Xsan (Apple) on FreeBSD

[Derek E. Lewis]

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.

Derek E. Lewis
delewis at acm.org
http://delewis.blogspot.com