Global namespace has been around for some time now but probably not used as widely as one would have hoped for. I think sooner or later the benefit of this approach will be evident to the end user and this will really take off. Microsoft has what is called DFS (Distributed File System) for a long time, at least since Windows 2000 and now we are up to Windows 2008 and this thing is still relatively unknown concept. Unix has a related concept of auto mount point. Global Namespace is being used notably for file virtualization. Here’s a nice article on the subject. Quoting the source directly here “File virtualization possesses these abilities. File virtualization decouples client access to files from the physical location of the files”. There you have it, in a nut shell file virtualization is all about adding an abstraction layer on top of the file system. As with other things in life, there is no one-size -fit-all solution in this area, different solutions have different trade offs. The solution from EMC- Rainfinity operates at the lower level Network Protocol utilizing concepts of v-lan whereas Brocaded FME is an in-band solution which uses DFS and probably some sort of network re-director to accomplish the same, same deal with file virtualization product from Attune Software. I have a feeling this area is going to heat up, given the deluge of data we are dealing with every where.

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Global namespace has been around for some time now but probably not used as widely as one would have hoped for. I think sooner or later the benefit of this approach will be evident to the end user and this will really take off. Microsoft has what is called DFS (Distributed File System) for a long time, at least since Windows 2000 and now we are up to Windows 2008 and this thing is still relatively unknown concept. Unix has a related concept of auto mount point. Global Namespace is being used notably for file virtualization. Here’s a nice article on the subject. Quoting the source directly here “File virtualization possesses these abilities. File virtualization decouples client access to files from the physical location of the files”. There you have it, in a nut shell file virtualization is all about adding an abstraction layer on top of the file system. As with other things in life, there is no one-size -fit-all solution in this area, different solutions have different trade offs. The solution from EMC- Rainfinity operates at the lower level Network Protocol utilizing concepts of v-lan whereas Brocaded FME is an in-band solution which uses DFS and probably some sort of network re-director to accomplish the same, same deal with file virtualization product from Attune Software. I have a feeling this area is going to heat up, given the deluge of data we are dealing with every where.