SGI Contributes World's Most Scalable File System Technology to Open Source Community
May 20th, 16:36 UTC
Key Infrastructure Technology Empowers Linux to Scale as Platform for Enterprise-Class Applications RALEIGH, N.C. (May 20, 1999) -- At the Linux Expo in Raleigh, SGI (NYSE: SGI)
today announced it will contribute its journaled file system technology,
XFSTM,
to the open source community. XFS is a key component of the company's highly
successful IRIX® operating system and is the world's most scalable and robust
journaled file sharing technology. In a separate release today, SGI announced
that it will investigate with Veritas the development of a unified Linux
journaled file system solution.
"The XFS file system has long been one of the UNIX industry's most advanced
file system implementations and one of the crown jewels of the IRIX operating
systems," said Tony Iams, vice president of Midrange Systems and Software
Research at D.H. Brown Associates. "SGI is demonstrating a commitment to Linux
technology investment surpassing other conventional UNIX vendors who have
focused primarily on sales and support."
"SGI's contribution of XFS to the open-source community has huge implications
for the future of Linux as an enterprise-class application platform," said
John R. "Beau" Vrolyk, senior vice president, Computer Systems Business Unit,
SGI. "XFS addresses one of the key issues previously limiting Linux - the lack
of a journaled file system. Journaling improves performance and speeds recovery
in the event of a system failure." XFS also provides full 64-bit file
capabilities that will enable LinuxTM to
scale easily to handle file systems as large as 18 million terabytes (18x1018)
of data and file sizes as large as 9 million terabytes.
The Need to Scale
During the late 1980s, when disk capacities started approaching the 2GB ceiling
of the file systems designed to manage them, it became clear that users would
soon need a file system capable of scaling to meet demand for large systems. To
ensure that it had a file system capable of taking users into the next
millenium, SGI designed XFS to address several underlying architecture issues
that would guarantee the scalability and robustness of its new file system when
dealing with large files or large numbers of files.
"XFS is unrivaled in the management of large file systems, large files, large
directories, large numbers of files and overall file system performance," said
Anne Vincenti, director of marketing, Storage and Networking, SGI. "XFS is able
to scale where other file systems would simply fail to perform. At the same
time, XFS provides enhanced reliability and rapid crash recovery without
hampering performance."
"The SGI XFS file system delivers outstanding performance for large 2D and 3D
data sets associated with ILM's award winning special effects," said Joe Takai,
director of Production Engineering, Industrial Light & Magic. "Bringing these
high-performance, file-handling capabilities to Linux will significantly
increase the value of Linux as an operating system."
The XFS File System Contribution to Open Source
XFS technology will benefit Linux and the open-source community in many ways,
including:
Scalability
XFS was designed to scale to meet the most demanding storage capacity and I/O
storage needs through:
- Large File Systems and Large Files
XFS is designed to handle rapid growth far into the 21st century. It enables
users to manage file systems and individual files as large as an exabyte (1018
bytes), millions of times larger than the largest file systems of today.
- Large Directories, Large Numbers of Files
SGI realized that as file systems became larger, the old way of searching files
in a linear fashion would become so slow in large systems that it would render
them useless. XFS incorporates large directories to address this problem. XFS
has the ability to dynamically allocate index space for files, enabling systems
to efficiently scale to support large numbers of files.
I/O Performance
Modern servers typically use large, striped disk arrays capable of providing
aggregate bandwidths of tens to hundreds of megabytes per second. The key to
optimizing performance from these arrays are I/O request size and I/O request
parallelism.
Crash Recovery
XFS can recover from most unexpected interruptions in less than a second,
regardless of the number of files being managed. Traditional file systems must
do special file-system checks after an interruption, which can take many hours
to complete. The XFS journaling features avoid the need for these lengthy
file-system checks and also significantly reduce the time for reading and
writing disks.
"This is terrific news and we're happy to have SGI as part of the open source
family," said Ransom Love, president and CEO of Caldera Systems, Inc. "There's
a great need in Linux for business to have that enterprise-class file
technology and storage capability. Daily, we have enterprise customers asking
for these solutions - particularly where graphics are concerned. With SGI's
contribution and expertise in journaling, throughput and data integrity, we can
meet the file sharing/storage needs of those customers with the best technology
available. That SGI would make this contribution to the open source community
says a lot about their vision and business acumen."
License and Availability
SGI will begin to offer code later this summer and meet the license guidelines
set-forth by the Open Source Initiative.
About SGI
SGI is a market leader in technical computing, offering the world's most
powerful servers, supercomputers and visual workstations. SGI uniquely provides
a broad range of high-performance computing and advanced graphics solutions
that enable customers to understand and conquer their toughest computing
problems. Headquartered in Mountain View, Calif., with offices worldwide, the
company is located on the Web at www.sgi.com.
IRIX is a registered trademark, and SGI, the SGI logo and XFS are trademarks,
of Silicon Graphics, Inc. Linux is a trademark of Linus Torvalds. Intel is a
registered trademark of Intel Corporation. UNIX is a registered trademark in
the U.S. and other countries, licensed exclusively through X/Open Company, Ltd.
All other trademarks mentioned herein are the property of their respective
owners.
(Submitted by Bryan Taback of KVO Public Relations)
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