> Is there any reason to use anything but NFS? Yes.
NFS is a poor performer on WAN links, and can be very difficult to scale across an enterprise in that you end up with N**2 possibilities for filesystems and hosts if you need access to a diverse set of data and you can't easily predict what will be needed where. NFS also is a single-point-of-failure in that only one server can provide a filesystem at a time (so even with clustered servers, you will get access failures if one of the clustered servers fails). R/W data is particularly complicated. Also, atomic distributed locking is not guaranteed for NFS, so you can get really ugly failure scenarios. NFS v3 (the "classic" NFS) also has a extremely weak security model -- if you have the same UID, you're in. NFSv4 is supposed to fix that, but it's still not widely available and has some stability issues remaining that you probably don't want to trust Really Important Data to just yet. So, in general, NFS is "good enough". There are a number of scenarios where it's not. If you want one solution for Z and non-Z across the enterprise, there may be reasons to consider something other than NFS. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- For LINUX-390 subscribe / signoff / archive access instructions, send email to [email protected] with the message: INFO LINUX-390 or visit http://www.marist.edu/htbin/wlvindex?LINUX-390 ---------------------------------------------------------------------- For more information on Linux on System z, visit http://wiki.linuxvm.org/
