Disks are slower than processors, and modern networks performance is improving at a higher rate than that of disks. Moreover, the fast processors and networks impose an increasing average and peak demands on storage and file systems. A typical centralized network file system is based on a dedicated file server that satisfies storage access requests, manages file system metadata and maintains a cache. These tasks make the file server a performance and reliability bottleneck, and the centralized solution does not scale well. This paper presents DSF - a new serverless distributed file system, aimed to improve scalability.
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