[mbreese]

But if the analysis programs are in a different server or you don’t want to transfer 100s of GB of data to the local machine for processing, you still want to have the ability to selectively transfer individual files.

It doesn’t matter if you mount a remote server locally… unless your data is of a trivial size, you still want to do the processing remotely.

I see this as a theory vs practice difference. In theory having one unified file system is great and the way to go. In practice… there are issues.