We are considering moving our customer storage (POP mailboxes at first, but maybe personal web space, and configuration settings) to an OpenAFS cell with each customer having their own volume and the volumes spread across several machines in the cell. We want to use maildir for mailbox storage (yes, I saw the earlier messages about maildir and hard-links in AFS, so we are testing the possibilities of changing the link() calls to rename()s).
I doubt that the ratio of clients (SMTP, POP, FTP, and web servers) to OpenAFS servers will ever get above 2:1, if that might be an issue.
I have many questions, but here are three questions that have not been discussed on openafs-info recently, if at all:
1) Is this a "Good Idea" or are we setting ourselves up for a disaster due to performance/scalability issues? AFS seems much more stable than more recent distributed file systems and much more scalable than NFS or Samba. The main AFS clients and servers will be RedHat Linux 7.3 or 8.X boxes.
2) How many volumes can we reasonably expect to fit in a single cell? Earlier discussions mentioned 40K, 60K, and 100K+ volumes per cell; we would be looking at few, if any, backup volumes and most volumes will be read/write. A related question is how many volumes can fit on a single disk partition before things start to break? archov-doc.pdf mentions a maximum of 3500, but that document is over ten years old.
3) What is the status and future of OpenAFS, if my reading of IBM's discontinuation of support for AFS is correct? Is AFS a technology just waiting to explode across the Internet (I saw Avi Freedman's endorsement of AFS over NFS in the premier issue of ACM Queue this month.) or is it a niche technology looking for the right time to die?
I have not looked at Arla, but I imagine that the answers to these questions about OpenAFS will apply to it as well.
(OK, so it was five questions...)
Please forgive me, I started playing with OpenAFS two weeks ago.
Thanks, Leland
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