Hi,
I am thrown into the task to reorganize our local user file systems. We
have 7 DEC Alpha machines which I'd like to connect in some
intelligent way. Up to now we just connected the machines by NFS and
symbolic links resulting in an significant administrative overhead.
I was told that AFS could be what I need (a user loggs into the system
and just sees one file system) and I found DCE which seems to be quite
similar to AFS. Anyway, one user concern is (and I agree with him)
that a user has no influence at all where his/her file systems
physically are located. Since we are doing instationary flow calculations
we get VERY large (which is something around 5 Giga Bytes during one
calculation) result files. If I would not use a file system local to the
machine I am computing on this would probably result in a high net
traffic and probably decreasing the performance of the machine.
My questions are:
1) Is it possible for an ordinary user to determine the physical file
system he/she is using?
2) Are there any nice file systems around which could even spread large
files that do not fit on one single disk partition to several
partitions (maybe even on several different machines?). Purpose of
this would be: I do not have to care about available local disk space.
3) How fast is DCE/AFS? Faster than ordinary NFS?
I know that I haven't provided much information about our local
structure. However, my questions are basic.
I would appreciate any hints and suggestions.
Holger Bauer
Received on Fri Jun 14 1996 - 07:35:43 NZST