SAN provides a good infrastructure for data sharing. That’s ok, but if you want to build a functional SAN replete with volume and file sharing, the sharing needs help from volume and file sharing software. Therefore, as a SAN designer, you should decide “to share, or not?” If the following matters should occur within your SAN environment, SANique Cluster File Sharing will definitely be an essential component of your SAN!

Your cluster saves an mpeg file into a SAN disk, you expect that another computer in the cluster can read the mpeg file and play it, but without file sharing software the computers except the one who wrote the file do not even notice that the mpeg file exists in the SAN disk.

Many cluster applications, such as large-scale web mail solutions, invoke simultaneous read/write operations to a file. Suppose a mail system has two servers that deal with incoming mail messages. The two servers will try to access a volume, or even a file, to store the messages at the same time. In case one server occurs failure, the other should take over the whole mail services without any loss of stored data. With the adoption of cluster file system that arbitrates concurrent accesses to a file, the situation above is efficiently addressed and SAN users can have a cluster solution equipped with high availability and high performance.

Another frequent situation with which SAN designers are familiar is that the management of disks and volumes are not completed only with hardware support. SAN users want to change volume sizes, aggregate storage from different disk systems, add/remove disks, and add/remove computing nodes in a cluster, all on-the-fly without impacting current services. These actions, only with help of a cluster volume manager, become reality.