Chapter 1. Red Hat GFS Overview

Red Hat GFS is a cluster file system that provides data sharing among Linux-based computers. GFS provides a single, consistent view of the file system name space across all nodes in a cluster. It allows applications to install and run without much knowledge of the underlying storage infrastructure. GFS is fully compliant with the IEEE POSIX interface, allowing applications to perform file operations as if they were running on a local file system. Also, GFS provides features that are typically required in enterprise environments, such as quotas, multiple journals, and multipath support.

GFS provides a versatile method of networking your storage according to the performance, scalability, and economic needs of your storage environment.

This chapter provides some very basic, abbreviated information as background to help you understand GFS. It contains the following sections:

1.1. New and Changed Features

This section lists new and changed features included with the initial release of Red Hat GFS 6.0 and Red Hat GFS 6.0 for Red Hat Enterprise Linux 3 Update 5.

New and Changed Features with the Initial Release of Red Hat GFS 6.0

New and Changed Features with Red Hat GFS 6.0 for Red Hat Enterprise Linux 3 Update 5

For information about using GFS with Red Hat Cluster Suite, refer to Appendix A Using Red Hat GFS with Red Hat Cluster Suite. For GFS upgrade instructions, refer to Appendix B Upgrading GFS.