AuriStor promotes a new generation of OpenAFS

We met a second time AuriStor during a recent session of The IT Press Tour and we measure all the progress they did since our first meeting 7 years ago under the name Your File System. They accomplished and delivered a lot of things.

We wish to refresh again our audience about AFS and its derivative. Historically the project came from Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, with the idea to address the need of sharing data present on multiple servers with thousands of clients machines, let's say professor and students systems. The subsequent idea was to avoid considering large file servers with everything in it with all people connected to that central point. Rapidly Transarc corporation was established to become the commercial force to promote and sell AFS. And finally IBM landed on the project acquiring Transarc in 1994 with the gift in 2000 of AFS to the open source community as OpenAFS.

AFS philosophy is to share files between producers - data servers - and consumers - client systems - within a campus or geographically dispersed over a country or even larger than that in a way that data location if completely masked presented as superior or master root directly named /afs. This directory works as a global virtual namespace with strong authentication service based on Kerberos and data proliferation operated by file replication across systems. Clients receive a copy of the requested file on their local storage thus working as a cache copy that need later to be synchronized back with the server thanks to a subtle call-back mechanism. Cache plays its role as subsequent access are just honored via the local presence of the file.

AuriStor extends OpenAFS and developed AuriStorFS as richer flavor of the product both in performance, scalability, resiliency and platform support. They recently signed with Red Hat. They boost performance in several dimensions: on the network side, they reach 8.2GB/s per listener thread reducing significantly the number of packets exchanged, on the file server side, 1 AuriStorFS server can replace 60 OpenAFS 1.6 file servers, also a better UBIK management, locking mechanism, and, as said, larger platform support such MacOS, Linux and even iOS. For more detailed information on things improved by AuriStor the vendor creates a web page you can access here.

AFS globally and various distributions, OpenAFS and AuriStorFS, targets large wide environments where other techniques could reach some limits. Their pricing philosophy and adoption model is also a major difference. We invite our readers to try the AuriStor flavor to feel all the power of such approach.

You can access below the presentation the team used with the press team.