The Echo Distributed File System.

Joe Kiniry (kiniry@cs.caltech.edu)
Thu, 13 Jun 96 21:41:03 PDT


I. Find Karma writes:
>
> Color me clueless, I didn't know about this until now.
> -- Adam
>
> http://gatekeeper.dec.com/pub/DEC/SRC/research-reports/abstracts/src-rr-111.html
>
> Echo is an ambitious distributed file system. It was designed around a
> truly global name space. It uses a coherent caching algorithm. It is
> fault tolerant. And it is real--it was the primary file system for a
> large group of researchers. Its novel aspects include an extensible
> "junction" mechanism for global naming; extensive write-behind with
> ordering semantics that allow applications to maintain invariants
> without resorting to synchronous writes; and fault tolerance mechanisms
> that are highly configurable and that tolerate network partitions. It
> was designed with the intention that its performance could be as good as
> a local file system, while supporting large numbers of clients per
> server. Its reliability was designed to be higher than other distributed
> file systems, and higher than centralized systems. It was designed to
> work well in arbitrarily large networks.
>

and just as many people will ignore it as the name-space problem
solver as they did for afs and dfs.

jrk