It wasn’t that long ago that SGI completely owned the media production space, but with Macs making headway, SGI have instead
added MacOSX to the list of supported O/S’s with their clustered XFS filesystem. Now Macs can share the same filesystem as the IRIX, Linux and Windows boxes, and get fibre channel performance at the same time.
SGI add MacOSX support to their clustered filesystem
About The Author
Eugenia Loli
Ex-programmer, ex-editor in chief at OSNews.com, now a visual artist/filmmaker.
Follow me on Twitter @EugeniaLoli
Good to see a UNIX vendor thinking with the “If you can’t beat ’em, join ’em” mentality. Think of how great it’d be if *all* UNIX vendors were this realistic. I don’t know much about them, but SGI seems, to me, to be more about the technology and less about the $$ than the average competitor of theirs… though I guess SCO’s cash registers and Sun’s servers aren’t really *competitors* perse of SGI’s Workstations, but you know what I mean.
The last time I saw SGI systems being used for video production was summer 1999. That’s almost 5 years ago.
It’s nice to see SGI and Apple collaborating. I’m quite surprised SGI is working on a Windows port of XFS, but not an OS X one. OS X uses a VFS which is quite similar to Irix’s (significantly more similar than, say, Linux)… you would think that it would be quite easy for SGI to port XFS to OS X. With support for extended attributes, XFS would have little trouble handling Macisms like resource forks.
Unfortunately, all we can do is trust Dominic Giampaolo to continue cleaning up HFS+…
Apple and SGI should merge.
Am I reading this right? Windows supports XFS? If so, how? I’d like to know because it would be the best filesystem for sharing data between Linux and Windows.
Am I reading this right? Windows supports XFS? If so, how?
It’s more like SGI is attempting to port XFS to Windows. This page makes several references to XFS when used in conjunction with Windows:
http://www.sgi.com/software/xfs/techinfo.html
“Apple and SGI should merge.”
Yeah, I think so, too. 🙂
By Bascule (IP: —.atmos.colostate.edu)
The last time I saw SGI systems being used for video production was summer 1999. That’s almost 5 years ago.
—
I saw them in the disc 2 of Finding Nemo :b
By dan (IP: —.sbcss.k12.ca.us)
Apple and SGI should merge.
—
In a way I agree. So they can be suppliers to Pixar, again my thoughts are based on seeing Pixar people with Apple Powerbooks and SGI workstations.
we were talking about this under the other topic (apple $4 billion in cash).
SGI’s market cap is $700 million. If anything apple should buy them outright, preferably with stock and a little bit of cash.
I really don’t follow SGI too closely. How much of a force is SGI in high-end computing (creative) and otherwise these days?
And the business reason for Apple and SGI merging would be?
I don’t think SGI brings anything to the table at this point.
– Kelson
Uhm, no. It doesn’t provide XFS for either MacOS X, Windows or any client. The name CXFS is actually kind of misleading, so is the term distributed file system. Think of it as a very long SCSI cable that can be shared between many computers at once.
There is an intersting statement in the SGI press release:
“With Apple’s recent introduction of the fast and extremely powerful Power Mac® G5, 39% of visual effects and dynamic media studios and 26% of broadcast stations and cable systems in the United States now use Mac as their primary system for production/editing workstations, according to TrendWatch Fast Facts, published by TrendWatch, Inc.—up 11% and 8% respectively from only one year ago. ”
Market share, guys, …..market share!!!!!!
Well i don’t think that project is still active, i remember when SGI went the whole Windows workstation route (98?) that they wanted to port XFS from IRIX to Windows NT to use on said workstations.
I could be wrong though!
It’s a pity that most of the development on IRIX has stopped tbh, my main system at home is a dual proc Octane 🙂
Umm… for those speculating about availability of XFS on Windows, go get some glasses or a larger monitor — SGI only have CXFS available for Windows, not XFS.
The article states “clustered XFS”, which I suppose the ‘C’ in CXFS stands for.
We are talking about the XFS link that bascule supplied
http://www.sgi.com/software/xfs/techinfo.html
which states that XFS has support for NT, as i said in my previous post that’s to do with couple of years ago when they tried to break into NT workstation market.
on a slightly related note here’s a screenshot of parts of gnome 2.4 on IRIX
http://www.sb-1.net/gnome.jpg
CXFS is a clustered filesystem which allows many computers to access a shared data store (such as a single SAN volume).
CXFS requires at least one system to be the “broker” and handle the locking mechanisms (the SAN itself can not do the locking since it does not know what’s on the filesystem or even what type of filesystem it is.)
The reason SGI has created CXFS for Windows (it was first out for Irix) is easy, money. The Windows platform is pervasive in the industry.
Also check out Veritas Cluster Server for a similar product.
CXFS is a cluster filesystem which uses XFS as its base and helps share data between windows,linux(ia32 , ia64) ,Irix,
MacOSX,AIX and Solaris; on a single file system.The metadata is handled by a central server (also called MDS) and the clients write data directly over the SAN. It supports 40+ nodes in a cluster and i/o rates in the order of a few GB/s across the entire cluster.
I dont think comparing it to veritas cluster filesystem would be fair since it is probably 10-50x faster over large node counts.
Jus my 2 cents.