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