On 4/7/17, 3:47 PM, "David Boyes" <[email protected]> wrote:
Anne & Lynn Wheeler [email protected] commented:
> IBM also funded $50M Andrew project at CMU, Andrew File System
Which is still alive and well and in production use at dozens of sites.
It’s now supported on System z hardware as well. AFS offers a lot of cool stuff
that make continuous availability a reality on relatively cheap hardware. It
implements a unified directory tree across organization, architecture specific
substitution of binaries (allows you to provide different binaries for a range
of CPU architectures using the same path to the binaries), replication of
read-only data (read-write coming soon), relocation of data volumes
transparently while in production, strong authentication, and a whole lot more.
AFAIK, AFS can claim to be the first commercial application available for
Linux on System z. It was needed for a POC at one of the Wall Street banks,
and IBM and the bank shared the cost of a port to make it happen. Total
changes: 11 lines of code to implement an atomic compare and swap in the kernel
module (needed for any new architecture).
AFS was rare in that all the academic sites that used it heavily had a
source license (from the CMU days). IBM and Transarc were forced to preserve
that in the subsequent products, and IBM turned over the AFS source to the open
source community early in the Linux effort. It’s continued to be actively
developed ever since.
----------------------------------------------------------------------
For IBM-MAIN subscribe / signoff / archive access instructions,
send email to [email protected] with the message: INFO IBM-MAIN
