Xsan (Apple) on FreeBSD

[Eric Anderson]

Eric Anderson wrote:
> 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..

Does anyone have a pointer to the presentation by NetApp from the Dev 
summit?


Eric