OCFS2 and GFS.

[Paul A Houle]

Naoki wrote:

>Hi all,
>
>Was checking this out :
>http://lxer.com/module/newswire/view/41239/index.html  it's just a
>little bit of Oracle marketing about how great OCFS2 is and how great
>Oracle is for releasing it to the community. 
>
>But I was thinking what the point of OCFS2 is when we have GFS. 
>
>Mr Morton seems to like it but what are the advantages to GFS which is
>seemingly been around longer?
>
>The are both POSIX which is nice.
>  
>
    I'd really like to see a global file system that has implementations 
on multiple platforms:  this would be the disruptive technology that 
would make iSCSI appealing.  Once the iSCSI drivers firm up a bit,  I'm 
planning on setting up a storage server that runs GFS over iSCSI:  this 
ought to work well with the other Linux machines at home,  but won't 
work with the other machines in the menagerie -- running Windows,  MacOS 
X,  and Solaris.  (I'll probably need to run SAMBA and NFS for those guys.)

    This is a lot to ask for.

    People who are working on global file systems seem interested in the 
high-end cluster market,  not in the low-end NFS/CIFS/Appletalk killer 
market.  On the other hand,  working up from the low-end might help get 
the momentum that will vanquish the FC mafia at the high end.  For 
instance,  I'm planning to build an NFS killer to evaluate GFS (and 
maybe OCFS2) for use in a future cluster installation at work.