Overview
For organizations that have deployed the Andrew File System (/afs), the AuriStor File System provides significant improvements in performance, scalability, and security. Migration can be easily accomplished with no data loss, no flag days and at a reasonable cost.
When it comes to unstructured data management organizations are facing broad challenges. End user work flows require increasing access to information from an ever increasing range of devices and geographic locations. At the same time organizations must protect their intellectual property, the personal identifying information of their community members, and other restricted data from both active attacks and unintentional exposure. Data classification and compartmentalization is the industry best practice but the deployment of competing overlapping systems with differing access capabilities and security properties leads to data duplication, increased complexity and additional challenges to policy enforcement.
Thirty years ago researchers from IBM and Carnegie Mellon University’s Andrew Project had the foresight to build the foundation of a solution, the /afs. /afs was the world’s first cloud computing platform but was so far ahead of its time there were few organizations that understood the benefits. Unlike the World Wide Web, the /afs vision took a security first approach to network communications combining single sign-on, wire privacy, strong mutual authentication, fine grained access control and audit capabilities to permit organizations to protect their information on open networks. Built upon the standard file system programming interface, use of /afs is portable to all computing form factors and programming languages.
Today, the AuriStor File System is fulfilling the /afs vision to meet the challenges of today and tomorrow. AuriStor combines the best ideas of the Andrew File System with today’s security best practices to produce a secure high-performance Software Defined Storage solution that will satisfy the requirements of the next decade.