[OpenAFS] Is OpenAFS the right solution for this?

[Brandon Lamb]

I have not been able to find a straight answer anywhere. I have been
trying to figure out if after my rebuild of our mail system (ISP) I
should stick with NFSv3 which we are currently using, or switch to GFS
or OpenAFS.

Basically I have a big badass 16 drive scsi raid 10, and the server
its connected to exports a partition via NFS to 5 mail servers. We use
courier and exim. exim spool is on each individual mail server local
ide drive, they all deliver mail to the nfs mounted raid.

Now what I am trying to figure out, is should I use openafs or gfs to
replace NFS? GFS was sounding cool as I read that using iscsi to
connect the partition on the raid at a block level could be 10 times
faster than NFS. But I dont understand how GFS works exactly.

I came across OpenAFS before GFS and it sounded like what I wanted.
Basically providing the same functionality of NFS (sharing a single
disk with RW access to multiple client machines) but with better
security and performance.

So can anyone tell me what they would recommend for my situation?

Stick with NFS, use OpenAFS, or go with GFS?

Oh one more thing to add, we are going to turn the current 16 drive
raid into two replicated 8 drive raids using DRBD to replicate between
the new "fileserver' and a live spare. Not sure if that will make a
difference. I am thinking that part should work fine regardless of
which of the 3 options I go with.