Each machine sees the same Fibre Channel disks as their local disk, with GFS as the local file system. GFS takes advantage of the ability to connect multiple hosts to the same storage devices over the Fibre Channel.
All hosts access the storage directly, without the involvement of a centralized server.
GFS can be re-exported to NFS and Samba clusters, Web servers, computational clusters, and as the root file system to create a single system image for a Beowulf Cluster. Since the NFS servers share the disks, they can scale up to higher NFS client loads and fail over the NFS functions to the other NFS server if necessary. If a single client fails, another client may continue to process its load by accessing the failed client's files on the shared disk. Load balancing a mixed workload among multiple sharing disks is simplified by the client's ability to quickly access any portion of the data set on any of the disks. Pooling storage devices into a unified disk volume equally accessible to all machines in the system.