[ILUG] RAID, huge filesystems and data mining.

[Ronan Cunniffe]

On Wed, 14 Jul 2004, Olivier Tharan wrote:

> A NetApp storage could do what you want. It's NFS (or CIFS or
> HTTP, etc.) but it could be part of a NAS with Fiber Channel
> (this part I am not sure). When you run out of space, you throw
> more disks in your qtree[1] and there you are.

Ok, that's something I don't think has been considered.

> On the downside, the permissions are bound to your system, so for
> the access permissions mentioned earlier, you would have to rely
> on Unix groups and basic permissions (no ACL).

This is (sadly) not a runner.
The overlapping data access problem means you need a user to belong to
many, many groups (potentially 2^N for N users, and N is going to be
>>16....)

The real problem is that a user can't easily figure out by looking at the
group ownership of a set of directories, which ones they're permitted to
access.

The resulting solution has to be invisible to the end-user.

I'll look in to the NetApp futher.

Thanks,

Ronan