Distributed filesystem: XtreemFS 1.4 with Hadoop support

At the SC12 conference that is currently taking place in Salt Lake City, the XtreemFS developers have released version 1.4 of their distributed filesystem. XtreemFS 1.4 supports asynchronous background writes, which significantly improves performance when storing data. The developers say that they have further improved stability – server and client operation is now said to be "rock solid". The new Hadoop client allows the filesystem to be used as a substitute for HDFS in Hadoop clusters.

XtreemFS 1.4 includes a beta version of a completely rewritten Windows client in which the EldoS Callback File System has replaced the previously used Dokan to provide the framework for filesystems in userspace. Java programs can now directly access the distributed filesystem via the XtreemFS library. The Vivaldi algorithm for estimating network latencies allows clients to deposit replicas on servers that are "close by" or retrieve them from there. For this purpose, the developers have provided a visualisation page for virtual network coordinates.

XtreemFS is a cloud filesystem that allows distributed, redundant data to be stored on cluster nodes and is optimised for unreliable connections beyond the boundaries of data centres. XtreemFS supports on-disk file encryption and provides authentication via SSL and X.509 certificates.

The filesystem is developed within the EU's Contrail research project at Zuse Institute Berlin. The open source software is available to download and is released under the BSD licence. The XtreemFS server runs under Linux; clients exist for Linux, Mac OS X and Windows XP as well as Vista.

(crve)