[OpenAFS] Future Development Status?

[Geoff Silver]

> else just said this as well, It isn't recomended putting
> databases and such on an afs filespace. Not trying to sound sarcastic or
> anything, but I personally don't know why you'd do it in the first place
> since you get to the data via the network anyway.

Currently everything is in one office, and we utilize NFS/SMB to our
NetApp for storage.  However, we're migrating everything to a datacenter
for all our customer operations (processing and the like).  In the short
term future, we will be connecting to offices in Europe and Asia, and
would like to maintain access to data as easily and seamlessly as possible
while doing the least amount of administration to locate the data, and
ensure it's readily available, even over transatlantic links (damn, I
sound like a manager....)

Basically, we have customers who submit cellular and GSM frequency charts
showing antenna locations, settings, etc, which are processed against data
we collect from driving around their cells, and which we use to optimize
their frequencies.  We want to have several hundred machines distributing
the processing, but using the same storage.  However, our processing will
all be done at our datacenter, though our clients may submit data at
different locations.  This is where a distributed filesystem is helpful.

Anyway, the thought is if we can migrate to a global filespace, we can
make access from Europe or Asia easy, even if maintaining multiple copies
isn't feasible.  NFS really sucks when things go down, and at least AFS
can sometimes compensate for poor WAN links, particularly on some of the
smaller files which are also used.  A global filespace would make it easy
to process data at one point, and have the results written to a directory
which was really an AFS cell somewhere else in the world.

> Another option by the way is GFS (global file system) you can get
> information about it here http://sistina.com/gfs/ it seems to be
> a pretty good alternative to AFS depending on what your goals are.

The problem with GFS is that it uses shared disks - it's not really
designed for globally distributed storage, but seems to be more like SGI's
CXFS.

BTW, Thanks for all the help.

-- 
Geoff Silver					<geoff at uslinux dot net>
"Note To Self: Remember to put something witty here later..."