Don't Give Up on Distributed File Systems

Wide-area distributed applications often reinvent the wheel for their storage needs, each incorporating its own special-purpose storage manager to cope with distribu- tion, intermittent failures, limited bandwidth, and high la- tencies. This paper argues that a distributed file system could provide a reusable solution to these problems by coupling a standard interface with a design suited to wide- area distribution. For concreteness, this paper presents such a file system, called WheelFS, which allows appli- cations to control consistency through the use of seman- tic cues, and minimizes communication costs by adhering to the slogan read globally, write locally. WheelFS could simplify distributed experiments, CDNs, and Grid appli- cations.