[OpenAFS] Overview? Linux filesystem choices

[Harald Barth]

> ZFS has some really nice features, but Oracle just priced themselves
> out of the market for scientific computing.

Looks like their strategy to me. Time will tell if it will be successful.

> It's hard enough to sell buying enterprise disks and servers, when
> consumer stuff is much cheaper[1], but add a doubling of the head
> node price to have a safe filesystem and it just won't fly.

As you say, I just can't "sell" it to the researchers. They rather
have double the capacity and double the performance instead. Btw, the
only real troublesome advanced HW failures with single bit rot that we
have encountered where ZFS would have saved the day was with an
advanced "enterprise" SAN system (RIO). The simple "consumer" stuff
in my experience just fails in a more simple manner.

With daily backups, our HD failues are rare enough and not too much of
a pain so I bet that any researcher rather would have double the
storage and performance than double the price (or more) for Oracle-FS.

Another way to tackle the data corruption issue in the AFS case would
be to add checksum functionality to the fileserver backend. In
contrast to NFS, we have the advantage that noone reads the data
directly from the file system but always through the client.

Harald.