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Andrew File System

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The Andrew file system (AFS) is a file system developed by Carnegie Mellon University as part of their Andrew Project. It is named for Andrew Carnegie. Its primary use is in distributed computing.

[It] is a location-independent file system that uses a local cache to reduce the workload and increase the performance of a distributed computing environment. A first request for data to a server from a workstation is satisfied by the server and placed in a local cache. A second request for the same data is satisfied from the local cache. (Source - searchStorage.com)

The main competitor of the Andrew File System is the more popular Network File System (NFS). NFS is more general use, while AFS is designed specifically for high performance.

It was adopted by the Open Software Foundation as part of their Distributed Computing Environment.

See Also