Craig Everhart

Glitz: cross-vendor federated file systems

We propose Glitz, a system to integrate multiple file server federation regimes. NFS version 4 is a significant advance over prior versions of NFS, in particular specifying how NFS clients can navigate a large, multi-server namespace whose constituent parts may be replicated or moved while in use, as specified by NFS servers. This capability is essentially the same as that of previous distributed file systems such as AFS [7]. Sophisticated as this NFS capability is, it does not address the larger problem of building a usable system atop this basic capability. Multiple single-architecture solutions have been proposed, but each of these is based on an architecture for server federation that does not easily admit other members [3, 16, 18]. Glitz allows those multiple-server federations to interoperate and collaborate in a vendor-independent fashion. We give a history of file system federation efforts as well as a detailed tour of Glitz and its benefits for vendors.