Distributed File Systems for Storage Area Networks

This paper discusses some fundamental aspects of Distributed File Systems (DFS) for Storage Area Networks (SANs). Many desirable features make a SAN DFS attractive to a production environment that processes huge volumes of bulk data and requires high bandwidth. Throughout the discussion, the traditional server-attached storage model is compared against the distributed network-attached storage model. The remainder of the paper will focus on issues of DFS configuration, data placement strategies, cross platform data sharing, fault tolerance and performance. Finally, we will show that distributed file systems can provide superior performance over traditional server-attached storage shared file systems.