[OpenAFS] the best distributed file system

[Russ Allbery]

Cees de Groot <cg@cdegroot.com> writes:

> Comparing Sun hardware to commodity PC hardware is, of course, totally
> useless. We run the IBM xSeries stuff, and as I have extensive
> experience with Sun hardware I can tell you that this is the sort of
> gear you should compare with because it shows the same sort of
> engineering quality (only priced way lower, at least for us).

Certainly true.  The problem on the PC side is that it's difficult to
figure out what hardware actually is well-engineered, whereas when buying
a box from Sun, it just works.  It's unclear to me whether, for example,
*all* of IBM's PC kit has quality engineering or if they have some cheaper
stuff for people really looking for a price break....

And even with quality hardware, I'm just not seeing people having the same
experience with PC kit of any type as we've had with Sun kit.

> OP: I looked at OpenAFS because, as far as I could tell, Coda was unable
> to deal with very large amounts of data; the whole scheme just didn't
> seem to scale well. I think stability-wise, it's OK - IIRC from doing
> Coda research there are a number of long-time happy users. OpenGFS might
> be something else to check into.

Everything I've heard indicates that Coda doesn't actually exist as a
product.  It's an interesting research project that never became anything
more than that.  Research projects are cool for what they are, but I
wouldn't run an enterprise file system on one.

-- 
Russ Allbery (rra@stanford.edu)             <http://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/>