HAMFS file system

Unix's lack of a robust and expandable file system has become a significant problem with the growth of Unix in large commercial environments. The HAMFS (highly available multi-server file system) is a cluster file system designed to address this need. HAMFS offers disk-pooling, supports off-the-shelf disks, and automatically balances file load across disks dynamically. Data residing in a disk pool is directly accessible from every node in a HAMFS cluster. As user's capacity requirements grow, HAMFS provides easy disk pool expansion. Finally, HAMFS provides uniform scaling of file system performance from a single node configuration to large multi-node clusters, offering significant performance advantage over traditional file systems. For example, in short file access situations, HAMFS provide a factor of five performance improvement over NFS, and a factor of two improvement over conventional local file systems. Technologies developed for HAMFS are applied to Fujitsu's file system product SafeFILE.

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