[OpenAFS] What filesystem?

[Jeffrey Hutzelman]

On Monday, March 06, 2006 09:17:23 AM -0600 "Christopher D. Clausen" 
<cclausen@acm.org> wrote:

>> It's kind of hard to explain, but Windows people and Unix people think
>> differently about what they are serving out.  AFS grew up in a world
>> where Unix admins wanted to distribute executable "applications" as
>> well as data from a single name space tree.  In the enterprise, Unix
>> workstations actually run their applications off of the network.
>
> Warning: I am a Windows person.
>
> I'm not at an enterprise.  I'm at a University.

So am I.  A University _is_ an enterprise, and a challenging one at that, 
because of the highly heterogeneous community.  At Carnegie Mellon, we use 
an enterprise-grade distributed filesystem (AFS), and we use it in exactly 
the way Jeff described.  Here's why:

Back in the 1980's (long before I got to CMU), a few people had a grand 
vision.  They imagined a world in which every student and staff member had 
his or her own small computer.  All of these machines would be similar 
hardware and run the same software, maintained and distributed by a central 
support group, which would also manage the machines so that individual 
users wouldn't have to know how.  They'd have a friendly graphical 
interface, and the ability to run more than one application at the same 
time.  All the machines would be tied together into a central system, so 
that you could sit down in front of any machine, log in, and have access to 
all of your data -- just like traditional timesharing systems, except that 
you'd have the processor all to yourself, instead of sharing it with lots 
of other people.  In addition, there would be locations around campus with 
groups of workstations, which would provide easy access to computing 
facilities for those who didn't yet have computers of their own, or were 
not near their own machines (think students between classes).

Sound familiar?  It should; these are basic characteristics common to 
nearly every enterprise (corporate, university, etc) computing environment 
today, to one degree or another.  The difference is that in the 1980's, the 
basic components of such a system simply didn't exist.  So those visionary 
folks (and, independently, similar groups at several other universities) 
pitched their idea, got support and funding from various sources, and set 
out to build a distributed computing environment.

In those days, disks were small and expensive and computers were relatively 
slow, so there was a limit to how much data could be stored on a single 
server.  Supporting the data-storage needs of an entire university would 
require a system that supported multiple servers relatively easily.  Also, 
affordable workstations had very little disk -- often not enough even for 
the complete operating system, let alone the complex software components 
and applications which would be part of the new system.  So, it had to be 
possible to run applications and even most of the operating system from 
disks attached to a server somewhere else.  To meet these needs, they built 
a distributed filesystem (vice), which is a direct ancestor of OpenAFS.

The original plan called for central fileservers to store user data and 
master copies of software, and read-only replica servers in each cluster 
(lab), to provide operating system and applications software for machines 
in that cluster.  You may think that 100Mbps networks are slow, but trust 
me, they're blindingly fast compared to 4Mbps token ring.  By the time I 
got here in 1990 or so, 10Mbps coaxial ethernet was common, and the 
server-per-cluster idea had been basically abandoned in favor of multiple 
centrally-located replicas.


The point is this - in those days, disk was scarce enough that you _had_ to 
run not only applications but the OS itself from a central location.  The 
folks working on the Andrew project weren't the only ones to reach this 
conclusion; several other institutions (MIT and the University of Michigan 
both come to mind) developed their own filesystems and used them in exactly 
the same way.  Today, we still do, as do many other institutions, though 
most have given up their own filesystems in favor of AFS (just as we gave 
up on the Andrew windowing system in favor of X Windows).


-- Jeffrey T. Hutzelman (N3NHS) <jhutz+@cmu.edu>
   Sr. Research Systems Programmer
   School of Computer Science - Research Computing Facility
   Carnegie Mellon University - Pittsburgh, PA