[ale] Distributed File Systems

[Bob's ALE Mail]

> Date: Thu, 5 Apr 2001 16:29:49 -0400
> From: Vernard Martin <vernard at cc.gatech.edu>
> To: Jeff Hubbs <Jhubbs at niit.com>
> Cc: ale at ale.org
> Subject: Re: [ale] Distributed File Systems
> References: <688DB098779CD311A183009027DE5314014E894B at mail.niit.com>

> > 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.

More advanced network/distributed file systems have been "right around the
corner" almost since I joined the Unix game in 1974!  NFS has been used for
some incredible stuff such as holding million dollar financial transactions.

Don't hold your breath for the next generation!

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

Bob Toxen
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