Red Hat GFS is a cluster file system that is available with Red Hat Cluster Suite. Red Hat GFS nodes are configured and managed with Red Hat Cluster Suite configuration and management tools. Red Hat GFS provides data sharing among GFS nodes in a Red Hat cluster. GFS provides a single, consistent view of the file-system name space across the GFS nodes in a Red Hat cluster. GFS allows applications to install and run without much knowledge of the underlying storage infrastructure. GFS is fully compliant with the IEEE POSIX interface, allowing applications to perform file operations as if they were running on a local file system. Also, GFS provides features that are typically required in enterprise environments, such as quotas, multiple journals, and multipath support.

GFS provides a versatile method of networking your storage according to the performance, scalability, and economic needs of your storage environment. This chapter provides some very basic, abbreviated information as background to help you understand GFS. It contains the following sections: