Mike,
Just throwing a question out there curious to hear people's thoughts or experiences. Every time I end up dealing with hundreds of stale file handles because of a server move/change I become increasingly annoyed by the stateless nature of NFS and think to myself "Maybe this time I'll finally start seriously looking at AFS."
Other than lots of other ways an AFS deployment could be complicated, I wonder how if at all a Netapp can be part of an AFS deployment?
Also feel free to tell me how using AFS is crazy in general and I should just accept my stale file handles.
NetApps have been successfully used as back-ends over iSCSI (I think) to AFS server front-ends. A problem that has arisen is the unreliability of the front-ends in comparison to Data OnTap, however, which is a common reason folks go to NetApp, in my experience.
NetApp merged with (or acquired) Spinnaker a while back. I believe many of Spinnaker's developers were from the AFS arena. I've heard something like the benefits of AFS will bleed through in future products. I don't recall further details.
In general, I find AFS a little clunky due to the lack of experience with its commands (both personally and across the user community) and perhaps more importantly the fact that it's an add-on kernel module which OS kernel developers do not hold dearly to heart during ABI changes. Changes to both Solaris and Linux in the past have caused situations to be dealt with, which would not have needed to have been dealt with, if the filesystem were an integral part of the environment that went through the proper testing phases. Neither of these "problems" are really AFS' fault, but that doesn't make them go away, either...
Roy