A distributed lock manager (DLM) provides distributed software applications with a means to synchronize their accesses to shared resources.
DLMs have been used as the foundation for several successful clustered file systems, in which the machines in a cluster can use each other's storage via a unified file system, with significant advantages for performance and availability. The main performance benefit comes from solving the problem of disk cache coherency between participating computers. The DLM is used not only for file locking but also for coordination of all disk access. VMScluster, the first clustering system to come into widespread use, relies on the OpenVMS DLM in just this way.
Read more about Distributed Lock Manager: VMS Implementation, Linux Clustering, Google's Chubby Lock Service, SSI Systems
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