[ale] Distributed File Systems

[Vernard Martin]

> What's the best current path forward w.r.t. distributed file systems a la
> Coda?  What are people successfully implementing?

well, that all depends on what you mean by "trend". To my knowledge, there
are no really commercial distributed filesystems that are gaining much fame.
However, I do know that the folks that produce PVFS have been quite
successful. I beliveve that they even had an article in one of the Linux
Journals that came out in the last few months. I've personally used it before
and it does perform quite well on legacy code. And the speedups are quite
substantial once you start developing for that platform its even best. 

You will also found that AFS and Coda are quite popular as well. But at a
fundamenal level, they are research projects that have had a lot of money
pumped into them but they are still not commercial products. 

I do know that many of the really big clusters are just using NFS and AFS
over gigabyte links and not working about modifying the filesystems at all.
That's what is really getting used. It'll probably be another copule of years
before the filesystem technology catches up properly.

Vernard
-- 
Vernard Martin (vernard at cc.gatech.edu) http://www.cc.gatech.edu/~vernard/     
        "Anything worth fighting over is worth fighting dirty over"
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