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

["Christopher R. Hertel" <crh@samba.org>]

Ric, et. al.,

I want to think of these questions from the perspective of the storage
systems vendor who is (or may be interested in) using the Linux storage
stack in a product.
  * How do we make things easy for those vendors (without compromising
    the licensing--theirs and ours)?
  * How do we ensure that they have all of the features that they need,
    and can add their own software "skin" to present to the end-user?

We have talked about some of these issues already, and I know that there is
work being done, but the key will be to make that work consistent so that we
are not reinventing wheels but also not forcing customers to use this or
that specific piece or part.

I think we want to look at our storage stack from the bottom up, and
consider what can be done within the kernel and/or in user-space to bring
the pieces together.

Okay... so all of that is wildly vague and magic-waving-of-hands-ish.  The
questions raised in the thread below require a bit of thought to answer.

Chris -)-----

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@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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> 

-- 
"Implementing CIFS - the Common Internet FileSystem" ISBN: 013047116X
Samba Team -- http://www.samba.org/     -)-----   Christopher R. Hertel
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ubiqx Team -- http://www.ubiqx.org/     -)-----   crh@ubiqx.mn.org
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