Veritas Storage Foundation 5.1 SP1 Cluster File System Administrator"s Guide (5900-1738, April 2011)

Table 1-2
Veritas File System features not in cluster file systems (continued)
CommentsUnsupported
features
This Quick I/O for Databases feature that caches data in the file system
cache is not supported.
Cached Quick I/O
File access times may appear different across nodes because the atime
file attribute is not closely synchronized in a cluster file system. So
utilities that depend on checking access times may not function
reliably.
Commands that
depend on file
access times
Storage Foundation Cluster File System benefits and
applications
This section describes the SFCFS benefits and applications.
This section includes the following topics:
■ How Storage Foundation Cluster File System works
■ When to use Storage Foundation Cluster File System
How Storage Foundation Cluster File System works
SFCFS simplifies or eliminates system administration tasks that result from the
following hardware limitations:
■ The SFCFS single file system image administrative model simplifies
administration by enabling the execution of all file system management
commands from any node.
■ You can create and manage terabyte-sized volumes, so partitioning file systems
to fit within disk limitations is usually not necessary.
■ SFCFS can support file systems with up to 256 terabyte in size, so only
extremely large data farms must be partitioned because of file system
addressing limitations.
■ Because all servers in a cluster have access to SFCFS cluster-shareable file
systems, keeping data consistent across multiple servers is automatic. All
cluster nodes have access to the same data, and all data is accessible by all
servers using single server file system semantics.
■ Because all files can be accessed by all servers, applications can be allocated
to servers to balance load or meet other operational requirements. Similarly,
17Technical overview of Storage Foundation Cluster File System
Storage Foundation Cluster File System benefits and applications