A Global Namespace (GNS) is a

heterogeneous Homogeneity and heterogeneity are concepts often used in the sciences and statistics relating to the uniformity of a substance or organism. A material or image that is homogeneous is uniform in composition or character (i.e. color, shape, siz ...

, enterprise-wide abstraction of all

file File or filing may refer to: Mechanical tools and processes * File (tool), a tool used to ''remove'' fine amounts of material from a workpiece **Filing (metalworking), a material removal process in manufacturing ** Nail file, a tool used to gent ...

information, open to dynamic customization based on user-defined parameters. This becomes of particular importance as multiple network based file systems proliferate within an organization—the challenge becomes one of effective file management. A Global Namespace has the unique ability to aggregate disparate and remote network based

file systems In computing, file system or filesystem (often abbreviated to fs) is a method and data structure that the operating system uses to control how data is stored and retrieved. Without a file system, data placed in a storage medium would be one larg ...

, providing a consolidated

mount point Mounting is a process by which a computer's operating system makes files and directories on a storage device (such as hard drive, CD-ROM, or network share) available for users to access via the computer's file system. In general, the process o ...

which can be mounted on any machine via

network protocols A communication protocol is a system of rules that allows two or more entities of a communications system to transmit information via any kind of variation of a physical quantity. The protocol defines the rules, syntax, semantics and synchroniza ...

and it can greatly reduce complexities of localized file management and administration. For example, prior to file system namespace consolidation, two servers exist and each represent their own independent namespaces; e.g. \\server1\share1 & \\server2\share2. Various files exist within each share respectively; however, users have to access each namespace independently. This becomes an obvious challenge as the number of namespaces grows within an organization. With a GNS, an organization can access a virtualized file system namespace; e.g. files now exist under a unified structure, such as \\company.com\share1, share2—where the files exist in multiple physical server\share locations but appear to be part of a single namespace. Some of the main reasons behind a GNS is to open up more storage pools for larger working pools of disk, migrate data transparently, and reduce number of mount points / shares in an environment. Vendors implement this technology in different ways, but the client view is designed to be the same. A GNS is always made of several name spaces using concatenation or individual shared volumes.

Standards

Global Namespace technology can virtualize file server protocols such as

Common Internet File System Server Message Block (SMB) is a communication protocol originally developed in 1983 by Barry A. Feigenbaum at IBM and intended to provide shared access to files and printers across nodes on a network of systems running IBM's OS/2. It also provides ...

(CIFS) protocol and the

Network File System Network File System (NFS) is a distributed file system protocol originally developed by Sun Microsystems (Sun) in 1984, allowing a user on a client computer to access files over a computer network much like local storage is accessed. NFS, like ...

(NFS) protocols. These are standard protocols used by all servers,

network attached storage Network-attached storage (NAS) is a file-level (as opposed to block-level storage) computer data storage server connected to a computer network providing data access to a heterogeneous group of clients. The term "NAS" can refer to both the techn ...

(NAS) devices and client systems for handling file data.

Standards

See also