This implies that the server would have several threads that are constantly running, instead of the more traditional approach where there are as many threads as there are connections. The potential for this approach is more scalable network servers for high volume traffic. Another aspect of the project is the implementation of distributed file system where there are multiple servers and each server only has a subset of entire file hierarchy. This design is, again, targeted for global file service. Load balancing results from different server serve different subset of files and if we assume uniform file access pattern, then the load is effectively divided among the servers.
High availability is the result of mirroring and multiple servers.
However, these advantages do not come free. Issues such as consistency of the data and cache coherency between servers and server and clients become harder to manage. Whenever there is a trade-off between consistency and performance, we choose to preserve consistency. Servers are connected via high speed, high bandwidth network. Thus bandwidth is high and latency is low.