[Infrastructures] Coda, to do or not to do?

[Jim Carroll]

Hi Steve,

> which would you recommend today for a few hundred terabytes 
> of both R/O and R/W data for a 1000-seat trading floor -- AFS 
> or Coda?  
> 
> Just to make it interesting; assume outages can cost as much 
> as $30,000 per seat per minute, so your career and even the 
> company could depend on it; you have 6 months from today 
> before the floor needs to be live, and the machines aren't 
> purchased yet, so you'll actually only have around
> 2-3 months to set it all up, test, debug, fix, deal with 
> application compatibility, etc.  You also have to deal with 
> the normal politics of introducing new technology, which 
> means every little problem is magnified beyond proportion...

I take it this is a real-world example of AFS in use...?

I have a genuine question or two (not playing devil's advocate here), part
of which you seem to have answered already.

Assuming you were to start with 10TB+ worth of data files (not DB files) out
of the gate and want to grow the environment over 1-2 years to possibly
100TB, would AFS fit the bill?  Are there any limitations (or caveats) to
the directory structure, or could it easily handle tens of thousands of
directories, each one containing thousands of files?

jc