Characteristics of large scale filing environments

The author is concerned with very-large-scale information systems composed of many computers, potentially in the hundreds of thousands or millions, mostly independently managed and administered. They range from PCs to workstations to mainframes to supercomputers. Their users exchange data, processing services and software. The author outlines the architectural characteristics which such large-scale filing services and the systems that host them need to possess if they are ultimately going to be successful, and he gives approaches by which they may be achieved