“Sun Microsystems is expected to announce tomorrow the following
improvements to its Full Moon clusters: a new home-grown clustered
file system, failover to eight nodes as opposed to four, all based
on fibre channel, with improvements all round in manageability and
failover response times. A few technical showstoppers – such as
dynamic kernel patching – are thrown in for good measure.”
“But does the world needs another proprietary cluster file
system – when free software projects such as the GFS
(GlobalFileSystem), Intermezzo and Lustre are making headway on
cheap Linux hardware?”
“Sun’s goals appear to be tactical – feature-matching rivals
– rather than strategic. It differs in this respect from the Linux
crowd, which clearly has the storage business in its
sights.”