Components

CalSoft has an in-depth knowledge and vast experience in file systems, storage and systems space. We are in the unique position of being the first Indian company to develop a series of components in these areas. We offer our high-end consulting services bundled with these components.

CalSoft has designed and developed the following components from inception to completion. These components provide ready-to-use modules, which can be deployed to reduce product development life cycles.

DirectNFS
DirectNFS component is a network file system based on NFS that allows file system client nodes to take full advantage of the performance and scalability benefits of SANs. Access to the file system's meta-data is coordinated by file servers, but clients access the SAN directly for data-intensive operations (reads and writes). DirectNFS is designed as an extension of and is backward compatible with traditional network file systems, such as NFS and CIFS. We followed the approach of stackable file systems and therefore it is independent of the underlying physical file system. It is portable to any operating system that supports the v-node (VFS) interface. DirectNFS performance matches that of the local file system ext2 on Linux.

DirectCIFS
DirectCIFS component aims at integrating NAS and SAN technologies. It is a cluster file system designed for Microsoft Windows NT/2000/XP server operating systems and provides high-throughput direct data access over SAN's using extensions to the CIFS protocol.

DirectCIFS is based on the fact that NAS protocols such as NFS and CIFS suffer from server bottlenecks, as I/O requests are always routed through the NAS server. This prevents NAS clients from fully exploiting the high-throughput promised by Storage Area Network architecture. DirectCIFS solves this problem by allowing NAS clients to access the storage directly on a shared SAN. The NAS server functions as a metadata server, which satisfies metadata accesses made by the clients. This information can then be cached and used to access data blocks directly through the SAN, thus completely bypassing the server for file data I/O.

NextGenNAS (Next Generation NAS)
The objective of this component is to unify disparate storage boxes running NFS into a single namespace, provide scalability of metadata services by implementing flexible and scalable polices with respect to the number of intermediate servers that manage the unified namespace, provide striping support across multiple partition servers (basically NFS servers which can be used as storage repositories) and hence improve performance, provide powerful locking semantics and guarantee a level of consistency of data that is both reasonable and acceptable with regard to the performance penalty incurred thereby.

SCSI test suite
This component is a regression test suite for fibre channel and SCSI. We have designed and developed SCSI software emulation layer as targets and initiators, which act as a random stress test generator. This component has been built for storage system makers and storage switch makers. This showcases CalSoft's understanding of the storage networking space.

Test Suite for Windows
This component is a test engine, which helps to validate new file system against the Win32 API. The approach that we have taken is to choose NTFS as the "compliant" file system against the Win32 API.

We have generated list of test cases for each of the Win32 API calls. A test engine developed in Perl runs against NTFS for each of the test cases and for each of the API calls. Once this is done the result of running this test case is logged as the "correct log". The same test case is then run against the new file system and the result is once again logged. The two logs are then compared and any discrepancy is logged as a fault with the new file system. This ensures that the new file system is compliant with the Win32 API.

The front end for this engine has been developed using JAVA, and provides the user with an intuitive way to test selected API calls and to compare the logs and the results of the test.

Volume Manager Migration Utility
This component is migration utility that facilitates migration of users from the Veritas Volume Manager (VxVM) to other logical volume managers in propriety systems. The deployment of this utility implies reconstruction of volume maps using different migration strategies. It retains the information on object hierarchy created by Veritas including replicated volume groups, remote links, besides things like striping, mirroring etc.

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