NFS-Ganesha for Clustered NAS

With the storage requirements growing at exponential rate and the industry shift towards cloud computing and software defined architecture, the need for bigger, reliable and centralized storage servers is increasing. Industry is making use these centralized clustered storage units to serve the storage needs. NFS-Ganesha, a user space NFS server has been gaining popularity and has become central part of multiple industry leaders in serving NFS side of the NAS needs. NFS-Ganesha abstracts out various file systems interfaces through its unique File System Abstract Layer (FSAL). Because of this, NFS-Ganesha is able to support various types of file systems like GPFS, Ceph, Gluster, Lustre, VFS, ZFS and more. As the enterprise users are demanding clustered NAS, we have introduced a new clustering framework, called Cluster Manger Abstraction Layer (CMAL) which allows NFS-Ganesha to work with various cluster mangers seamlessly.

In this presentation we intent to describe the CMAL interface and how it can be used to implement Clustered Duplicate Reply Cache(cDRC), Cluster wide distributed Lock manager and Lock Recovery.

Learning Objectives

Understand how NFS-Ganesha can be used in clustered NAS
Overview of CMAL interface for NFS-Ganesha
Understand some of the use-cases of CMAL, like Clustered DRC