In a major move, Oracle has released a vastly enhanced version of OCFS to the open-source community as a significant new entrant in the fully open-sourced cluster file system arena. To our delight, they’ve actually chosen the GPL as the release license! It was a mystery what would happen to OCFS as it was a very poor-performing cluster file system for anything other than Oracle datafiles, and we all know Oracle has been pushing “”the Grid”” in the shape of its ASM Automated Storage Management technology instead of continuing with a clustered file system. It turns out, Oracle has now fixed the performance problems on file open that made OCFS 1 a poor performer and is now releasing OCFS 2 as a recommended deployment platform for Oracle software binaries as well as a general-purpose clustered file system. Of course, the regular caveat still seems to apply: “”OCFS is not intended to be a POSIX compliant file system, there are no guarantees that timestamp updates or inode changes are similar in behavior as other file systems on the same platform or especially on different operating systems.”” Our attitude: production engineering is about testing technology, not trusting it. Seems like this deserves some testing.
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