Don't Give Up on Distributed File Systems

Wide-area distributed applications often reinvent the wheel for their storage needs, each incorporating its own special-purpose storage manager to cope with distribution, intermittent failures, limited bandwidth, and high latencies. This paper argues that a distributed file system could provide a reusable solution to these problems by coupling a standard interface with a design suited to widearea distribution. For concreteness, this paper presents such a file system, called WheelFS, which allows applications to control consistency through the use of semantic cues, and minimizes communication costs by adhering to the slogan read globally, write locally. WheelFS could simplify distributed experiments, CDNs, and Grid applications.