A distributed and replicated file system for the Cloud

Cloud issues addressed

It is all about data, and file systems are the most basic data storage systems in existence. However, with Cloud services spread all over the world, data location and data availability are more and more becoming barriers to further adoption of Cloud technology.

Contrail's Solution today

Cloud data storage capacity seems endless. Numerous virtual resources offer distributed and redundant pay for what you use capacity at a bargain. Reliable, elastic and always accessible. But where is your data? Somewhere invisible in the Cloud or on a private Cloud of your competitor? How reliable is your provider and how secure is your data?

Best would be to set up your own distributed storage, using XtreemFS. It is a distributed and replicated file system for the Cloud and offers significant leverage compared to other solutions. First: XtreemFS is POSIX compliant. From a user's point of view, it looks and behaves like a local file system. Any application can therefore access XtreemFS without having to be adapted to a specific Cloud storage systems and APIs. This can considerably reduce development and maintenance costs of applications for the Cloud. You are by no means limited to POSIX, since XtreemFS also provides alternative Cloud storage interfaces.

Second: XtreemFS offers high availability and data safety through replication. Unlike most other Cloud storage systems, it offers strong replica consistency and provides different replication mechanisms. Read-only replication can e.g. be used to prevent I/O bottlenecks in Content Distribution Network (CDN)-like scenarios, in which large chunks of data (e.g., virtual machine images) are accessed by many users at the same time. Alternatively, read-write replication can be used to ensure that any written data is safely stored in the face of storage device failures.

Third: Locality of data. You can tell XtreemFS for every file, which resource providers can be used, depending on your business needs.

Features of the XtreemFS file system: SPOF-free: No single point of failure since all services are replicated; Efficient Read-Only Replication to increase I/O throughput for immutable files; POSIX compatibility; Support for SSL and X.509 certificates (no need for VPN); Global distributed (Cloud) installations; Elasticity & scalability; Extensible through policies and plug-ins; Striping for Parallel I/O; Asynchronous MRC backups and files system snapshots; Metadata caching on the client side; Network and geo location awareness; Data integrity.

Contrail Solution in 2013

Single-point-of failure-free: All services will be replicated; Support for Apache Hadoop; Windows client; Integration with Contrail e.g., provide user storage for federation users XtreemFS service in ConPaaS: Create an XtreemFS service deployment within minutes and easily add and remove storage nodes; Revised/improved file system maintenance tools.

More information

1. Documentation: Contrail XtreemFS User Guide
2. Download: Download directory