[DotGNU]VRS DFS: paper of interest (Google file system)

[Eric Altendorf]

Hi folks, still lurking, sorry for the lack of participation.  I saw 
this and thought it might be of interest to anyone still thinking 
about the design of the distributed file system for VRS.

Good points in relation to the VRS: (1) it's distributed over 
unreliable hardware and connections, (2) it makes use of the 
underlying filesystem and stores there large "chunks" (64MB) of the 
very large (multi-gig) "actual" files (which, for the VRS, could 
actually be essentially encrypted disk or filesystem images).

Bad points: it's designed primarily for streaming -- appending to the 
end of large files, and reading long continuous streams of data from 
a file.  Small files, middle-of-the-file writes, and caching of data 
is avoided.

----------  Forwarded Message  ----------

O | S | D | N      NEWSLETTER      September 30, 2003                           
              

The Design Of The Google File System
http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=03/09/29/2227224

    [0]Freddles writes "This is [1]an interesting paper (PDF)
 describing the design approach to [2]Google's file system. The
 design had to take account of requirements for huge file sizes, a
 highly responsive infrastructure and an assumption that hardware
 components will always fail."
Links
    0. http://www.fredhoysted.com
    1. http://www.cs.rochester.edu/sosp2003/papers/p125-ghemawat.pdf
    2. http://www.google.com/

-- 
Eric Altendorf    //    http://www.speedtoys.com/~eric