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

[Ric Wheeler <rwheeler@redhat.com>]

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@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.
> 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@redhat.com>
>> --
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