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Storage Cluster Features And Advantages

By Eddison Sherry

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Republish: EasyPublish
Published: 09Mar2012
Word count: 475
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While the fundamental advantages of high speed, totally coherent access to shared storage on a cluster are vividly apparent for some users and tasks. Several are described here to give a sampling of how this technology can be used to the greatest advantage. Other benefits may be more specific to the storage cluster's primary task. Shared root file systems can simplify systems administration. Centralized storage increases the efficiency with which hardware resources can be used. LAN free and parallel tape backup allow large file systems to be efficiently backed up without killing network performance. Storage cluster can be best used for increased scalability and higher availability for these applications among others :

1) NFS serving or NFS replacement
2) Samba serving
3) Mail serving
4) Web serving, http proxy caching
5) Java servlets
6) Clustered compute tasks

A normal cluster can often provide transaction services faster and cheaper than a single large server. However managing even a small cluster cn be tedious and expensive. Competent system administrators are difficult to find and it is a serious waste of their time if they have to administer each node in a cluster. Some tools and scripts are available thatmake this less difficult but they have limited functionality and are problematic if you ever want to undo changes.

GFS can be used for the root file system of a storage cluster. Thus when an upgrade is made on one node of the cluster all the nodes can use the new data. GFS support context sensitive links which allows the nodes in the cluster to have different identities and to maintain some independent configuration files while sharing most of their files. A storage cluster can have multiple shared root file systems allowing multiple versions of the file system. This allows upgrades to be tested on a few nodes before the entire production cluster is upgraded. The simplified administration of the cluster alone can make storage clusters a worthwhile investment even if the regular run time data of the cluster does not need to be shared.

On severe problem with duplicated storage is upgrades. One rule of computer users is that when you give them some amount of storage they will find a need for three times as much. In a storage cluster upgrades aer much simpler. On need only buy one new storage device attach it to the shared storage medium and reconfigure the software in one place. GFS also supports online growing of the file system. The file system can be enlarged without resetting any of the nodes in the cluster. This further extends the uptime of the cluster and allows the storage cluster to provide services during hardware upgrades as well as software upgrades.

Eddison Sherry had been working in Linux and other Unix flavours for long years. He had been writing blogs and article on the Linux Storage , Linux commands , Linux Server Administration , Apache Configuration etc.

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