[Federated-fs] FedFs text for charter

[Daniel Ellard]

Per our discussion on the conf call, here's the prose from last March.
(the names of the drafts will have changes, of course)

On behalf of myself, Craig Everhart (NetApp), Renu Tewari (IBM), and
Manoj Naik (IBM):

As discussed at the NFSv4 WG meeting in Philadelphia at the beginning of
March, we request that the work we have been doing to develop a
requirements document for a federated naming system that can be used to
implement a federated file system, and protocols that satisfy the
requirements, be taken up for review by the NFSv4 WG.  The first
milestone will be to refine the requirements document so that it can be
published as an informational RFC.
The next milestone is to publish the specifications for the proposed
protocols, based on the requirements document, as draft RFCs for
discussion in the NFSv4 WG.

The starting points for the WG discussion are a preliminary requirements
document and protocol specification.  These documents are the result of
more than a year of open discussion in the form of BoF sessions at
FAST'07 and FAST'08, discussion on an open mailing list
(federated-fs at ucsd.edu), and frequent open conference calls (announced
on the federated-fs list).  Participants in this discussion have
included representatives from NetApp, IBM, Sun, EMC, Rainfinity, CITI,
and others.  The current state of the work is summarized in the
following personal drafts:

draft-ellard-nfsv4-federated-fs-00

draft-tewari-nfsv4-federated-fs-protocol-01

draft-ellard-nfsv4-federated-fs-admin-00

-Dan

On Thu, Sep 18, 2008 at 1:39 PM, James Lentini <jlentini at netapp.com> wrote:
>
> As the NFSv4 working group expands their charter to include the issues
> of constructing a federated namespace, we have an opportunity to help
> them with the additional text for the charter. Craig and I have put
> together this piece of text as a draft for the modifications for the
> working group charter. Please let us know if you have comments.
>
> Spencer and Brian will have the final decision on what text to use.
>
> We may also need a set of milestones.
>
> ---
>
>  + Federated Namespace
>
>   The NFSv4 protocol provides a referral mechanism that allows a
>   server to redirect a client to another server. The working group
>   will produce documents describing a mechanism for creating a
>   federated namespace using the NFSv4 protocol's referral
>   capabilities. In addition, these documents will describe a
>   convention for a shared global namespace. The file system
>   federation protocol will enable file access and namespace
>   traversal across collections of independently administered
>   fileservers. No modifications will be made to the
>   NFS client to server protocol.
>
>