Network File System (NFS) is a distributed file system protocol originally developed by Sun Microsystems (Sun) in 1984, allowing a user on a client computer to access files over a computer network much like local storage is accessed. NFS, like many other protocols, builds on the Open Network Computing Remote Procedure Call system. NFS is an open IETF standard defined in a Request for Comments (RFC), allowing anyone to implement the protocol.
Network-attached storage (NAS) is a file-level computer data storage server connected to a computer network providing data access to a heterogeneous group of clients. NAS is specialized for serving files either by its hardware, software, or configuration. It is often manufactured as a computer appliance – a purpose-built specialized computer. NAS systems are networked appliances that contain one or more storage drives, often arranged into logical, redundant storage containers or RAID. Network-attached storage removes the responsibility of file serving from other servers on the network. They typically provide access to files using network file sharing protocols such as NFS, SMB, or AFP. From the mid-1990s, NAS devices began gaining popularity as a convenient method of sharing files among multiple computers. Potential benefits of dedicated network-attached storage, compared to general-purpose servers also serving files, include faster data access, easier administration, and simple configuration.
OpenSSI is an open-source single-system image clustering system. It allows a collection of computers to be treated as one large system, allowing applications running on any one machine access to the resources of all the machines in the cluster.
In distributed computing, a single system image (SSI) cluster is a cluster of machines that appears to be one single system. The concept is often considered synonymous with that of a distributed operating system, but a single image may be presented for more limited purposes, just job scheduling for instance, which may be achieved by means of an additional layer of software over conventional operating system images running on each node. The interest in SSI clusters is based on the perception that they may be simpler to use and administer than more specialized clusters.
In computing, the Global File System 2 or GFS2 is a shared-disk file system for Linux computer clusters. GFS2 allows all members of a cluster to have direct concurrent access to the same shared block storage, in contrast to distributed file systems which distribute data throughout the cluster. GFS2 can also be used as a local file system on a single computer.
Linux Terminal Server Project (LTSP) is a free and open source terminal server for Linux that allows many people to simultaneously use the same computer. Applications run on the server with a terminal known as a thin client handling input and output. Generally, terminals are low-powered, lack a hard disk and are quieter and more reliable than desktop computers because they do not have any moving parts.
A diskless node is a workstation or personal computer without disk drives, which employs network booting to load its operating system from a server.
Google File System is a proprietary distributed file system developed by Google to provide efficient, reliable access to data using large clusters of commodity hardware. The last version of Google File System codenamed Colossus was released in 2010.
oneSIS is an open-source software tool developed at Sandia National Laboratories aimed at easing systems administration in large-scale, Linux cluster environments.
DRBL is a NFS-/NIS server providing a diskless or systemless environment for client machines.
GPFS is a high-performance clustered file system software developed by IBM. It can be deployed in shared-disk or shared-nothing distributed parallel modes, or a combination of these. It is used by many of the world's largest commercial companies, as well as some of the supercomputers on the Top 500 List. For example, it is the filesystem of the Summit at Oak Ridge National Laboratory which was the #1 fastest supercomputer in the world in the November 2019 top500 list of supercomputers. Summit is a 200 Petaflops system composed of more than 9,000 IBM POWER microprocessors and 27,000 NVIDIA Volta GPUs. The storage filesystem called Alpine has 250 PB of storage using Spectrum Scale on IBM ESS storage hardware, capable of approximately 2.5TB/s of sequential I/O and 2.2TB/s of random I/O.
Network booting, shortened netboot, is the process of booting a computer from a network rather than a local drive. This method of booting can be used by routers, diskless workstations and centrally managed computers such as public computers at libraries and schools.
The Red Hat Cluster includes software to create a high availability and load balancing cluster. Both can be used on the same system although this use case is unlikely. Both products, the High Availability Add-On and Load Balancer Add-On, are based on open-source community projects. Red Hat Cluster developers contribute code upstream for the community. Computational clustering is not part of cluster suite, but instead provided by Red Hat MRG.
A clustered file system is a file system which is shared by being simultaneously mounted on multiple servers. There are several approaches to clustering, most of which do not employ a clustered file system. Clustered file systems can provide features like location-independent addressing and redundancy which improve reliability or reduce the complexity of the other parts of the cluster. Parallel file systems are a type of clustered file system that spread data across multiple storage nodes, usually for redundancy or performance.
oVirt is a free, open-source virtualization management platform. It was founded by Red Hat as a community project on which Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization is based. It allows centralized management of virtual machines, compute, storage and networking resources, from an easy-to-use web-based front-end with platform independent access. KVM on x86-64, PowerPC64 and s390x architecture are the only hypervisors supported, but there is an ongoing effort to support ARM architecture in the future releases.
BeeGFS is a parallel file system, developed and optimized for high-performance computing. BeeGFS includes a distributed metadata architecture for scalability and flexibility reasons. Its most important aspect is data throughput.
Linux kernel-based operating systems have been widely adopted in a very wide range of uses. All the advantages and benefits of free and open-source software apply to the Linux kernel, and to most of the rest of the system software.
A distributed file system for cloud is a file system that allows many clients to have access to data and supports operations on that data. Each data file may be partitioned into several parts called chunks. Each chunk may be stored on different remote machines, facilitating the parallel execution of applications. Typically, data is stored in files in a hierarchical tree, where the nodes represent directories. There are several ways to share files in a distributed architecture: each solution must be suitable for a certain type of application, depending on how complex the application is. Meanwhile, the security of the system must be ensured. Confidentiality, availability and integrity are the main keys for a secure system.
Dell EMC PowerFlex, is a commercial software-defined storage product from Dell EMC that creates a server-based storage area network (SAN) from local server storage using x86 servers. It converts this direct-attached storage into shared block storage than runs over an IP-based network.
