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

[Russ Allbery]

"Chas Williams (CONTRACTOR)" <chas@cmf.nrl.navy.mil> writes:
> Jeffrey Altman writes:

>> End user organizations have over the last decade asked their storage
>> vendors to integrate AFS services into the storage products they
>> purchase.  The answer has consistently been 'not interested'.

> I suspect the answer that you received was "Can you make a business case
> for that?"  That appears to be the polite way of saying "go away".

Usually.  Sometimes they cut straight to "go away."  :)  NetApp, for
example, is very heavily invested in NFS.

> Operating system vendors have limited resources just like the OpenAFS
> community and there isn't any (or very little) demand for a built-in AFS
> client.  After all, from their point of view, if you need that you could
> just install OpenAFS right?  So, they are not going to devote time to
> support a new feature with essentially no users.  Hardware vendors are
> not going add a protocol to their storage box unless there is a
> perceived need for it.  Since operating systems don't have AFS clients
> there is no need.

Yup, exactly.  Furthermore, all the site running AFS grumble but buy their
products *anyway* and just put an AFS server in front of their storage and
re-export it, so they're not losing any business by not having native AFS
support, so why should they care?  The only reason for them to care would
be competitive advantage (if they could get sites running AFS to switch
from a competitor's product to their product), but the amount of work
compared to the amount of advantage just doesn't add up from a financial
perspective.

-- 
Russ Allbery (rra@stanford.edu)             <http://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/>