Design and Development of File System for Storage Area Networks

By merging network and channel interfaces, resulting interfaces allow multiple computers to physically share storage devices. A storage area network (SAN) is a high-speed special-purpose network (or subnetwork) that interconnects different kinds of data storage devices with associated data servers on behalf of a larger network of users. In SAN, computers service local file requests directly from shared storage devices. Direct device access eliminates the server machines as bottlenecks to performance and availability. Communication is unnecessary between computers, since each machine views the storage as being locally attached. SAN provides us to very large physical storage up to 64-bit address space, but traditional file systems can’t adapt to the file system for SAN because they have the limitation of scalability. In this paper, we present architectures and features of SANtopia that allows multiple machines to access and share disk and tape devices on a Fibre Channel or SCSI storage network in Linux system. It performs well as a local file system, as a traditional network file system running over IP environments, and as a high performance cluster file system running over storage area networks like Fibre Channel. SANtopia provides a key cluster enabling technology for Linux, helping to bring the availability, scalability, and load balancing benefits of clustering to Linux.