T. E. Anderson, M. D. Dahlin, J. M. Neefe, D. A. Patterson,
D. S. Roselli, R. Y. Wang.
Serverless Network File Systems.
ACM Transactions on Computer Systems 14,1.
pp. 41-79.
February 1996.
Also appeared as Award Paper in
Proc. Fifteenth Symposium on Operating Systems
Principles.
pp. 109-126.
December 1995.
Also appeared as University of California Technical Report CSD-98-983.
In this paper, we propose a new paradigm for network file system
design, serverless network file systems. While traditional network
file systems rely on a central server machine, a serverless system
utilizes workstations cooperating as peers to provide all file system
services. Any machine in the system can store, cache, or control any
block of data. Our approach uses this location independence, in
combination with fast local area networks, to provide better
performance and scalability than traditional file systems. Further,
because any machine in the system can assume the responsibilities of a
failed component, our serverless design also provides high
availability via redundant data storage. To demonstrate our approach,
we have implemented a prototype serverless network file system called
xFS. Preliminary performance measurements suggest that our
architecture achieves its goal of scalability. For instance, in a
32-node xFS system with 32 active clients, each client receives nearly
as much read or write throughput as it would see if it were the only
active client.