A Wide Area Mass Storage File System R. Y. Wang, T. E. Anderson. A Wide Area Mass Storage File System. Fourth Workshop on Workstation Operating Systems pp. The current generation of file systems are inadequate in facing the new technological challenges of wide area networks and massive storage.
WANs have lower bandwidth, higher latency, and higher cost.
Such a scarce resource must be used intelligently. The management of a large number of hosts and massive amount of data demands a system with good scalability. And as the system is made more scalable, allowing larger groups of clients and servers to work together, it also becomes more likely at any given time that some hosts will be unable to communicate. Existing disk-based local area network file systems fail to distinguish the difference between WAN communication and LAN traffic and generate excessive traffic over the WAN links. They depend on central server models that offer poor scalability and availability.