| 5 | | .- .- -- .-- .. - . -.. |
| | 5 | With the explosion growth of Web 2.0 applications, the need for an "infinite" storage arose. Web 2.0 applications like [http://www.flickr.com/ Flickr], [http://www.facebook.com Facebook] or [http://www.youtube.com Youtube] have a high demand for storage space. The storage market faces new challenges because the existing solutions are too expensive to accomodate this growth. On one side, storage vendors are building high-available and scalable storage solutions that use commodity hardware, so the they can have more competitive products on the market. On the other side, the services that demand these volumes cannot wait for the release of new products and are building their own storage solutions based on commodity hardware. |
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| | 7 | This project aims to build high-available and scalable distributed storage system based on commodity hardware. For more information about the motivation, please read the Disclaimer section below. |
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| | 9 | = Disclaimer = |
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| | 11 | This project was born as a project for the course of Distributed Systems from Carnegie Mellon University. The aim of the course project was to build a distributed system that follows the major properties for distributed systems, like High-availability, Fault-tolerance and Scalability. |
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| | 13 | The group of students that proposed this project aims to build something useful, fun and to learn new technologies at the same time. The group wants to experience the difficulties faced on building a distributed storage and to come up with solutions to resolve at least some of those problems. Being this a course project, the priorities of the project are to build a high-available, fault-tolerant, scalable and distributed storage solution. Performance is a keyword for a distributed storage solution, specially if you want to deploy it to serve your customers. While the group of students will take performance into consideration as much as possible, it is not a priority of the project. However, after implementing this project, we will most likely have a clear idea of what can be improved and leave such improvements for future work. |