Re:Lose the buzzwords (Score 1)

Guys, I think you're both absolutely right about the complexity of simultaneous access to shared disks - something has to control that, and it's NOT the disk array. At my customer site, I was using HP's high-availability cluster software MC/ServiceGuard, and the operating system's logical volume manager controls the shared access (you prepare the volume group as shared, then mount it in 'exclusive' mode where it keeps track somehow how's mounting it - so that no simultaneous access is possible - MC/SG is for high-availability only, not for parallel performance like Oracle RAC).

Let's take a step back. Let's assume I don't want too much smarts, and that I will look after the mounting so that no two SAN nodes will attempt to mount the same volume / partition. That should make it easier, right? You mentioned something about reversing the IEEE1394 stack - can you be a bit more precise?

E.g. the home built disk array is partitioned into two slices ("1" and "2"). Computer A mounts slice 1, computer B mounts slice 2.

BTW: The disk array I used has a great feature - you associate LUNs (space allocated on the disk array) to the World Wide Name of the FC HBA (like a MAC address in FibreChannel land). It's called "LUN Security"... Do Firewire controllers have an Identification of themselves?