Xsan (Apple) on FreeBSD

[Robert Watson]

On Sat, 18 Aug 2007, Derek E. Lewis wrote:

> On Sat, 18 Aug 2007, Robert Watson wrote:
>
>> Catching up on an aging thread here -- as far as I know, the XSan parts 
>> from Mac OS X are closed source, so while you can access XSan storage using 
>> whatever distributed file systems Apple supports (NFS, CIFS?), you can't 
>> use FreeBSD to directly access the storage area network.  This is probably 
>> fine.
>> 
>> You'll be interested to know, if you don't already, that both NetApp and 
>> Isilon use FreeBSD as the foundation OS for their products.
>
> Isilon uses FreeBSD, yes, but Netapp uses Linux. One of the improvements 
> Netapp made to Linux was rewriting the NFS stack to support NFSv4 in a 
> decent manner. Those of you that have worked with Linux NFS before know that 
> its not something you want to ship on a commercial storage product.

NetApp gave a rather nice presentation at the recent FreeBSD developer summit 
in Ottawa on the topic of FreeBSD as the foundation OS for OnTap/GX, and also 
made a rather healthy donation to the FreeBSD Foundation in the last six 
months.  I defer to their expertise on the point of what the OS in their 
product is... :-)  As I understand it, NetApp has improved the Linux NFS 
client significantly, but not for the purposes of including it in their 
product.

Robert N M Watson
Computer Laboratory
University of Cambridge