The Echo Distributed File System

Abstract

Echo is an ambitious distributed file system. It was designed around a truly global name space. It uses a coherent caching algorithm. It is fault tolerant. And it is real—it was the primary file system for a large group of researchers. Its novel aspects include an extensible “junction ” mechanism for global naming; extensive write-behind with ordering semantics that allow applications to maintain invariants without resorting to synchronous writes; and fault tolerance mechanisms that are highly configurable and that tolerate network partitions. It was designed with the intention that its performance could be as good as a local file system, while supporting large numbers of clients per server. Its reliability was designed to be higher than other distributed file systems, and higher than