Features - Enterprise Data Insights:

NEW STORAGE ARCHITECTURES DRIVES FILE SYSTEM RESEARCH

As reported by John Abbott for the451.com/Distributed, shared or clustered file systems have become central components of many storage devices, and many technologies that have languished within academic research labs for years are now getting their moment in the sun.

Veritas built its whole business on file systems, but has been slower to update its technology so that it can drive the move over to network attached and storage area networking architectures. Network Appliance wrote its own high-performance file system to get around some of the bottlenecks associated with NAS, and more recently has been pushing DAFS ­ the direct access file system ­ as a potential standard. EMC is using its FilePool technology as an integral part of Centera, a new product line aimed specifically at fixed content applications.

It's likely that no single new-generation file system will predominate, although most will accommodate interoperability with the existing incumbent file systems, Sun's NFS and Microsoft's NTFS. Sistina would like to be the new Veritas, and hopes that the popularity of Linux will help it get there. SGI's CXFS is highly regarded in high-performance computing circles, and is now being focused in on storage applications. PolyServe is focused on file sharing over cache-coherent server architectures, but also has its eye on storage.

File systems will also play their part in tying the worlds of NAS and SAN storage together. Startups such as Ibrix are looking into this, as is IBM, whose long-gestating StorageTank technology will be significant in the future ­ assuming, of course, that it ever gets to the commercial release stage. And Microsoft is working on its own storage-aware file system that may emerge next year along with the Yukon version of SQL Server. Eventually, Microsoft could squeeze many of the other players out of the market.