CIFS and protocols
Failover on Windows-based system.

We are investigating a Windows clustered NAS system that can do the file IO level automatic failover. My concern is that since the Windows file system is CIFS that is a stateful protocol, if one host of the cluster goes away, the network connection will be lost during the cluster switch over and the file descriptors of the clients become invalid.

    Requires Free Membership to View

    Login

    When you register for SearchStorage.com, you’ll also receive targeted emails from my team of award-winning editorial writers. Our goal is to keep you informed on the hottest topics, the latest news and the biggest challenges you face as a storage professional today.

    Rich Castagna, Editorial Director

    By submitting your registration information to SearchStorage.com you agree to receive email communications from TechTarget and TechTarget partners. We encourage you to read our Privacy Policy which contains important disclosures about how we collect and use your registration and other information. If you reside outside of the United States, by submitting this registration information you consent to having your personal data transferred to and processed in the United States. Your use of SearchStorage.com is governed by our Terms of Use. You may contact us at webmaster@TechTarget.com.

You have a good understanding of the issue. Because of the stateful case of CIFS, a failover will still require an intervention on the accessing client. Basically it results in a retry but you must respond.

There's no alternative here with the implementation. The CIFS protocol gives you some very good security capabilities and the stateful environment is one of the byproducts of that.

Randy Kerns

Editor's note: Do you agree with this expert's response? If you have more to share, post it in one of our .bphAaR2qhqA^0@/searchstorage>discussion forums.


This was first published in January 2004