Resources

This is a part of resource list regarding filesystems and storage in general. Please note that many of the documents cited are older and do not necessarily represent the current feature set of file- or storage systems - please always check with vendors or developers before making decisions.

Your feedback, suggestions and your favourite documents are highly welcome!

Local Filesystems

General

A General-Purpose File System for Secondary Storage
How things began: a paper from 1965 (Daley/Neumann)

Practical File System Design with the Be File System
One of the few “real” books about filesystem design (1999)

XFS

Scalability in the XFS file system
Classic paper about XFS (1996)

XFS Overview and Internals
Detailed overview of the internals of XFS

Distributed Filesystems and Protocols

AFS

Managing AFS: The Andrew File System
Classic book about the Andrew File System (1999)

GPFS

GPFS: A Shared-Disk File System for Large Computing Clusters
Introductory paper about GPFS from FAST 2002 conference

NFS (General)

NFS version 3 protocol specification
The NFS v3 RFC

NFS (Linux Client)

Using the Linux NFS Client with Network Appliance Storage
Useful paper with a detailed discussion of Linux NFS client settings 

NFS (Linux Server)

Making the Linux NFS Server suck faster
SGI talk about improvements in the Linux NFS server (2007)

NFS Tuning Secrets
SGI talk about more improvements (2008, caution: ODF/OpenOffice-File)

Google File System

The Google File System
Paper discussing the design and implementation of Google File System

Storage Systems

BlueArc

BlueArc’s Titan Architecture White Paper
A high-level description of Bluearc system architecture (2008)

US Patent 7337190 (withdrawn)
More detailed information about the concepts behind BlueArc’s filesystem

Isilon

US Patent 7146524
More on the internals of the OneFS file system 

NetApp Ontap GX

Data ONTAP GX: A Scalable Storage Cluster
Mike Eisler’s paper from FAST 2007 conference