I've had an ephiphany..... The reason noone uses EFS is simple: the initial setup complexity and infrastructure requirements are beyond the abilities of just about everyone who has tried to get this thing up and running. In addition, it's only the large complex IT shops that really would benefit from the NAS infrastructure, or that have the skills to build something like this, and in most cases, they have existing solutions and therefore don't need EFS.
Part of the epiphany is that the real value of EFS is NOT the NAS infrastructure, but the namespace, and the management software for that namespace. If we could make it easy to install EFS on a single machine, with a local database, and no NAS, then the barrier to adoption would be all but eliminated, and people could get this running on a single machine very easily. Would it scale? No, of course, not but if you only have 10 machines, why would you look at software designed to support 1000 anyway? That's the first part of the epiphany. The other half was looking at the code, and realizing how EASY it will be to have the efs CLI bypass the TPC/IP connection to efsd, and simply make the damn API calls directly. Honestly, I think I can get a branch of efs-core working like this in a day of hacking. The idea is to use the upload/download mechanism to maintain the state of the machine. Yes, this becomes a scale of one solution, but this also means that with a bit more work, EFS should be able to support an environment which has BOTH centralized NAS filers, and machines which use the download machine to maintain a local subset of the /efs/dist data. The tricky part of figuring out how to make /efs/dev work locally, but... I've got some sick ideas. I intend to have this working by YAPC::NA 2012, where I will be talking about cpan2efs, and demonstrating efsdeploy and cpan2efs working on my laptop, standalone. I am convinced at this point that until we make EFS scale *down*, we're never going to get any traction in the Open Source world... Something to think about. _______________________________________________ EFS-dev mailing list [email protected] http://mailman.openefs.org/mailman/listinfo/efs-dev
