SAN file systems today allow clients direct access to block devices for data storage and retrieval without going through a server. This however poses new challenges to file system designers such as security, scalability and management. The newly developed Object Stores (ObS) [5] [6] [9] enable applications to create and delete objects and to write and read byte ranges to/from objects. ObS provide space management abstraction, late binding, security, safe writes and other capabilities. Building a SAN file system using ObS as storage devices alleviates the challenges mentioned above. In this article we briefly detail these challenges and describe how ObS help in solving them. We then describe zFS, a scalable distributed file system which uses ObS.
By: J. Satran, A. Teperman
Published in: H-0214 in 2003
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