afs-related stuff

I've been working with AFS as a user and as an administrator since its early days, since before DFS and "enterprise" filesystems. I first encountered AFS in the late 1980s, when I worked at The National Institutes of Health ( NIH) and used the alw.nih.gov cell. From 1990 through 1995, I did systems adminstration in the Athena server support group at MIT, which included the athena.mit.edu cell. In 1995. I gave a talk at the Transarc users' meeting on how we install third-party software packages in the Athena environment; Dot Bowe and I wrote the paper, which unfortunately I can't find on the web. I worked for a couple of years in a non-AFS environment, and now know first-hand that NFS doesn't scale. During 1997, I worked for Transarc, doing AFS and DFS consulting work. I got to see AFS and DFS in use in a variety of production settings, including universities, high-tech companies, international automotive design shops, and very highly available websites. AFS and DFS allow management of huge amounts of data by small staffs since the disk space management is de-coupled from managing the client systems. That is, AFS and DFS are truly scalable in ways that NFS is not.

salemme@mit.edu
Last updated Fri Jul 24 1998