[OpenAFS] Proposal: OpenAFS foundation to develop AFS server appliance

[Troy Benjegerdes]

I believe the proactive case here would be to create an OpenAFS foundation
with the charter to work with storage hardware vendors to offer and market
storage hardware with the AFS server software pre-installed, in the same
way that NFS and CIFS servers are already embedded in the storage product
hardware offering.

Places like Your-File-System could then offer value-added upgrades to the
base embedded OpenAFS on the storage appliance.

I think we all get so tied up in the technical aspects sometimes we forget
that it is *sales and marketing* that keeps people buying crap like NFS
and CIFS.

On Fri, Aug 31, 2012 at 02:56:18PM -0700, Russ Allbery wrote:
> chas williams - CONTRACTOR <chas@cmf.nrl.navy.mil> writes:
> 
> > And this is one of the shortcomings and strong points of AFS.  AFS
> > provides (for the most part, with some exceptions related to caching)
> > end to end protection (the end here being the actual user) of the user's
> > data.  I suspect the reason for NFS and CIFS is that the admins for
> > those machines don't need to install any new software.  They don't need
> > to install some third-party client or setup some "complicated"
> > authentication mechanism. It just works out of the box (and I guess the
> > security is "good enough").
> 
> Another primary reason for NFS and CIFS is because the storage that you
> purchase, at least if you're a larger institution, already speaks NFS and
> CIFS.  I don't know how many times I've had a conversation that goes
> something like "so, if we used NFS or CIFS, we could just plug this in and
> it would work, but if we use this AFS thing that you want, we have to buy
> an additional server and put it in front of the storage to re-export all
> of the storage and introduce an additional point of failure and additional
> complexity?  why would we want to do that?"