[Vrs-development] Who's doing the distributed filesystem?

[Eric Altendorf]

The more I think about it, the trickier our theoretical distributed 
filesystem sounds.

It seems to me (though I could easily be wrong) that we're basically looking 
for a dynamically scalable, highly distributed, low-bandwidth, secure and 
encrypted, interleaving and redundancy -parameterizable RAID system.  We've 
got to think about semantics... transactional guarantees... performance...

My earlier analogy to the Andrew file system was way off.  AFS replicates 
whole files, and has session semantics (updates to files are not visible 
until the file is closed).  What we're talking about here is many times more 
complex.  I'm not sure if it's practical...  we might be able to do it but I 
don't know if we could get decent performance.

Do we have any distributed filesystem experts here?  I'm sitting here 
re-reading the filesystems chapters from Silberschatz and Galvin and next 
I'll be working through Gray and Reuter's transaction processing book, but 
that's not going to make me an expert. :-)

Eric

PS: If I'm being annoying or asking questions that have already been 
addressed in archives or something, please tell me.  I want to be a help, not 
a distracting loudmouth. :-)

-- 
"First they ignore you.  Then they laugh at you.
 Then they fight you.  And then you win."             -Gandhi