Measurement and Analysis of Large-Scale Network File System Workloads

In this paper, the authors present the analysis of two large-scale network file system workloads. They measured CIFS traffic for two enterprise-class file servers deployed in the NetApp data center for a three month period. One file server was used by marketing, sales, and finance departments and the other by the engineering department. Together these systems represent over 22TB of storage used by over 1500 employees, making this the first ever large-scale study of the CIFS protocol. They analyzed how their network file system workloads compared to those of previous file system trace studies and took an in-depth look at access, usage, and sharing patterns.