[OpenAFS] OpenAFS vs NFSv4?

[Jason Young]

--==========2147506658==========
Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii
Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit
Content-Disposition: inline



--On Monday, April 28, 2003 10:50 AM -0400 Rodney M Dyer <rmdyer@uncc.edu>
wrote:

> My conspiracy theory is that NAS and SAN companies want to keep you
> "buying-in" to their product lines.  They don't really want the
> abstraction of the "global namespace" idea getting out.

I'm not so sure.  I think we'd buy a whole bunch of NAS appliances and
stick them all over the place if they looked like an AFS fileserver (is
anyone running a storage company listening?  We'd buy a LOT - of course we
are a public institution with decreasing budgets - LOT is relative ;-)
Most of the time that's what our AFS fileservers look like - pretty
commodity NAS box-like -  A CPU and network card with an attached RAID and
enough OS underneath it to run the fileserver process.

My personal conspiracy theory was always that IBM has a patent on the
global namespace concept and the other vendors (Novell, Microsoft, Sun, et
al.) didn't really want to pay for it.   Now that the code is more open,
it's hard to keep that theory.  I think in the end, networking filesystems
are just hard, because nobody seems to get it all like we want it.  

So now, I just blame it on the Microsoft Office users.  And probably some
lawyers somewhere.  And thankful for now that our AFS/Solaris servers are
doing the majority of what we need.  Because I really don't want to run any
more Windows and Novell servers than we already have too.

Jason
----------------------------------------------------
 Jason Young  # ITECS Systems Group Manager
 NC State University College of Engineering
--==========2147506658==========
Content-Type: application/pgp-signature
Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit

-----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE-----
Version: GnuPG v1.2.1 (Darwin)

iEYEARECAAYFAj6uk+wACgkQloVk9jomnHhn9gCgyeC9px/w9vAsNJL0y8Wd6l03
ftkAmwf5ll88f2pCrJdZ8EeE/u5k31pm
=7D8F
-----END PGP SIGNATURE-----

--==========2147506658==========--