The Cloud and Distributed File Systems

• A relatively new technology (or new hype) is the Cloud.
• The idea is that there are a bunch of (essentially) desk tops sitting in a warehouse somewhere.
• Users access these computers remotely.
• The PCs act together as a cloud of computation and storage.
• The operating system on top of these PCs binds them toghether and automatically (or semi-automatically) distributes the computation and the files across the machines.
• A user accesses the cloud via the Internet.
• This provides a really large number of benefits.
• One of these is a distributed file system.
• You can have as much storage as you like (as long as your willing to pay for it).
• It's automatically backed up and you are much less likely to have problems losing data.
• Others can also access these files.