The document provides an overview of various network file systems, including early systems from NEC, Sun, AT&T, CMU, and Microsoft. It discusses technologies like NFS, AFS, CIFS/SMB, and file systems from NetApp and EMC. Key aspects covered include file versus block storage, RPC protocols, client caching, replication, and support for features like locking, snapshots and fault tolerance.

1. Network File Systems Briefs [email_address] 3/20/2010

2. Index DEC-DAP SUN-NFS AT&T-RFS CMU-AFS CMU-Coda OFS-DCE/DFS Microsoft-CIFS NetApp-Filer EMC-MPFS

3. Topic-File Storage Block storage vs. file storage. Block storage: EMC and Hitachi. Block I/O access Devices may be directly attached (SCSI or Fibre Channel) or distant accessed (iSCSI or AoE) File storage: NetApp and EMC Celerra. File I/O access Files and directories are present over the network.

4. NEC-DAP (Data Access Protocol) Created in 1976 First wildly used network file system A FAL (File Access Listener) is created on each data node to serve network-based access requests. Use local file system to manage local device

5. RPC war-Sun ONC vs. Apollo NCS 1980s. ONC (Open Network Computing Remote Procedure Call, now SunRPC). Always in big-endian order. NCS (Network Computing System) Avoid byte-swap if two peers share a common endianness.

6. SUN-NFS (Network File System) Built on top of SUN RPC. V1: in-house development V2: RFC1904. 1989. First release. Stateless. UDP based. Without lock management. Big bull authors (including Bill Joy). V3: RFC1838. 1995. 64-bit support. Asynchronous writes. TCP support. READDIRPLUS operation to get file handle and attributes while scanning dir. V4: RFC3010 and 3530. Learn from AFS and CIFS. IETF. Performance. Security. Session. Includes a stateful protocol. NFS semantic: flush on close check return value of close(2) when working with NFS !

7. SUN-NFSv4.1 pNFS – MPFS Directory delegation and notifications Clients can have read-only delegated dir. So local cache is enough for any reads. Server sends change notifications to clients that have delegated dir. Multi-serve namespace Server replicas to serve requests from clients

8. AT&T-RFS (Remote File System) 1980s. SVR3 (Unix System V release 3). Bell lab production. Stateful. Lock management. Complete UNIX/POSIX semantics. Mount devices over network. Digital Equipment, HP and IBM adopted NFS over RFS.

9. CMU-AFS (Andrew File System) 1988. Named after Andrew Carnegie and Andrew Mellon. Part of Andrew project. Kerberos (C/S auth protocol from MIT) for authentication. ACL on dir. Client cache on local file system. Cache consistency—Callback. Server saves all cache information and sends update notify if file changed. Doesn’t support large shared file updating. Single file per message in Andrew Message System, vs. single file per mailbox. Volume. Volume quota. Read-only volume replicas. Shared and local namespace. Predecessor of Transarc, OpenAFS, Arla and Coda.

10. CMU-Coda 1987. From AFS-2 Client side persistent cache and logged write updates. Local/global conflicts Server replication, allow all servers to receive write updates. Server/server conflicts Extensive repair, both manual and automated. Continued operation during partial network failures. Network bandwidth adaptation.

11. OFS-DCE/DFS Open Software Foundation(1988). HP, IBM against SUN and AT&T. Developed by Transarc, based on AFS. DCE/LFS (Local Journaling file System, aka Episode) as local cache layer. Improve write performance even over slow network connections. Filesets management. Transarc bought by IBM. OpenAFS announced by IBM in 2000. DCE/DFS killed by IBM in 2005.

12. Microsoft-CIFS (Common Internet File System) AKA SMB (Server Message Block) protocol, originally designed at IBM. Modified and Merged by Microsoft with LAN Manager product in 1990. Renamed to CIFS in 1996. Samba – reverse engineering open source implementation. Opportunistic locking. Batch Locks: client delays sending close request. If a subsequent open request is given, the two cancels each other. Exclusive Locks: If obtained, client may cache all changes before committing. If others open the same file, server sends revocation notify and client flushes all changes. Level 2 OpLocks: After revoking a exclusive lock, server may send Level 2 OpLocks to allow client to cache read but exclude write.

13. Microsoft-CIFS cont. SMB2 in 2006 (Windows Vista). Specification published. Samba 4 adds support for SMB2. Reduce control messages from over a hundred to nineteen. Request pipelining: allow sending requests before response to previous req returns. Compound multiple action in a single request. Larger buffer size and symbolic links. Durable file handle, allows a connection to survive brief network-outage without having to negotiate a new session.

14. NetApp-Filer AKA NetApp Fabric-Attached Storage (FAS). Originally NFS/CIFS based NAS solutions. FTP, TFTP, HTTP, FC (Fiber Channel) and iSCSI are added later. WAFL (Write Anywhere File Layout). Read-only and read-write (FlexClone) snapshot. Two directory models (UNIX and Windows) and two file security models (ACL and bitmask) Consistency points. Automatic fragmentation, saving metadata anywhere on the disk, usually beside its data blocks.

15. EMC—MPFS (Multi-Path File System)

16. More Over Clustered file system. Shared disk. Translation from file-level ops to block-level must be done on client nodes. Examples? Distributed file system. Similar to clustered file systems. Replication and fault tolerance. NFS, CIFS, AFS, Google GFS, etc. Clustered NAS Stripe data/metadata across the cluster of nodes.

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