Global file system

In computer science, global file system has historically referred to a distributed virtual name space built on a set of local file systems to provide transparent access to multiple, potentially distributed, systems. These global file systems had the same properties such as blocking interface, no buffering etc. but guaranteed that the same path name corresponds to the same object on all computers deploying the filesystem. Also called distributed file systems these file systems rely on redirection to distributed systems, therefore latency and scalability can affect file access depending on where the target systems reside.