By default, iXOS-JUKEMAN presents all disks as subdirectories of a mount
point (via NFS) or as drive letters (on NT). To meet the needs of all different
kinds of applications, the server uses a much more versatile concept to enable
the administrator to configure views to the file system in a flexible way.
Clarity
For instance, if you had hardware managing 700 disks and all these disks
would be visible as subdirectories to a single root directory, the clients
accessing the data might be presented with problems to find the desired disks.
For this reason like in every file system a tree structure should be
established, the disks being the leaves of this tree.
This allows not only the client access to be controlled but also the access to
special disks to be made easier for the clients. A software developer may want
to use only certain disks containing PC products. It would speed up her work,
if she could see just the disks she needs.
The server maintains a tree of views. Each view contains either views or a
selection of disks. Different views display disks differently, for instance in
upper case or lower case letters. Once a view is exported, clients can access
it as a mount point (using NFS) or as a network drive (on NT). All views form a
directory tree, the so-called volume tree. Clients can acess branches of this
tree, for example a single view with only some disks or the root view
containing the whole tree.
Each view has properties configured by the administrator. Each view has a
volume name space, and a file name filter. On NT, each view can have a drive
letter and a drive label additionally. Each view describes its self-contained
views or disks. Unless specifically defined, a subview's properties are
inherited from the parent view.