On Mar 7, 2006, at 4:55 PM, Christopher D. Clausen wrote:
Jeffrey Hutzelman <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
Back in the 1980's (long before I got to CMU), a few people had a
grand vision. They imagined a world in which every student and staff
member had his or her own small computer. All of these machines
would be similar hardware and run the same software, maintained and
distributed by a central support group, which would also manage the
machines so that individual users wouldn't have to know how.
I think this is where UIUC differs. The problem is that there
isn't a single entity managing all computers (as is the case at
most schools.) There is a centrally maintained Active Directory
domain, with seperate OUs delegated to various other autonomous
groups: http://www.ad.uiuc.edu/
It sounds like UIUC is similar to University of Michigan, where the
administration strongly encourages decentralization. At one time UofM
had more than a half-dozen AFS cells in it, each run by different
departments with different rule sets.
For fiddily stupid reasons, the main campus AFS service (called IFS,
as I slip into UMisms below) charged too much for IFS space and
didn't supply much in terms of large quotas. This changed a year or
two back, and the result is that departments are finding they can get
AFS space from the IFS service cheaper than they can run it
themselves. Of the existing campus cells I know of, all but two are
scheduled to or in the process of converting to using central IFS.
One of those is the research cell at CITI, which will probably never
go away, and one is at a school which has some severe restrictions on
what they can do with their data due to medical and research privacy
regulations.
Since the changes to storage charges and quotas, IFS space has been
growing spectacularly. Our usage is up 50% in the last 75 days. The
advantages of a campus-wide filestore (especially when backed by what
is effectively a campus-wide single sign-on; see <http://
www.umich.edu/~umweb/software/cosign/>) are huge.
AFS/IFS has historically not supported Windows nor MacOS well. This
seems to be changing, but other folks can speak to that better than
I. If/when it does, I expect IFS to start making more inroads in
those communities on campus.
But there will always be a need for local file store, where 'local'
is a deliberately vague word. We have departments or groups which
need multiple terabytes of disk for a weekend of heavy-duty data
crunching. No network-attached file server is going to serve that
data across gigabit links and give adequate performance; SANs might
but who can afford to borrow a SAN for a weekend? Only departmental-
level storage is going to meet those requirements.
I guess my point is that AFS is *an* answer to file system issues,
but there is not and likely will never be an answer to *all* file
system issues, regardless of centralized vs decentralize or
commercial vs. academic. Bleeding edge research using large bulk data
needs its store 'close to' the CPUs, as does corporate data mining.
Regulatory issues sometimes mean that file store cannot be
centralized without putting the entire central support staff (and
file store) under onerous requirements. Sometime Micro$oft trumps
everything. There's a mix, there's always going to be a mix.
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