On 2007/04/19 18:08, Daniel Ouellet wrote: > Stuart Henderson wrote: > >>I don't think NFS/AFS is that good an idea; you'll need very beefy > >>fileservers and a fast network. > > > >NFS may actually be useful; if you really need the files in one > >directory space for management/updates that's a way to do it (i.e. > >mount all the various storage servers by NFS on a management > >station/ftp server/whatever). > > Good idea yes, but if I recall properly, unless major changes have been > done, isn't it the use of NFS become a huge bottle neck compare to local > drive? I think the archive is full of complain about the thought put of > NFS not being so good.
I meant using it the other way round: have the *webservers* export their filesystem, and ftp/management servers mount them to provide a single space for carrying out updates and backups, locating files, etc. Having a bunch of webservers serve data from a large NFS store seems less attractive for most of the cases I can think of. The main one I see where it may be attractive is where heavy CGI processing or similar is done (that's usually a different situation to having many TB of data, though). In the CGI case, there are some benefits to distributing files by another way (notably avoiding the NFS server as a point of failure), rsync as Joachim mentioned is one way to shift the files around, CVS is also suitable, it encourages keeping tighter control over changes too, and isn't difficult to learn.
