BS2000 and higher permits UNIX file systems to be accessed via NFS.
This enables BS2000 files to be saved and processed by file servers and Net-Storage in released directories.
From the BS2000 viewpoint, on the storage medium Net-Storage, too, data is saved to volumes which are, however, permanently assigned to a pubset. These serve as a storage extension for the pubset. It is thus possible to exceed the maximum possible storage space of an SF pubset (4 TB).
Basic information on Net-Storage can be found in the “Introduction to System Administration” [10 (Related publications)].
Net-Storage is used primarily to save (large) files which do not need to be accessed with maximum performance. Performance-critical data (e.g. database files) should still be saved to pubsets.
There are several reasons for this:
The performance capability of state-of-the-art networks is constantly increasing, but the bandwidth must be shared with other participants in the network. Consequently, in contrast to FC peripherals, no exact forecasts of throughput and latency periods can be made.
Read access to Net-Storage is at a higher performance level than write access. A considerably higher throughput can be achieved by reading and writing large I/O blocks than with small I/O blocks.
The throughput increases with the number of parallel jobs and with the block size until a bottleneck is reached. Thus with sequential processing of large blocks (HSMS/ARCHIVE, COPY, File Transfer), very high throughput values can be achieved which extend to the limits of the bandwidth provided in the network.
If the configuration and the hardware of the network permit, jumbo frames should be used (MTU 8,000 bytes). The MTU must also be configured or supported on all the network components involved (e.g. switches).
Details of the configuration of Net-Storage are provided in the “Net-Storage Installation Guide”. ((dp-bs2000-net-storage-guide-v11-0-em-en.pdf), see Fujitsu product pages in the Internet).