[ale] Distributed File Systems

[Davis, Ricardo C.]

Back in the early 90's I used AFS at a Department of Energy site; the
distributed filesystem was used by AIX, IRIX, and HP-UX
workstations/departmental servers as well as a Cray supercomputer on site.
It's probably what you need, Jeff.

My opinion is that back then distributed file systems were way ahead of
their time for the commercial market.  It was a solution that had very
little commercial market to sell to.  But time will tell whether or not the
concept will make it into the private sector data center.


-Ricardo


-----Original Message-----
From: Vernard Martin [mailto:vernard at cc.gatech.edu]
To: ale at ale.org
Sent: Thursday, April 05, 2001 7:39 PM
To: Bao Ha
Cc: ale at ale.org
Subject: Re: [ale] Distributed File Systems


> 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 have always considered DFS/AFS to be pretty much the same thing. And yes,
AFS is pretty darned good. But I haven't heard anything dramatically better
about the DFS version vs. the freely available AFS version.

> Look up Transarc! Mainframe connectivity! AIX!

Never heard of them. Specifically, never heard of anyone building clusters
out 
of AIX machines. 

> 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.

AFS can definitely be used over Gig links. Works quite nicely. 

V
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