distributed file systems

Sean Dilda agrajag at scyld.com
Tue Sep 4 17:24:20 PDT 2001


On Fri, 31 Aug 2001, Jon Tegner wrote:

> Haven't tried, but it seems that afs should be slightly faster than
> nfs, see
> 
> http://www.ait.iastate.edu/olc/storage/afs/nfs2afs.txt.html

As someone who has experience with afs as a user and an administrator, I
can tell you it is definately not what you want for a cluster.

AFS is very nice if you have a very large deployment of machines (like a
campus with over 50,000 users), however for a self-contained cluster, it
has way to much overheard and adds unnecessary complications to
administration.

As far as speed, I think nfs is actually faster than afs.

On top of these, there are also stability issues, there are serious
problems with every implementation of AFS I know of for linux, this
includes Transarc's closed source implementation, the OpenAFS project
which is based on Transarc's code, and the code for arla, an
implementation of AFS from scratch.
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