Dexter Kimball, CCRE/JPL -- AFS Cell Profile

United Airlines became the first carrier to put all of its business-critical aircraft maintenance information on line -- parts schematics, engineering data, proc edures and diagrams -- in a multi-year effort beginning in 1995. UAL bet heavily on AFS as the secure wide area distributed file system used to distribute this data: if the maintenance information is unavailable at a given location the affected aircraft is/are grounded in place. Millions of pages of documentation were made available at every UAL gate world wide, at every UAL maintenance bay, and at UAL vendor locations for outsourced maintenance. United won an "innovative technology" award in the proc ess. This system is in place today and available for the Boeing 727, 737, 747, 757, 767, 777 and Airbus 318, 319, 320 fleets. I'll talk about the challenges of choosing world wide replication sites to "place data into the local area network," experiment s with large (up to 12 GB) cache configurations, a sim! ple mechanism to delegate vos release permission, flying pre-populated disks to new replication locations, experiences and solutions for vos release cycles (thousands of volumes per day) that ran longer than 24 hours, bandwidth issues and decisions, firs t-rate system availability, and other design and implementation issues. And the impac t the system has had on the airline.








Slides: Life of an AFS Cell