Veritas Storage Foundation Cross-Platform Data Sharing 5.0 AdministratorÆs Guide, HP-UX 11i v3, First Edition, May 2008

Chapter
4
File system data sharing
Considerations about data in the file system
Data within a file system might not be in the appropriate format to be accessed if
moved between different types of systems. For example, files stored in
proprietary binary formats often require conversion for use on the target
platform. Files containing databases might not be in a standard format that
allows their access when moving a file system between various systems, even if
those systems use the same byte order.
Some data is inherently portable, such as plain ASCII files. Other data is
designed to be portable and the applications that access such data are able to
access it irrespective of the system on which it was created, such as Adobe PDF
files.
Note that the CDS facilities do not convert the end user data. The data is
uninterpreted by the file system. Only individual applications have knowledge
of the data formats, and thus those applications and end users must deal with
this issue. This issue is not CDS-specific, but is true whenever data is moved
between different types of systems.
Even though a user might have a file system with data that cannot be readily
interpreted or manipulated on a different type of system, there still are reasons
for moving such data by using CDS mechanisms. For example, if the desire is to
bring a file system off line from its primary use location for purposes of backing
it up without placing that load on the server or because the system on which it
will be backed up is the one that has the tape devices directly attached to it, then
using CDS to move the file system is appropriate.
An example is a principal file server that has various file systems being served
by it over the network. If a second file server system with a different operating
system was purchased to reduce the load on the original server, CDS can migrate
the file system instead of having to move the data to different physical storage
over the network, even if the data could not be interpreted or used by either the
original or new file server. This is a scenario that often occurs when the data is