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Network distributed file system

Network distributed file system description/claims

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The present invention relates to a method and apparatus for distributing files within a network.

Traditionally computer data is usually stored in form of individual files in a computer long-term storage (non-volatile). This most commonly is a “hard disk”. Hard disks suffer from following issues:

Limited capacity

Prone to damage and failure because of mechanical (moving) parts—short lifetime

Not shared, generally only one machine can access it at a time

To overcome such problems, disks can be combined in to larger pools of storage with data protection, for example, in a RAID array. In terms of their interface to a host computer, disks or pools of disks can be either be:

Internal—e.g. IDE, SATA, SCSI disks.

External—DAS Directly Attached Storage e.g. USB, SCSI, Fiber Channel. However, DAS is only capable being connected to very limited (<10) number of servers at a time.

External—NAS Network Attached Storage e.g. Ethernet, TCP/IP, IPX/SPX. NAS is just a more advanced, specifically designed in hardware file server.

External—SAN Storage Area Network e.g. Fiber Channel (FC) network infrastructure. It is acknowledged that SAN is capable of being connected to multiple machines however the infrastructure costs for doing so are prohibitive for desktops and, in spite of improvements such as iSCSI, SAN is typically used only for servers.

A pool of storage usually needs to be accessible by more than just a single machine. Traditionally the most common way of sharing storage is to use a “file server” which is a dedicated computer on the network, providing its storage pool (connected through any of the above 4 ways, internal or external) transparently to other computers by a “File Sharing Protocol” over a computer network (LAN/WAN/etc) with the possibility of adding extra security (access control) and availability (backups) from a central location.

Some commonly used file sharing protocols are: CIFS/SMB/Windows File Sharing introduced by Microsoft with Windows 3.x NFS introduced by Sun Microsystems and adopted by almost all Unix operating systems

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Electrical computers and digital processing systems: multicomputer data transferring or plural processor synchronization

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