[ale] Distributed File Systems

[Bao Ha]

> 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. 

Yes, they do.  AFS became DFS.  It is a very bad history,
since the research is sponsored by the government.  And,
they just made it proprietary.  It has left a bad impression 
in the Unix community.  But, the technology was much better
than NFS, since you can export filesystems securely and with
good performance across WAN.
> 
> 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.

Look up Transarc! Mainframe connectivity! AIX!

I strongly believe AFS can be used over Gig links between 
clusters.  It is, however, very hard for the Unix community 
to forgive the sin of ripping off community efforts for one 
own greed/benefit.

Bao

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