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XtreemFS implements striping of files over several storage servers for increased I/O bandwidth and capacity. This is similar to RAID0. Paralell I/O ensures that read/write operations are executed in parallel on the storage servers to exploit the full bandwidth. XtreemFS implements POSIX interfaces and semantics. It has the same "look and feel" as a local file system or NFS. Applications do not need to be modified to take advantage of advanced features like replication or striping. Read-only replication allows you to create copies of files on several OSDs. Since the files are immutable (read-only) there is no overhead for coordinating the replicas. We also support partial replicas, only the data requested by a client is fetched from other replicas. For a demonstration see our screencast. With XtreemFS all replicas are initially empty and can be used immediately by applications. Depending on the strategy the replica is filled up automatically or on-demand as applications read data. This helps you to reduce start-up times, network bandwidth and disk usage. XtreemFS can work with plain TCP connections or over SSL. XtreemFS supports X.509 certificates for user and service authentication. Our plug-in architecture allows you to easily create your own X.509 cert handlers to adapt XtreemFS to your security infrastructure. XtreemFS clients and servers can be distributed world-wide. Several features will make your life easier when working over the internet such as caching in the client and file replication. SSL and X.509 support means that you can use XtreemFS over the internet without a VPN. Simply mount XtreemFS from your laptop to acccess your files no matter where you are. Objects on the storage devices can be checksummed to detect data corruption of file content automatically. This will be extended in future versions to full end-to-end checksums. XtreemFS is extensible. You can modify the behaviour of XtreemFS to better integrate with e.g. your security infrastructure. For more information see our developer guide. |
