Margaret,

You're right on the money. Again. As Bart already illustrated NFS has very cumbersome metadata management. I paraphrase a famous fellow countryman: "Use of NFS considered harmful". If you see to what great length clustered filesystem solutions have to go to overcome the issues of file metadate and locking, a subject largely disregarded by NFS or left to the client, it is amazing to see it coming up again and again. Of course a NAS is better manageable for large generic IT shops as we find them in Government and Oil&Gas. But for us data pumping punters it's just bad news. We are currently developing our SAS grid and discussing our options for shared storage.

So, much to my surprise I was recently confronted with a EMC Isilon publication titled "EMC Isilon scale-out storage for SAS grid computing". No surprise it concludes that it works. At 60MB/s/core no less! (which imho is rather underwhelming). It can't be very new as it uses SAS 9.2 for the benchmarks. It is also full of marketing poetry that does evoke a feeling of SAS endorsement without ever confirming that.

I look forward to your thoughts on how I shoud read this in the light of this blog post.