[BBLISA] filesystem virtualization for AFP

Douglas Alan douglas_alan at harvard.edu
Wed Sep 27 12:35:39 EDT 2006


Does anyone know if there is a filesystem virtualization solution for
Apple's AFP filesharing protocol?

By "filesystem virtualization", I mean the ability to present multiple
filesystems spread across multiple servers as one large fileshare.  The
AFS filesystem, I believe, introduced the notion, but Micro$oft supports
the idea with their DFS filesystem, which is, I believe, layered on top
of CIFS.  For NFS, there are filesystem virtualization appliances that
one can purchase, and one can also implement filesystem virtualization
for NFS on the cheap via clever use of the automounter and symbolic
links.

Whither virtualization with AFP?

|>oug

P.S. Spanning one huge filesystem across RAIDs using XSAN or another
SAN-based technology does not sound particularly appealing to me as
alternative.  I don't actually want one huge filesystem, as that
approach is pretty terrible for disaster recovery, fsck-like processes,
and the like.  Filesystem virtualization, instead, presents many
filesystems as one large virtual filesystem, but underneath the covers
there are still many separate filesystems.




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