Availability in the Flexible and Adaptable Distributed File System

The goals of a Distributed File Systems (DFS) may vary broadly. It is impossible to design a DFS attaining every desirable characteristic, such as, transparency, performance, privacy, reliability, and availability, for example. In this paper we describe the improvements achieved with the availability and performance offered by a DFS named FlexA (Flexible and Adaptable Distributed File System), which already proposed an architecture that could provide data security and flexibility. Modifications included a new approach to provide file replication and procedures to prevent system overloads. Details about the modifications introduced to FlexA, as well as results achieved with them, are provided. These results indicate that FlexA can be an important option among the known DFS.