On Tue, Sep 04, 2012 at 01:07:11PM -0400, chas williams - CONTRACTOR wrote: > On Sun, 02 Sep 2012 00:00:52 -0400 > Jeffrey Altman <[email protected]> wrote: > > > On 9/1/2012 3:03 PM, Chas Williams (CONTRACTOR) wrote: > > > In message <[email protected]>,Jeffrey Altman writes: > > >> The Elders have engaged in discussions with the major operating system > > >> vendors over the years as well. Those discussions inevitably broke down > > >> because AFS3 did not satisfy the needs of a First Class file system. > > >> (No Ext. Attributes, no alt data streams, no byte range locking, no > > >> mandatory locking, directory limitations, etc.) > > > > > > Again, I believe this was just a polite way to say "go away". While > > > these limitations do exist, they generally don't impact users on a > > > day-to-day basis or there are known workarounds. Some limitations > > > are present with any enterprise file system though. > > > > You are making assumptions that are completely unfounded. I am not at > > liberty to discuss the contents of contract negotiations but discussions > > with at least two OS vendors reached that stage. > > > > Jeffrey Altman > > Granted, I wasn't in these meetings and with your NDA you can't tell me > exactly what happened. But, I have been enough of these meetings to > get a general idea of what happens/happened. > > Regardless, at least two of the larger storage vendors are switching to > virtualization to address the the issue of "I want to run XYZ on my > storage appliance". The intent of this feature was to allow customers > to run other enterprise filesystems (aka Lustre) and applications (like > your preferred mapreduce solution) directly on the storage itself. > There are some space and power savings to be had in this configuration > but perhaps not cost (based on a total cost it generally isnt too > different). > > So instead of asking a storage vendor to port the AFS server to their > internal operating systems, perhaps OpenAFS or YFSI could offer > supported AFS server applications for these vendors. A customer buys > the storage appliance and YFSI (or whoever) can offer the integration. > Actually YFSI (or whoever) might actually need to act an the integrator > since some of these vendors typically go through some reseller.
I would be quite interested negotiating with storage vendors to offer a TFS (OpenAFS-derived) server appliance, although I think this would work better in partnership with a full 501c3 foundation. The foundation could accept donations of server appliance equipment from the storage and OS vendors to put together a development and testing lab. It would also be quite helpful if IBM would agree to sign over the OpenAFS trademark rights to a legitimate charitable foundation. The FUD about trademarks is not helpful. It would be nice if we had some actual legal framework and a test lab process to verify vendor claims of 'OpenAFS compatible'. _______________________________________________ OpenAFS-info mailing list [email protected] https://lists.openafs.org/mailman/listinfo/openafs-info
