Internet File System Research Articles

High-performance internet file system based on multi-download for convergence computing in mobile communication systems

This paper proposes the Enhanced Internet File System (EIFS), of which the structure consists of a data manager, disk cache, and multi-download module, to improve the performance of the Common Internet File System (CIFS) and presents an evaluation of its performance. The data manager manages data by changing the page unit size used by the local file system from 4 KB to 1 MB. The multi-download module improves the transfer speed by dividing one file into 1-MB sections, which it then simultaneously downloads to multiple sessions. In addition, the disk cache uses internal memory as a cache to manage the data received from the network and also stores data in the cloud in the form of a virtual image, caching only the file pages requested by the application. The proposed EIFS speeds up the downloading of one file by concatenating two or three sessions for processing at the same time. As EIFS supports VFS and conforms to the POSIX standard, it can be used on multiple systems. The performance of EIFS was evaluated by measuring the download speed and app execution time in a mobile network environment. The test results showed that the file download speed increases for EIFS 2 (two sessions) and EIFS 3 (three sessions) compared to CIFS. The performance evaluations further show that the proposed technique outperforms the CIFS file system in terms of download speed and application execution time.

Optimisation to the execution performance of grid job based on distributed file system

In grid computing, many applications are invoked by the means of job submission. Grid job submission comprises the following scenarios: file stage-in, execution and file stage-out. Most of the grid midware provides the job submission infrastructure to help to submit jobs, and GridFTP (file downloading) is used in the file stage operations. These scenarios exit mostly in batch mode. It causes computational resources waiting for the data transfer and limits the performance of the grid application, especially when the application is data/communication intensive. Using the file sharing of distributed file system instead of GridFTP in the job submission, the scenarios of grid job submission can be processed in parallel, whereas the waiting of computational resource can be eliminated. By this way, the execution performance of the grid job is promoted. After the comparison of typical distributed file systems, network attached storage that meets the requirements of grid is picked out, and the file sharing mode for the data exchange in grid job is proposed. In the tests of a series of data–communication-intensive jobs, the performance promotion is verified. Comparing with GridFTP, the average promotion with Common Internet File System is 16.8% to single-task jobs and 19.5% to multiple-task jobs.

An audiophile's utopia

The Sonos wireless audio streaming system works with a proprietary 802.11n type wireless network called SonosNet to prevent interference or drops caused by existing wireless Internet traffic. It can stream from any storage device on your network that supports the common Internet file system (CIFS), such as a NAS (network attached storage device). The user can be located using a Wi-Fi enabled device such as a smart phone. Alternatively, users can authenticate themselves via radio frequency identification. Thus technology companies have demonstrated that our audiophile's utopia is feasible.

IBM Scale out File Services: Reinventing network-attached storage

This paper focuses on the challenges of creating a scalable network-attached storage (NAS) filer with hundreds of nodes on top of the IBM General Parallel File System™ (GPFS™). The filer is created as a multiheaded data exporter over Ethernet and uses the Common Internet File System (CIFS) as implemented by the Samba open-source project and a Network File System (NFS) protocol server. Special focus is given to ensure the consistency of data in an efficient manner for applications that have complex access patterns from a large number of nodes. Also considered are the challenges of providing an extremely high-performance facility for exporting data in parallel and the demands of storing very large amounts of data. Introducing new aspects of storage management--such as storage pools and fle sets as they are implemented in current file systems--into NAS appliances enables the management of large amounts of data in a single namespace.

Personalised ubiquitous file access with XML Web Services

The explosion of new types of end-user devices, as well as the increase in the number of users with broadband connection in private households, opens up the opportunity to provide access to documents and services residing in the home domain from remote locations. Also, the increased mobility of users, as well as the need to be able to work in all locations, further adds to the requirement of remote document access. The contribution of this paper is threefold. First, it introduces the Mobile Home Access system, which simplifies remote access to resources in a home domain. The Mobile Home Access (MHA) system is based on the Service-Oriented Computing concept and realized using XML Web Services for communication between the home domain and the end-user device, while employing the Common Internet File System (CIFS) network file system to allow appropriate file access in the home domain. The second contribution is the mechanism whereby such a service can be deployed when network elements like firewalls and NAT routers are introduced. The challenge of establishing a connection from a remote device is general for both client-server services and peer-to-peer services. The paper proposes and describes a design and implementation of a solution using XML Web Services technologies, and thus shows how NAT traversal technology can be integrated with such middleware. The third contribution of this paper is a performance analysis of the current implementation of the Mobile Home Access service. The results of the analysis should be interesting for the applicability of XML Web Services in mobile computing in general.

Implementing CIFS: The Common Internet File System [Book Review

Implementing CIFS: The Common Internet File System [Book Review

Global namespace for files

We propose a name service that enables construction of a uniform, global, hierarchical namespace, a key feature needed to create a file-system grid. Combined with other grid replication and location-lookup mechanisms, it supports independence of position for users and applications as well as transparency of data location in a scalable and secure fashion. This name service enables federation of individual files as well as file-system trees that are exported by a variety of distributed file systems and is extensible to include non-file-system data such as databases or live data feeds. Such a federated namespace for files can be rendered by network file servers, such as NFS (Network File System) or CIFS (Common Internet File System) servers, proxies supporting the NAS (network-attached storage) protocol, or grid data service interfaces. File access proxies, which handle protocol translation, can also include caching and replication support to enhance data access performance. A uniform namespace with global scope and hierarchical ownership allows sharing file data between and within organizations without compromising security or autonomy.