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Melio FS greatly simplifies the management of existing NAS installations using multiple Windows based appliances and a shared storage array. It also provides performance scalability and reliability that enables clusters cost effective Intel based NAS heads to be used in large or performance intensive installations that may still be using proprietary SMP server-based NAS solutions. In applications such as video, seismic analysis or imaging, in which some servers may require better performance than is typically available on TCP-based NAS file service, Melio FS also provides capability to share data on common storage with Fibre Channel, iSCSI or SCSI connected servers accessing block data. Melio FS is simple to install, and the storage management process is intuitive to users familiar with Windows disk administration tools.
Melio File System enables NAS servers using Windows Storage Server 2003 to share data on a storage array, enabling users to easily scale connectivity and the performance of storage systems accessed via CIFS or NFS file protocol. Multiple servers can be connected into common storage and access and share data in a single storage pool, eliminating the need of data replication between different NAS systems. Provisioning and manageability of the NAS storage are greatly simplified, and performance bottlenecks and single points of failure are removed. This also enables Windows based servers to be used in applications requiring performance and reliability typically requiring larger, proprietary NAS systems.
Background
NAS solutions built using the Windows Storage Server 2003 on standard Intel platforms provide a very cost effective solution to file serving. Servers built on this platform can export file services using CIFS, NFS, and other protocols, which provides a convenient platform to consolidate files, and enable file sharing across clients running Windows, Unix, or Linux operating systems. Within each NAS appliance a single file system controls the storage and manages file locking, so file sharing by clients accessing storage on that appliance using CIFS/NFS is enabled without conflict. Many installations are now choosing to connect the NAS servers to fibre channel storage, enabling consolidation of storage onto centralized, high reliability storage arrays.
NAS servers built on standard Intel platforms have finite throughput capability, which is typically adequate for small installations or remote offices. As throughput requirements increase, users can add additional NAS servers. Each additional server will have to be allocated its own physical or logical volume, and will maintain a separate file system. Although NAS heads can be clustered for active-passive fail over, they typically do not share simultaneous access to the storage. Frequently accessed data must be replicated across servers, each file system must be maintained separately, and files may need to be manually migrated when adding new servers to balance utilization across servers.
This scalability challenge has frequently led to Windows-based NAS solutions being used in small applications or remote offices, while larger SMP server-based solutions are used in the central office or large environments. However, the cost effectiveness of standard Intel platforms for NAS relative to larger proprietary files has created strong interest in improving the scalability of the Windows/Intel-based NAS solutions.
Melio FS addresses the scalability challenge by enabling a single file system to be shared across multiple NAS servers. Additional storage or servers can be added to the NAS cluster on the fly, providing seamless scalability as the number of clients or data storage requirements increases. Each node in the cluster of NAS servers mounts a single copy of Melio FS and exports a single mount directory for NFS or CIFS. Melio FS is a clustered journaling file systems that manages file locking and cache coherency across all of the servers in cluster, allowing near linear scalability as additional servers and storage are added. Multiple NAS servers can write to or read from the same file on a shared storage array simultaneously, without any risk of file corruption. Melio FS appears as local file system to the front-end nodes.
When multiple NAS servers are clustered into a single instance of Melio FS, NAS administration is greatly simplified, since no file migration of replication is required, active-active fail over is supported, and storage management can be accomplished from a single server using standard administration tools. The journaling functionality of Melio FS ensures fast recovery in the event of a hardware failure.
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