What is OpenAFS?

Posted by Steven Jenkins A common question about OpenAFS adoption is "What is OpenAFS?" Usually, the person asking the question is somewhat familiar with filesystems, but doesn't follow the technical details of various filesystems. This article is designed to help that reader understand why OpenAFS could be a useful solution (and understand where it is not a useful solution).

First, the basics. OpenAFS is an open source implementation of AFS: from the OpenAFS website, OpenAFS is a heterogeneous system that "offers client-server architecture for federated file sharing and replicated read-only content distribution, providing location independence, scalability, security, and transparent migration capabilities".

Let's break that down:

First, OpenAFS is extremely cross-platform. OpenAFS clients exist for small devices (e.g., the Nokia tablet) up to mainframes. Do you want Windows with that? Not a problem. On the other hand, OpenAFS servers are primarily available on Unix-based platforms. Implementations of OpenAFS servers for Windows do exist, but they are not recommended or supported (If you'd like to change that, you are welcome to submit patches or to hire developers to make that change. That's a major advantage of an open source project.).

The second part of OpenAFS is rather straightforward: it is a client-server distributed file system. Much like SMB/CIFS in the Windows world, and NFS in the Unix world, OpenAFS lets file accesses take place over a network. One feature that sets OpenAFS apart from CIFS and NFS, though, is its strong file consistency semantics based on its use of client-side caching and callbacks. Client-side caching lets clients access data from their local cache without going across the network for every access.

Other distributed filesystems allow this as well, but OpenAFS is rather unusual in that it guarantees that the clients will be notified if the file changes. This caching plus the consistency guarantees make OpenAFS especially useful across wide-area networks, not just local area networks. With respect to consistency, most other distributed filesystems use timeouts and/or some kind of FIFO or LRU algorithm for determining how a client handles content in a cache. OpenAFS uses callbacks, which are a promise from the file server to the client that if the file changes, the server will contact the client to tell the client to invalidate the cached contents. That notion of callbacks gives OpenAFS a much stronger consistency guarantee than most other distributed filesystems.

Another unusual feature in OpenAFS is that it provides a mechanism for replicated access to read-only data, without requiring any special hardware or additional high-availability or replication technology. In a sense, OpenAFS can be considered an inexpensive way to get a read-only SAN. OpenAFS does this by classifying data as read-write or read-only, and providing a mechanism to create replicas of read-only data. Up to 11 replicas of data can be made, allowing read access to be very widely distributed.

The last four features mentioned in the website description are also very interesting: location independence, scalability, security, and transparent migration.

OpenAFS provides location independence by separating information about where a file resides from the actual filesystem itself. This allows separation of name service from file service, which lets OpenAFS scale better. It also provides some functionality not present in other networked filesystems in that changing the location of the data can be more easily done. Because of the layer of indirection, OpenAFS is able to make a copy of data behind the scenes, and after that data has been migrated, to then update the location information. This allows for transparent migration of data.

Because the location of data is separate from the data itself, if some of the data is found to be more heavily used, that data can be migrated to a separate server, so as to better balance out the accesses across multiple servers. This can be done without negatively impacting the users. This kind of feature is not usually found in networked filesystems but only in either higher-end proprietary Network Attached Storage (NAS) systems, or in Storage Area Networks (SANs).

Because of OpenAFS's use of client-side caching, read-only data, and separation of location information from the filesystem itself, OpenAFS can scale up quite well. The initial design of AFS was to be at least 10 times more scalable than the implementations of NFS at that time, with a client to server ratio of 200:1. While client to server ratios are highly dependent on hardware and filesystem access patterns, 200:1 is still easily achievable, and much higher ratios have been leveraged in production environments. 600:1 is achievable in an environment where the data is predominately read-only.

OpenAFS provides built-in security by leveraging Kerberos to provide authentication services. The servers themselves rely on Kerberos to ensure that a rogue host cannot successfully masquerade as an OpenAFS server, even if DNS is compromised. OpenAFS itself is agnostic with respect to what kind of Kerberos server is used, as long as it supports the Kerberos 5 protocol standards: a Windows Kerberos Domain Controller can provide the Kerberos services for an OpenAFS installation, as can an MIT KDC or a Heimdal one.

Additionally, traffic between the clients and servers can be encrypted by OpenAFS itself (i.e., not just with SSH or VPN encryption). This can provide an extra layer of security.

Overall, OpenAFS provides some of the features of traditional network filesystems like CIFS and NFS, but with better scalability, consistency and security. Additionally, because of its ability to replicate and transparently migrate data, OpenAFS can be leveraged much like a SAN, but without the proprietary tie-ins to hardware.