An Efficient Recovery Technique using Global Buffer on SAN Environments

The shared disk file systems use a technique known as file system journaling to support recovery of metadata on the SAN(Storage Area Network). In the existing journaling technique, the metadata that is dirtied by one host must be updated to disk space before some hosts access it. The system performance is decreased because the disk access number is increased. In this paper, we describe a new recovery technique using a global buffer to decrease disk I/O. It transmits the dirtied metadata into the other hosts through Fibre Channel network on the SAN instead of disk I/O and supports recovery of a critical data by journaling a data as well as metadata.