Our favorite storage pundit Henry Newman continues his two-part series, “The Evolution of Stupidity,” explaining how file system issues seemingly resolved more than 20 years ago are again rearing their heads.
In the mid-1980s, most of the open system file systems came as part of a standard Unix release from USL. A few vendors, such as Cray and Amdahl, wrote their own file systems. These vendors generally did so because the standard UNIX file did not meet the requirements of the day. UFS on Solaris came from another operating system, which was written in the 1960s, called Multics . That brings us to the late 1980s, and by this time, we had a number of high-performance file systems from companies such as Convex, MultiFlow and Thinking Machines. Everyone who had larger systems had their own file system, and everyone was trying to address many, if not all, of the same issues. They were in my opinion the scalability of:
- Metadata performance
- Recovery performance
- Small block performance
- Large block performance
- Storage management
Read the Full Story or jump back to Part 1.
