[OpenAFS] Commercial use of OpenAFS ?

[Kris Van Hees]

On Fri, Sep 03, 2004 at 01:38:54PM -0700, Mike Fedyk wrote:
> Phil.Moore@morganstanley.com wrote:
> >Morgan Stanley's use of AFs does NOT include such large volumes, and
> >in fact, we are deprecating the use of AFS for RW data on large scale,
> >and encourging users to use NFS/SAN solutions instead.
> >
> What problems have you been encountering?

My guess would be performance.  RW data usually requires a fairly high level
of performance, and it cannot benefit from RO replicas to distribute the load
and unless the data is going to be accessed multiple times, it won't benefit
from the cache much either (in fact the cache might even hurt).

An analysis into the performance problems for the AFS client (for the Unix
version, not the Windows one) is going to be conducted later this year, to
uncover more specific data on what is causing the main performance loss and
what can be done about it.  It won't resolve the performance problems as
such (it's only an analysis, to formulate recommendations for improvement),
but it hopefully will help focus our time and effort on specific areas.

Provided improvements can be implemented, I believe that performance can be
improved quite a lot.  You'll always incur a cost from some of the more
advanced features AFS provides, where other protocols might be more basic
and thus won't have an extra cost.

	Kris