To Clarify Few Things On File Systems
StorageNewsletter.com, Monday, June 26,2023
Following some recent vendors' messaging, marketing pitches and press articles promoting parallel and network file systems in a strange way, we wrote this piece to clarify a bit the file systems domain. In other words, it's important to understand from where people speak, what is their interest and value to say that based on what they offer and their associated limitations or properties.
We realize that many people don't know what a parallel file system is and why the industry invented this model. Historically and to make that part brief, some users, especially where data was big in size both in terms of capacity but also in terms of file size, touched a problem.
How is it possible to boost the file read and write operations? Research centers and technical environments encountered this reality earlier than others and they tried to address this limitation. Based on the same 'divide and conquer' model, the idea was to store portions of the file on different storage entities but not like RAID between disks but between file servers and we can potentially say 'RAIN zero' to maintain some analogy.