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XFS is SGI’s scaleable, high performance extent-based filesystem. CXFS is an evolution of XFS that allows multiple clients to access the same filesystem at the same time on your SAN.

As systems scale and data volumes grow, access to, and manipulation of that data becomes a serious bottleneck.

I’ve found that many people are unaware of CXFS, or it’s benefits, and in general there’s a fair amount of confusion over the difference between concurrent access to a SAN filesystem versus shared cluster filesystems, as provided by something like Clustered VxFS.

So, I’ve collected together some documents and information which will give a good grounding on CXFS, and hopefully help show what an impressive feat it is.

DMF - Data Migration Facility - is a valuable tool that can live off the back of CXFS. You might be familiar with the concepts of HSM - Hierarchical Storage Management. DMF is pretty much the same thing.

• SGI’s CXFS page
• CXFS Administration Guide from Techpubs
  • Local copy
• Local copies of:
  • CXFS datasheet
  • CXFS whitepaper
• Los Alamos National Laboratory CXFS briefing
  R. Kent Koeniger’s April 1999 briefing - a very good overview
  • Local Mirror
• Backing up and Restoring multi-terabyte datasets

  A white paper where SGI demostrate 10TB per hour backup throughput

  • Local Mirror
• NCAR Visualisation and Enabling Technologies
  A report detailing CXFS performance
  • Local Mirror
• SGI Mobile Innovation Centre at University of Waterloo
  Notes from SGI’s MIC visit to UWaterloo in September 2003 - details of CXFS and DMF
  • Local Mirror
• Scaleability and Performance in Modern Filesystems
  An SGI paper comparing UFS, XFS, VxFS and NTFS - a good overview of XFS and how it works, and how that compares to other common filesystems
  • Local Mirror