Distributed File Systems

Need of storing a huge amount of data has grown over the past years. Whether data are of multimedia types (e.g. images, audio, or video) or are produced by scientific computation, they should be stored for future reuse or for sharing among users. Users also need their data as quick as possible. Data files can be stored on a local file system or on a distributed file system. Local file system provides the data quickly but does not have enough capacity for storing a huge amount of the data. On the other hand, a distributed file system provides many advantages such as reliability, scalability, security, capacity, etc. In the report, we will provide the state of the art in DFS oriented on reliability and performance in these systems. First of all, traditional DFS like AFS, NFS and SMB will be explored. These DFS were chosen because of their frequent usage. Next, new trends in these systems with a focus on reliability and increasing performance will be discussed. These include the organization of data and metadata storage, usage of caching, and design of replication algorithms and algorithms for achieving reliability. This work was supported by: UWB grant SGS-2010-028 Advanced Computer and Information Systems. Copies of this report are available on http://www.kiv.zcu.cz/publications/ or by surface mail on request sent to the following address: University of West Bohemia in Pilsen Department of Computer Science and Engineering Univerzitni 8 30614 Pilsen Czech Republic Copyright © 2012 University of West Bohemia in Pilsen, Czech Republic