<br><br><div><span class="gmail_quote">On 10/23/07, <b class="gmail_sendername">Rick Stevens</b> <<a href="mailto:rstevens@internap.com">rstevens@internap.com</a>> wrote:</span><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="margin:0;margin-left:0.8ex;border-left:1px #ccc solid;padding-left:1ex">
On Tue, 2007-10-23 at 15:00 -0700, alan wrote:<br>> On Tue, 23 Oct 2007, Mark Haney wrote:<br>><br>> >> Now you really have me confused. "a system without directories"? From<br>> >> where are you getting this information? I don't recall anyone saying
<br>> >> anything such as this.<br>> >><br>> >><br>> ><br>> > I, too, am interested in this. I know ext4 is the next version of the ext<br>> > filesystem, but everything else mentioned by you has to my knowledge NOT been
<br>> > hinted at on any of the lists I'm on. Facts, man, give us facts.<br>><br>> The only thing I have seen about a filesystem that does not use a<br>> directory structure is blue sky handwaving from Microsoft. (Also known as
<br>> a "database filesystem" in some accounts.) How it would work is unclear.<br>> How you would find anything is even more unclear. (And how such file<br>> systems would handle millions of files is pretty unclear.)
<br>><br>> No one has implemented anything like this in any real usable fashion that<br>> I know of. It would take an incredible amount of work to get Unix/Linux<br>> programs to use it correctly. (Let alone secure it.)
<br><br>There are several commercial storage systems that use filesystems like<br>that. Caringo's CAstor is one, Acinion is another. They use UUIDs to<br>store the files (aka "objects" to them) and use a subset of HTTP
1.1 to<br>do the I/O, as opposed to things such as NFS or CIFS.<br><br>Yes, it's a little counterintuitive to those who are used to normal<br>hierarchical systems such as we are, but it isn't blue-sky or FUD and it
<br>does work. Storage blocks are storage blocks. A filesystem is just ONE<br>way of presenting the storage to the applications. Remember when we<br>had to use CHS (cylinder, head, sector) addressing rather than LBA<br>
(logical block addressing)?</blockquote><div><br class="webkit-block-placeholder"></div><div><br class="webkit-block-placeholder"></div><div>PICK systems are systems which have a database-like file system. </div><br> </div>