Xsan (Apple) on FreeBSD

[Eric Anderson]

Robert Watson wrote:
> 
> 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, can you point me to that presentation please?  I'd love to read it..

Eric