[OpenAFS] What filesystem?

[Christopher D. Clausen]

Horst Birthelmer <horst@riback.net> wrote:
> On Mar 3, 2006, at 11:30 PM, Volker Lendecke wrote:
>> If you have one or two servers, AFS probably is not worth
>> the hassle. But AFS really pays off when you run out of
>> fingers to count your servers. I see the initial cost in
>> particular when you're new to AFS as relatively high, but in
>> the long run with a lot of servers around the world, you
>> will start to love it.
>>
> I just wanted to add, that if you reach that size Volker was talking
> about, you also ran out of options.
> AFS is the only file system being able to help you in that case.

Microsoft's Dfs should scale as well.  Of course, it essentially only 
works on Windows, but if you are mostly a Windows shop, it may be the 
best way to go.  I am a particular fan of the multi-master read-write 
replication possibilities it offers, something that is not currently 
possible with OpenAFS.  And MS Dfs is suposed to get even better in 
Windows 2003 R2.

Some will argue that the "last write wins" algorithm it uses isn't a 
good idea, but for user home directories I think it is the best thing to 
do and possibly the only solution out there for Windows.

If there are further questions, I'd suggest discussions on the #openafs 
IRC channel on the freenode network.

<<CDC
-- 
Christopher D. Clausen
ACM@UIUC SysAdmin