Research And Implementation Of A Distributed Network File System (dnfs)

The purpose of distributed network file system, the DNFS, is to improve the transmission performance and reliability of network file system. It also implements "zero management" which means the file system should reach the read/write performance comparable to the local file system with the minimum manual participation. Base on the analysis of comparison to current file systems, this thesis proposes new distributed network file system architecture on the TCP/IP protocol. The newly proposed file system is a three-layer architecture including clients, index servers and logic block servers. Through the implementing of kernel level file and cache mechanism at the client side, this newly proposed distributed network file system provides seamless network file access and reduces the performance decline caused by network transmission. Utilizing the concept of logic block server, it provides the reliable data block storage and implements redundant storage capacity. Utilizing the concept of the index server, It provides the cost of the greatly for server and network during data access process and realizes the computing with balancing capacity. The new file system is designed to be efficient, stable and scalable due to realization of "zero management" of server groups.Based on the aforementioned notions, this thesis proposes, designs and implements a simple prototype of DNFS. The performance evaluation is carried out on the prototype system. The experiment results show that this new DNFS performs well under different environment.