A usage profile and evaluation of a wide-area distributed file system

Abstract

The evolution of the Andrew File System (AFS) into a wide-area distributed file system has encouraged collaboration and information dissemination on a much broader scale than ever before. In this paper, we examine AFS as a provider of wide-area file services to over 80 organizations around the world. We discuss usage characteristics of AFS derived from empirical measurements of the system, and from user responses to a questionnaire. Our observations indicate that AFS provides robust and efficient data access in its current configuration, thus confirming its viability as a design point for wide-area distributed file systems. 1. Introduction Over the last decade, distributed file systems such as AFS and NFS in the Unix world, and Netware and LanManager in the MS-DOS world have risen to prominence. Today, virtually every organization with a large collection of personal machines uses such a system. The stunning success of the distributed file system paradigm is attributable to three facto...