[OpenAFS] OpenAFS vs NFSv4?

[Rodney M Dyer]

At 12:02 PM 4/28/2003 -0400, Norman P. B. Joseph wrote:

>They're hiding AFS functionality behind a NAS head, serving out CIFS &
>NFS (thus no client-side code requirements, -or- byte-range locking
>issues).  They support global namespace and volume location hiding.
>
>So, at least one NAS company gets the idea of the "global namespace",
>and is selling (or trying to sell) on that idea.

Umm, I understand you mean well here, but this is not the same.  If there 
is no need for a client, then you just end up pointing all your traditional 
clients CIFS/NFS to one network end-point.  The back-end might be 
virtualized, but this solution doesn't distribute the load across the 
network evenly.  Again, it's a silly NAS solution with a "global namespace" 
back-end tacked on.  This solution would be fine for web serving, but 
terrible for traditional client/server filesystem access.  And, if you are 
going to use it for web serving, then there's little point to having 
"global namespace".  This even supports my conspiracy theory that NAS is 
just being pushed for business marketing purposes, not technical merit.

Again, the AFS solution is that the volume location selections are done "on 
the client".  The client chooses which server to go to for fileserver 
access, but the filesystem namespace remains intact.  There's not one 
end-point to funnel everything through.

Rodney