First and Most Widely Deployed Clustered File System on Linux Extends Performance and High Availability Leadership

Sistina Software, the premier storage infrastructure software company delivering data-sharing solutions, today announced general availability of Sistina GFS(TM) (Global File System) version 5.2 for the Intel Architecture, further extending Sistina's unmatched performance, flexibility and scalability for its powerful enterprise-class clustered file system. New features enhance key data management and protection capabilities to accelerate the deployment of Linux clusters in combination with storage area network (SAN) and blade-based computing architectures.

Sistina GFS 5.2, currently available on all major Linux distributions, is a modular, robust and native file system, which allows multiple computers to share a single, common view of storage data. This lets organizations consolidate existing server and storage resources into a single management domain, linking thousands of diverse data storage repositories into a massively scalable, secure and stable SAN based on either Fibre Channel or IP technologies. Oracle 9i RAC, file serving and web server applications are just a few of the environments that benefit today from a cluster architecture and Sistina GFS. With Sistina GFS, IT administrators can consolidate storage, optimize server utilization and scale applications while decreasing administrative overhead.

New Features in Sistina GFS 5.2

Sistina GFS 5.2 has an expanded OmniLock(TM) architecture in which applications can access any file independently of other servers, and file integrity is guaranteed through seamless operation of efficient, flexible locking mechanisms. The OmniLock architecture is now the only lock management system in Linux that can deliver multiple, independent simultaneous writes to the same file, thus providing tremendous performance and scalability boost to enterprise applications such as sophisticated, high-end distributed databases. Also, new OmniLock prepackaged modules ensure that a highly-available, high-performance environment can be configured quickly, so as to shorten the time to deploy mission-critical applications.

In addition, the enterprise-class meta-data journaling system of Sistina GFS has been extended to allow data journaling. This greatly improves the performance in environments, such as e-mail, where small files are predominant.

"The ability to share data is at the heart of the incremental computing movement in which system administrators can incrementally and independently add compute, I/O and storage capacity. Intel clusters running Linux, glued together by Sistina GFS and a SAN architecture, deliver this enterprise-class functionality," said Greg Nuss, director of product management at Sistina Software. "Better yet, with the new features in Sistina GFS 5.2, these clusters deliver extremely impressive price/performance benefits for our enterprise customers."

Sistina GFS 5.2 also delivers four to sixteen times the scalability of competing solutions and currently supports expansion capabilities up to 256 servers. With hundreds of Sistina GFS implementations already in production, Sistina continues to grow its customer base, especially via its partnerships with Hewlett-Packard and Fujitsu.

"Organizations find themselves dealing with several market trends simultaneously, including budgetary constraints, increasing needs for IT services, and requirements to improve both reliability and availability," said Dan Kusnetzky, vice president, system software research, at IDC. "Clustering and availability software, such as Sistina GFS 5.2, can help organizations address their requirements for improved performance and higher levels of reliability and availability while keeping hardware and software acquisition costs in line."

Additional Sistina GFS Features

Additionally, the established Sistina GFS product line continues to include leading and long-standing features that greatly ease day-to-day management of large, clustered systems and still dramatically improve the performance of these mission-critical environments. These include:

-- Direct I/O provides for high-performance, file system-based database implementations, eliminating the need to manage raw partitions.
-- Full POSIX Compliant File System Interface allows applications to run without interruptions or modifications.
-- Dynamic Multi-Pathing ensures high-availability in the event of a connection failure to the network storage pool.
-- Unique Storage Capacity Quotas allocate specific storage resources to selected groups and individual users for maximum control and administration over shared data resources without interruption to users.

Pricing and Availability

Sistina GFS 5.2 is available directly from Sistina Software, Inc. For a free, 30-day trial version of the software, visit http://www.sistina.com/products_gfs.htm to request an evaluation copy, or to obtain additional information.

Sistina GFS is the exclusive cluster file system running and supported on Fujitsu's line of High Performance Computing (HPC) clustering solutions.