Coda is an experimental distributed
file system, developed at
Carnegie Mellon University since 1987, under the direction of
M. Satyanarayanan[?]. It is based on the older
AFS, a similar but less advanced distributed file system.
Major features include:
- Disconnected operation - Disconnect from the file server and carry on working
- Client-side caching - Improves performance by reducing the need to fetch data from the server
- Replication - Store and manipulate the same data on multiple servers, to improve reliability and scalability
- Security - Uses a security system derived from Kerberos
- Well-defined semantics of sharing, even with network failures
Coda is still under development, and the emphasis appears to be on moving
from a very good research project to a useful filesystem ready for large-scale
production use.