Joachim Schipper wrote:
quoted text
>> there is nothing wrong with serving directly from NFS.
>>     
>
> Really? You have a lot more experience in this area, so I will defer to
> you if you are sure, but it seems to me that in the sort of system I
> explicitly assumed (something like a web farm), serving everything off
> NFS would involve either very expensive hardware or be rather slow.
>
> I see how in your example - a lot of storage, not accessed often - just
> serving everything off NFS makes perfect sense. However, that was not
> what I was talking about.
>
>   

at HPC facilities (LANL, sandia, LLNL, argonne, etc) NFS is used 
extensively for this purpose since the amount of storage required for 
simulation outputs greatly outstrips the storage that any one machine 
can provide, especially the compute nodes. before i switched my email 
address i would get regular notifications that NFS filesystems were down 
for this-or-that many hours at compute facility X. from my observations 
redundancy is the biggest problem with NFS and that its ability to 
efficiently serve up data is more than ample.

AFS provides additional redundancy via volume replication and having the 
various services that comprise it spread over several machines. there is 
a lot of documentation to go through tho.

cheers,
jake

quoted text
> Perhaps you could elaborate a little? I'm interested, at least...
>
> 		Joachim