PFS Using Individual Disks or Storage Arrays

Since PFS distributes file data and file system metadata across all the storage devices in a file system, the failure of any single device will result in the loss of all data in the file system. For that reason, the underlying storage devices in the PFS should be storage arrays with some form of RAID support.

Although PFS may be configured to manage each disk in a storage array individually, for the purposes of safety and performance some form of volume manager (such as Sun Enterprise Volume Manager or RAID Manager) should be used to manage the individual disks. PFS should then be used to manage the volumes across multiple servers.