SYMMETRIC SHARED FILE STORAGE SYSTEM CROSS-REFERENCE TO RELATED APPLICATIONS

摘要

A system and method to allow scalability of file storage (300) in terms of capacity and performance through a symmetric multicomputer architecture with shared storage, in which storage and protocol processing resources can be added to (or removed from) the system without any need of recognizing and/or explicitly migrating the data stored in the system. The invention permits clients (302, 304, 306, 308) to access files stored (i.e., written) in any of multiple external protocol processing nodes to be retrieved from any other external protocol processing node. The access can be routed through any of the gateway service nodes (312a, 312b, 312c).