Today's computer systems are highly dependent on distributed file systems. Although today's computer systems have storage capacity far greater than at any time in the past, and although that storage is less expensive than at any time previous, there is so much data to be stored, referenced and accessed that without distributed file systems, it would be nearly impossible for today's systems to be as widespread as they are. Distributed file systems offer greater flexibility to companies and organizations by making it possible for more employees to have access to more information than could possibly be stored locally. They offer greater security by making use of redundant disk arrays and geographically dispersed data. They are largely hardware independent, so that users can access data from an IBM computer, a Mac computer, or some other computer that meets the organization's budget requirements. Internet applications such as Napster make use of rudimentary distributed file systems that are not accessible to all users and which offer only limited access terms of the types of files that can be accessed; more complex distributed file systems contain metadata about the files themselves and information about the specific data stored on the system. This research offers an overview of distributed file systems, including security, weaknesses and typical applications for the use of distributed file systems.
Distributed systems are generally understood to be collections of multiple independent processes, processors or computers. These are autonomous systems, meaning that they are able to be controlled independent of one another. In this way, systems that are distributed are able to exchange informationùthat is, send and receive informationùto files regardless of their geographic placement within the distributed system (Milojicic et al, 2000).
The need for distributed file systems originally arose from the need to share information a...