The Logistical File System: A Network File System Designed for
Scalable Resource Sharing
Alex Bassi,
Micah Beck,
Erika Fuentes,
Terry Moore and
James S. Plank,
Technical Report UT-CS-00-469, University of Tennessee, August, 2001.
Available at
http://web.eecs.utk.edu/~tmoore/docs/cs_tech/LoFS_ut-cs.ps and
http://web.eecs.utk.edu/~tmoore/docs/cs_tech/LoFS_ut-cs.pdf.
Abstract
This paper describes the technologies and design ideas that
underlie the Logistical File Systems (LoFS). LoFS is close to a
traditional distributed file system in structure and in the class of
operations it supports, but it is designed to preserve the easy
deployability and scalability across the administrative boundaries that
have been the pillars of the Web?s success. The leading idea behind the
design of LoFS is that in order to implement a real file system that
nonetheless preserves the strengths of the Internet of model resource
sharing, one has to apply that model to the storage resources needed to
implement file system operations, so that they are exposed and shareable
to the global network. Systems that do not expose the underlying
resources used to implement file system operations can implement remote
access to file system operations, but they cannot distribute many
important functions of the file system itself.