Redundant Array of Independent Networked Storage or RAINS would sound so much cooler considering it is "cloud" storage.
Redundant Array of Independent Networked Storage (RAINS) © 2012 dhughes
Redundant Array of Independent Clouds
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Re: Redundant Array of Independent Clouds
#12Even before "cloud" or online storage was too hot or even showed up yet, I was thinking of doing this. Time was Google providing "unlimited" gmail storage and fuse gmail-fs was just released. I looked for another fuse fs like a hotmail-fs but did not push hard on it. I could not find and let my idea die. It was hard to do and time consuming, but marginal gain would be small. Also I'm a f lazy system administrator. I…
Yeah, a lot of us have had similar thoughts of using various forms of free storage like our own hard drives and RAID setups.
This should just go toward reinforcing our understanding that ideas are the easy part. Follow-through is the hard part.
Re: Redundant Array of Independent Clouds
#13Sidekick: Why am I not surprised that he replaced inexpensive with independent in the original acronym...
Other than that, interesting project.
Re: Redundant Array of Independent Clouds
#14Sidekick: Why am I not surprised that he replaced inexpensive with independent in the original acronym... Other than that, interesting project.
Well in fairness, both inexpensive and independent are used in the original acronym
Re: Redundant Array of Independent Clouds
#15Redundant Array of Independent Networked Storage or RAINS would sound so much cooler considering it is "cloud" storage.
Redundant Array of Independent Networked Storage (RAINS) © 2012 dhughes
Random Array of Independent Data Centers (RAIDC)
Edit: maybe Random Array of In-dependent Clouds (RAIdC)?
Re: Redundant Array of Independent Clouds
#16nice work zooko et al :) my understanding is that tahoe-lafs is meant to be used as a live filesystem. how does the redundancy configuration affect latency? i would guess a cloned volume ("RAID 1") would be faster than a distributed volume (e.g. "RAID 5" or "RAID 6").
Tahoe-LAFS performance leaves a lot to be desired, for various reasons, but the erasure-coding levels (i.e. the degree of distribution of each file via "RAID"-like math) aren't necessarily the most important component. Brian Warner did some thorough benchmarks using dedicated servers on a LAN, and specifically look at how increasing the number of shares ("K") affected throughput:
https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/attachment/wiki/Perfo...
The different colors of the samples there are for three different settings of how many shares the file was erasure-coded (RAIDed) into: 3, 30, or 60 shares. This type of file ("MDMF" type) seems to go about as fast at any of those three levels of distribution, but this older and more common type -- https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/attachment/wiki/Perfo... -- ("CHK" type, which is for immutable files) performs much worse for larger levels of distribution. There's probably just some dumb bug which causes this slowdown. This page has some ideas as to what's causing it: https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs/wiki/Performance/Sep2...
Re: Redundant Array of Independent Clouds
#17Cool! First thoughts: * how many of the supported options boil down to Amazon S3? * is this the new "upload their important stuff on ftp, and let the rest of the world mirror it"? https://groups.google.com/group/linux.dev.kernel/msg/76ae734... * whoever put together this newsletter is clearly doing a great job for that community
> how many of the supported options boil down to Amazon S3?
That's a really good question. Diego's experiment used:
• memopal: I don't know if it uses S3
• SugarSync: I don't know if it uses S3
• syncplicity: I don't know if it uses S3
• googledrive: not using S3
• UbuntuOne: yes, it uses S3
• DropBox: yes, it uses S3
By the way, my startup, Least Authority Enterprises is working on a future product which also goes by the codename "Redundant Array of Independent Clouds". Our project is no relation to Diego Righi's experiment, except perhaps we inspired him by talking about it.
We've received a research grant from DARPA to implement it. The backends we're developing for are all guaranteed to be separate backends from each other -- none of them turn out to be front-ends for another one!
• Amazon S3
• OpenStack Swift/Rackspace Cloud Files
• Microsoft Azure Blob Storage
• Google Storage for Developers
Re: Redundant Array of Independent Clouds
#18Beowulf cluster?
Re: Redundant Array of Independent Clouds
#19the idea of using multiple independent free providers as a unified one it's something that could be very popular among some of my friends, if someone could slap a nice UI on it I believe there would be a good market for it.
Re: Redundant Array of Independent Clouds
#20Nice idea! This paper ( http://www.cs.cornell.edu/~hweather/publications/racs-socc20... ) called RACS from Cornell explored the same space about two years ago, but it's really nice to see it rendered to practice in usable filesystem form.
One of the authors of RACS here. Indeed, the architecture of RACS is quite similar to Tahoe-LAFS, with a proxy server that sends shares of data to different cloud providers. With RACS, we focused on fault tolerance rather than malicious modification of data: Cloud providers have their own internal redundancy, so they (hopefully) protect their users from low-level hardware failures... but a company itself can fail, or even raise prices suddenly which can lead to an "economic failure", where the user's application becomes prohibitively expensive to run. So RACS is intended to protect against things like this. It can tolerate malicious modification of data shares on individual cloud providers, but that kind of security wasn't our focus, so it's interesting to see that Tahoe-LAFS takes that direction.