Abstract
By making use of a distributed file system, users of physically
distributed computers are allowed to share data and storage
resources. This paper compares three distributed filesystems: the
Sun NFS filesystem, Samba and OpenAFS. The emphasis of the
comparison is on the functionality, management and performance of
these three file systems in a heterogenous network. The iozone
filesystem benchmark tool was used to gathered information about
how well these filesystems performs read/write operations, in
order to numerically characterize the performance. Analyzing and
properly understanding the data gathered from the measurements,
reveals that Samba and NFS perform almost equally on windows
machines equipped with different Operating Systems and hardware.
On a client running SuSE9.1 NFS has the best performance for both
read and write operations. OpenAFS had the lowest performance on
windows machines and on the client running it performed as well as
Samba. The paper concludes with a recommendation for which
distributed filesystem best suits which computing environment.