[OpenAFS] the future

[Booker Bense]

On Sun, Sep 30, 2012 at 9:48 PM, Troy Benjegerdes <hozer@hozed.org> wrote:

> Having migrated from NFSv3 to AFS (and then OpenAFS), I'd have to say that
> NFS may be free, but it doesn't really fall into the 'functional' category.
> But this was several years ago, so there might have been some magic that
> happened with NFS I haven't seen yet.
>
> Can anyone who has experience migrating to/from OpenAFS from/to anything
> else in the last 2-3 years please comment? If there's really something
> free, functional, and already included then I'd like to know what the
> heck it is.

There is nothing that does everything AFS does that I am aware of. But
most of the
things AFS does that others don't do are not "user visible" features,
but features
that make it  easier to administrate and run.

There is also the question of whether you need the things AFS does.
For a small group
in which you trust root on every machine, AFS can easily be replaced
by NFS. ( v3 or v4
depending on your level of paranoia ).

For larger sites, there is really nothing that comes close, but the
underlying cost drivers
that make AFS a functional solution are going away. In particular the
need for a shared
executable repository, local disk is cheap and software install is a
much more solved problem
than it used to be.

AFS is acceptable at sharing read-only data if you don't need high
bandwidth, but hopeless as a read/write source for large
scale computing.

Secure shared home directories is the last hope of AFS and NFS V4
mostly does that but in
a more painful way ( but also supported by vendors... )

- Booker C. Bense