Multi-disk filesystems

[Mark Plotnick]

A number of people here run a program that creates and deletes dozens of
50- to 200-MByte files during its 14-hour run.  They run it on several
4/390's, each with 4 to 8 1GB IPI disks.  Each filesystem is a full disk
in size, but even these 1GB filesystems are inconveniently small; the
users either have to free up space on a filesystem before starting the
program, or have to use symbolic links to spread out the program's files
over several filesystems.

I'd like to know of any products that let filesystems span more than one
physical drive.  From the paragraph describing SPARCserver manager in the
May 15th press release, it seems it might do this, ("SPARCserver Manager
also allows files to span disks") but my sales rep has been unable to
provide any additional information.

What we'd like to do is have 3 to 6 disks treated as one filesystem.
Ideally, the failure of one disk would not necessitate restoring the
others from tape, but we can live with that (time to get that Exabyte
jukebox, I suppose).  We'd also prefer that the inodes are kept
appropriately numbered so that the method that tar and cpio use to check
for hard links doesn't result in files being omitted from tape dumps.

	Mark Plotnick
	mp at allegra.att.com