Conclusions
After proposing a taxonomy for classifying the many file systems that are available, this paper has described some of the prominent design details of each of Sun's shared and local file systems. Each file system has some design tradeoffs intended to address the peculiarities of specific target markets, and these considerations reflect how the products are most appropriately used. The most useful criteria for considering which file systems to use is usually the size of the data sets in question, with security being another notable issue. Because most files are small, the familiar bundled file systems, UFS and NFS, are the most suitable. When bulk data must be processed at high bandwidth, QFS/local and QFS/Shared Writer are almost always more appropriate. Finally, SAM capabilities can reduce the cost of underlying storage by substantial amounts due to policy-driven data migration capabilities.