Perspectives on high-performance file service

The author presents the personal perspectives of an ex-researcher on the file storage and network planning trends in actual large-site Unix environments. The perspectives are based on interviews and discussions with influential end-users at these sites, which represent applications including mechanical and electrical engineering, fixed-income securities trading, geophysical analysis and interpretation, film post-production, computational chemistry, and reconnaissance-satellite telemetry processing and analysis. The topics covered include: the roles of reliability, capacity, performance, and administration in large-site data storage; DFS versus NFS: will force or momentum be the victor; is Unix adequate for mundane matters like backup; how fast does storage capacity grow; truth or consequences of ATM; and handling multimedia and video.<>