I have just become aware of the GFS project and I am BLOWN AWAY.
I don't know how this project reached production quality status and escaped my
radar until now. I got an email from my VAR for StorageTek disk arrays today
pitching it as a solution. This appears at first glance to be the answer to a
lot of our mail server scalability problems. You can now put a bunch of SMTP
and POP servers (DNS round robin or serveriron/bigip them) clustered on a
fibrechannel network talking to shared disk arrays. No NFS, no TCP, just SCSI
over fibrechannel with every host in the cluster talking to every disk. I just
finished reading their latest IEEE paper and the locking mechanism makes sense
and seems quite sane and suitable to handling just this sort of situation.
It's a journalled and fault tolerant filesystem. If a machine in the cluster
goes down, no problem. With well supported and relatively inexpensive Qlogic
fibrechannel cards and fibrechannel disks costing only slightly more than SCSI
disks (I think, I've never really priced them individually) this seems quite
viable. I encourage all of you to check out:
http://www.globalfilesystem.org
and tell me what you think. Does this sound like a good way to cluster mail
servers to you too?
--
Tracy Reed http://www.ultraviolet.org
Every one we don't catch would be a "yet another major ms security hole",
and the theory tells us we can't catch all of them. So, we're just not
going to start down that path.
[EMAIL PROTECTED] 08/06/98 Bugtraq
