“Khalidi wanted to clear up the impression that the new offering
introduces a new proprietary cluster file system of Sun’s own
making. It doesn’t. Khalidi himself had hinted at this possibility
in recent talks, such as this one: “next-generation clusters could
rely on a Cluster File System (CFS) to enable global access to all
files, devices and network resources in the system, and create a
full single-system image.”
“But that isn’t the case. “That was an explicit design decision.
The last thing we want to do is invent a new proprietary file
system. So if something becomes important – like the new Linux file
systems – we can plug it in.” Sun Clusters 3.0 indeed employs
a “Global File Service”, but that boils down to using Solaris’
native file system and if you want it – and if you use disks on
non-Solaris systems, you almost certainly will – Veritas VxFS. He
left door open for Linux file systems to plug-in to Full Moon in
the future.”
“Nor does Sun Clusters mirror processes in the manner of
Himalaya (formerly Tandem) NSC machines. Instead, the system logs
file behaviour: open, read, write and sync calls. … That’s just
one of several fashionable, or once-fashionable approaches to
clusters that the Full Moon team was happy to trample in the design
work. Another being “process migration”, an approach adopted by for
example the MOSIX Linux cluster project, which in the event of a
node failure, fails over individual processes.”