Let's put NetApp and CacheFlow out of business!
Eran Gabber, Elizabeth Shriver · 2000
We believe that a lightweight and portable specialized file system library can provide applications with performance close to that of special-built appliances running on closed proprietary operating systems. Moreover, the application may execute on commodity hardware with a general-purpose operating system, and with minimal changes to the application source code. Such a file system would allow anyone to build cheap, high-performance appliances. We present the design of Hummingbird, a file system for caching web proxies. Hummingbird is 6-11 times faster than a general-purpose file system when serving a web proxy cache.