 
>  - Simplified ID mapping

What are you thinking of here?

--b.

>    and security configuration
>  - Support for NFSv4 migration and replication
>  - Better server observability (for operational and performance debugging in the field)
>  - FedFS and NFS basic junctions (already under way)
> 
> > 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@redhat.com>
> > --
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> 
> -- 
> Chuck Lever
> chuck[dot]lever[at]oracle[dot]com
> 
> 
> 
> 
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