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Secrets of Cluster File Systems: How to Share Files on Multiple Servers Without Errors?
With the rapid development of information technology, the demand for file access and its complexity continue to increase. Cluster File System (CFS) is one of the solutions, which allows multiple servers to mount and share files at the same time, which not only improves access efficiency, but also enhances system reliability and fault tolerance.
Clustered file systems can provide location-independent addressing and redundancy, which can help improve reliability or simplify the complexity of other parts of the cluster.
Shared disk file system is one of the most common clustered file systems. It uses a storage area network (SAN) to allow multiple computers to directly access disk data at the block level. To avoid data corruption, so-called concurrency control techniques are added to ensure that the consistency and serializability of the file system is maintained even when multiple clients access the files simultaneously. Such a design not only needs to consider the communication between servers, but also needs to provide some form of protection mechanism to prevent data corruption due to node failure.
In such a system, different block-level protocols, including SCSI and iSCSI, help the storage area network provide underlying support to ensure that data transmission between multiple servers will not occur errors.
Shared disk file systems typically use some form of "guardrail mechanism" to prevent data corruption.
However, there is another architecture called a distributed file system, which does not share the same block-level access but uses network protocols for data transfer. Distributed file systems can provide clients with the same access interface as local files. Clients can still use the syntax of local files to perform various operations, such as mounting, unmounting, or reading and writing data.
One of the goals of designing a distributed file system is "transparency", which means that the client does not need to know the actual location of the files or how they are distributed; users can freely operate the files as if they were using local disks. These systems typically have a unified namespace and all clients have access to a consistent state of the archive at all times.
Design goals such as access transparency, location transparency, and concurrency transparency make distributed archive systems more efficient and available.
As technology advances, many of the system architectures of the past have become the basis for today's distributed file systems. In the 1980s, the implementation of data access protocols made distributed file systems become mainstream, and the now famous NFS and CIFS also originated from this.
With the increasing demand for file storage, the emergence of network attached storage (NAS) systems has further integrated the functions of file storage and file systems, becoming the file solution for many companies today. Such systems typically use file-based communications protocols rather than block-level protocols to provide convenient access.
Of course, as the demand for multi-server computing grows, avoiding single points of failure becomes an important consideration in design. By storing data copies, we ensure that data will not become invalid due to the failure of any single device. Such design considerations not only improve the reliability of the system, but also greatly enhance the efficiency of file access.
Performance is an important metric for clustered file systems and is determined by the time it takes to satisfy service requests.
In the fiercely competitive market, how to balance data access efficiency, system stability and user needs has always been a challenge faced by IT professionals. These problems may be effectively addressed through the integrated application of clustered file systems and distributed file systems.
As big data and cloud technology gradually become mainstream in the future, will cluster file systems become the best solution to data management problems? Let us wait and see.
