GAFFES, the Global, Active and Flexible File Environment Study, is a file system designed to facilitate the sharing of information in a global network serving more than a million workstations. We have assumed that this global network has widely varying communication speeds and includes mutually suspicious domains. GAFFES is highly distributed in order to promote high capacity, modular growth, increased availability, and natural autonomy. In spite of the system's distributed nature, users are presented with the same basic service regardless of their location in the environment.

GAFFES provides four services which handle naming, replication and caching, security and authentication, and file access primitives (including the triggers which make files active). These services are to a large extent independent, having little interaction without the direct mediation of the user. This independence requires each service to assure its own reliability, availability and performance.