I suppose the BSD box was just accessing the device "raw" (like in "/dev/sdX" ; I don't know the exact syntax for BSD, tho), bypassing even the partition scheme.Thanks for the reply. Very interesting. Could you explain how the bsd box read the raw device and built the internal lookup table?
I also guess that the big files created thru the Solaris box were a succession of 512-bytes records, each with 4 bytes for the file number, then 4 bytes of sector number, the rest being some magic padding. The BSD box just had to scan all the sectors and build a kind of hash map.
Sorry for the lack of details and accurracy, but this was more the kind of "around a beer" discussion rather than a formal report ... And this was, as I understood, a long-term solution, which required a bit of hacking before being ready to production (modifying the code of the streaming video server running on the BSD boxen, I assume).
The main reason I wrote "not GFS" is because I'm aware of it and that it would take a bit of work to implement. I'm currently looking for a quick fix to give me some time to implement a more robust solution. Also, realizing I had some definite issues w/ my current config, I researched GFS a little while back. It's my understanding that total storage in a GFS cluster cannot exceed 8TB and we have > 12TB. I didn't investigate too much further for a work-around. Andreas suggested lustre which on the surface appears to be viable.
Let us know your findings ;-)