Scale-out File System Evaluation Guide

Evaluation Guide Overview

Evaluator Group’s Scale-out File System Evaluation Guide is part of a series of guides designed to help IT professionals evaluate storage technology alternatives.  This Evaluation Guide and the accompanying workbook are designed to assist potential buyers understand the options and products available and to help match requirements to the available technology choices.

What sets Evaluator Group’s Evaluation Guide series apart from vendor-sponsored whitepapers is the lack of vendor bias.  Our Evaluation Guides are not sponsored by vendors and are written for IT managers seeking a vendor neutral discussion of the design considerations behind new products, technologies, and trends.

What are Scale-out File Systems

Scale-out File Systems or SoFS for short are large-scale file serving implementations in software.  Distinguishing Scale-out File Systems from standard Network Attached Storage (NAS) is the large scale in the number of nodes supported, the amount of capacity, and number of files as well as being offered as software for subsequent integration on a variety of hardware systems.  Some of the Scale-out File Systems are also distinguished in their offering of parallel transfer to a file using POSIX compliant clients.  Scale-out File Systems implementations are similar to scale out NAS systems but with those different characteristics.  In general, the number of nodes is over a thousand, the capacity is practically unlimited, and the number of files is in the billions.  The number of parallel operations possible is usually relative to the number of nodes.

Scale-out File System Evaluation Guide includes: 

• Evaluation Guide Overview
• What are Scale-out File Systems
• Scale-out File System Functionality
• Characteristics of a Scale-out File System
• Usages
• Evaluation Questions
• Evaluator Group EvaluScale Requirements
• Summary

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