Oracle Cloud File System

Oracle Cloud File System ("The cloud file system of Oracle") is a product for file management in a cloud environment. This set consists of two known products – ASM Dynamic Volume Manager and ASM Cluster File System. According to representatives of Oracle, now all technologies of the ASM series (Automatic Storage Management is automated management of storages) will be issued under the name of Cloud FS.

The release of the integrated packet of Oracle Cloud FS for file management is aimed at service of the growing market of "cloud" applications. According to developers, the packet of Oracle Cloud FS offers the clustered file system constructed on technologies of the automated data storage. From the point of view of potential customers, such clustered file system can bring considerable benefit to the organizations which create internal "clouds" and also when testing "cloud" applications before their transfer on an external hosting.

The ASM Cluster File System component which is a part of a packet of Oracle Cloud FS represents a peer-to-peer distributed file system which allows to save materials on any of a set of servers in corporate network and to get access to these materials from any of these servers. Except direct access to files from any node in a cluster, the data access can also be got through such protocols of file systems as NFS (Network File System) and Microsoft CIFS (Common Internet File System). The clustered file system of ASM Cluster File System can be used as the independent file system and also in the form of a superstructure over other, more traditional file system – for example, over EXT3, NTFS (Network File System) or ZFS (Zetabyte File System), at the same time the possibility of a clustering of data on servers is lost, but advantages local file at the level of physical drives are effectively used.

The ASM Dynamic Volume Manager technology, the second component of the product Oracle Cloud FS, offers a broad spectrum of useful functions too. In particular, ASM Dynamic Volume Manager allows to add new drives to a system without manual redistribution of data on all available resources. Using ASM Dynamic Volume Manager it is possible to increase and reduce total capacitance of storages, to transfer storage to a new hardware platform without stopping of systems, and still this technology allows to create control pictures of storage with access only to reading.

The Cloud FS technology is not the first technology for creation cluster file systems from Oracle. Except commercial Cloud FS technology there is an open Lustre project. The Lustre technology, in turn, is suitable for the supercomputers integrating 1,000 and more servers more. Again provided Cloud FS technology is optimized for less large systems numbering about 25 nodes though successfully passed test on a cluster from 100 nodes.

"Cloud" file the Oracle Cloud FS systems can work on servers with Sparc and x86 processors running the Solaris and Linux systems, on PowerPC-servers running the IBM AIX operating system and also on x86 servers running Windows.