METHOD AND AN APPARATUS, AND RELATED COMPUTER-PROGRAM PRODUCTS, FOR MANAGING ACCESS REQUEST TO ONE OR MORE FILE SYSTEMS

摘要

The present invention relates to a method and an apparatus for managing one or more file systems, in particular a file system server, the apparatus being connectable to one or more storage apparatuses and to one or more host computers, the apparatus being adapted for use in a data storage system comprising the one or more storage apparatuses and the apparatus connected to the one or more storage apparatuses and to the one or more host computers. The apparatus comprises: a hardware-side processing section including one or more programmable hardware-implemented chips configured to process request packets, which are received from host computers and relate to access requests to one or more file systems managed by the apparatus, and to generate response packets for the processed request packets; and a software-side processing section including one or more CPUs configured to execute decoding of requests packets sent from a host computer based on one or more computer programs stored in a memory of the software-side; wherein at least one programmable hardware-implemented chip of the hardware-side processing section is configured to process a credit request included in a received request packet, in particular without involvement of the hardware-side processing section.