AFS on SAN?

[Charles Ball]

On Wed, 11 Apr 2001, Sarah Stockwell wrote:

> Our management is contemplating incorporating AFS into an 
> enterprise-wide move to SAN instead of locally attached 
> disk.  This would obviously remove the replication 
> advantage of AFS, but has anyone had any experience 
> implementing this, or comments on it?

The backup volumes are still quite handy for immediate access to a
shapshot after a mistake.  This isn't as good as the support for multiple
shapshots in NAS systems, but one has been sufficient to avoid many
restores for us.

Read-only aspect of AFS clones is a feature in some scenarios.  Examples
include off-line configuration of software packages prior to release and
added layer of assurance (beyond ACL's) that a web server won't allow
someone to modify files.

Geographical distribution using multiple-location storage is possible for
either, but seems likely to be less costly with AFS.


I've often wondered if the memory-speed completion of synchronous writes
offered by a SAN would have a significant impact on AFS performance.

Charles Ball
Information Technology
Boston University