Advantages to using Storage Foundation Cluster File System
SFCFS simplifies or eliminates system administration tasks that result from hardware limitations:
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The SFCFS single file system image administrative model simplifies administration by making all file system management operations and resizing and reorganization (defragmentation) can be performed from any node.
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Because all servers in a cluster have access to SFCFS cluster-shareable file systems, keeping data consistent across multiple servers is automatic. All cluster nodes have access to the same data, and all data is accessible by all servers using single server file system semantics.
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Because all files can be accessed by all servers, applications can be allocated to servers to balance load or meet other operational requirements. Similarly, failover becomes more flexible because it is not constrained by data accessibility.
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Because each SFCFS file system can be on any node in the cluster, the file system recovery portion of failover time in an n-node cluster can be reduced by a factor of n by distributing the file systems uniformly across cluster nodes.
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Enterprise RAID subsystems can be used more effectively because all of their capacity can be mounted by all servers, and allocated by using administrative operations instead of hardware reconfigurations.
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Larger volumes with wider striping improve application I/O load balancing. Not only is the I/O load of each server spread across storage resources, but with SFCFS shared file systems, the loads of all servers are balanced against each other.
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Extending clusters by adding servers is easier because each new server's storage configuration does not need to be set up—new servers simply adopt the cluster-wide volume and file system configuration.
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The clusterized Oracle Disk Manager (ODM) feature that makes file-based databases perform as well as raw partition-based databases is available to applications running in a cluster.
