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What Is A Distributed File System?: Dfs Has Two Important Goals

A distributed file system (DFS) allows storage and retrieval of files across multiple autonomous computers connected through a network. It implements a common file system that is shared across these computers in a transparent manner. Key components of a DFS include file servers for storing files, clients for accessing files, a name server for mapping file names to locations, and cache managers for improving performance through file caching.

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49 views5 pages

What Is A Distributed File System?: Dfs Has Two Important Goals

A distributed file system (DFS) allows storage and retrieval of files across multiple autonomous computers connected through a network. It implements a common file system that is shared across these computers in a transparent manner. Key components of a DFS include file servers for storing files, clients for accessing files, a name server for mapping file names to locations, and cache managers for improving performance through file caching.

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Weeb Coder 404
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© © All Rights Reserved
We take content rights seriously. If you suspect this is your content, claim it here.
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Download as DOCX, PDF, TXT or read online on Scribd
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What is a Distributed File System?

 File system performs organization, storage, retrieval, sharing and


protection of files.
 Distributed file system is a resource management component of distributed
operating system.
 It provides storage and retrieval of files in distributed environment.
 Users and storage devices of DFS are physically dispersed.
 It implements a common file system that can be shared by multiple
autonomous computers.

DFS HAS TWO IMPORTANT GOALS


NETWORK TRANSPARENCY
Users not aware of location of files
HIGH AVAILABILITY
System failures or failures in regularly scheduled activities should not result into
unavailability of files

File servers: Dedicated to storing files and perform file access operations

Clients: Used solely for computational purposes. They access files stored on the
servers

Client machines can be equipped with local disk storage that can be used for
caching remote files, as a swap area or a storage area.
ARCHITECTURE OF DFS

TWO IMPORTANT SERVICES IN DFS


NAME SERVER

It is a process which maps names specified by users to store objects such as files
and directories. This is also known as name resolution, and it occurs when a
process refers to a file or directory for the first time.

CACHE MANAGER

It is a process that implements file caching. In file caching, a copy of file stored at
a remote file server is brought to client’s machine when referenced by client.
Subsequent access to the same file by the client can be fetched from client’s
cache instead of getting it from remote file server thus reducing network latency.
Cache managers are present both at clients and servers. At server side, cache
managers cache files in the main memory to reduce disk latency. If multiple
clients cache the same file and try to modify it, then the copies become
inconsistent. To avoid this inconsistency, cache managers at client and server
should coordinate with each other during data storage and retrieval operations.
DATA ACCESS ACTIONS IN DFS

MECHANISMS FOR BUILDING A DFS


MOUNTING

Binds together different filename spaces to form a single hierarchically structured


name space. A namespace is bounded to an internal node or a leaf node of a
name space tree.
A node onto which a namespace is mounted is known as mount point. In the
figure, nodes a and i are the mount points at which directories in the server Y and
Z are mounted respectively.

 The kernel maintains a structure called mount table.


 Mount table maps mount points to appropriate storage devices.
 In DFS, file systems maintained by file servers are mounted at clients.

There are two approaches to maintain the mount information,

Maintaining mount information at clients

Each client must individually mount every required file system (Sun NFS). Since
each client can mount a file system at any node in the namespace tree, every
client need not see an identical file namespace.

Maintaining mount information at server

Mount information can be maintained at servers, in which case every client can
see an identical file namespace (Sprite file system). If files are moved to different
servers, then mount information needs to be updated only at the servers. In the
first approach, every client needs to update its mount table.

CACHING

This mechanism is used in DFS to reduce delays in accessing data. In file caching, a
copy of data stored at remote file server is brought to client when referenced by
client. Data can be cached in main memory or on the local disk of the clients. Data
is cached in main memory at servers to reduce disk access latency.

Caching results in the cache consistency problem. Avoided by the great level of
cooperation between file servers and clients which is very expensive. Alternative
method is to treat cached data as hints that is cached data are not expected to be
completely accurate. Example, After the name of file or directory is mapped to
physical object, the address of object can be stored as hint in the cache. If the
address fails to map to the object, the cached address is deleted from the cache.
File server consults the name server to obtain the actual location of file and
updates the cache.

BULK DATA TRANSFER

In this mechanism, multiple consecutive data blocks are transferred from server
to client. This reduces file access overhead by obtaining multiple number of blocks
with a single disk seek time. This mechanism is used since the fact that most files
are accessed in their entirety.

ENCRYPTION

This mechanism is used for security in Distributed systems. In this, two entities
which want to communicate establish a key for conversation with the help of
authentication server.

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