Redundant Array of Independent Filesystems

Using the fan-out infrastructure we have, we are developing a file system that has the same redundancy characteristics of RAID, but at the VFS level. We call this Redundant Arrays of Independent Filesystems (RAIF). RAIF support includes striping (RAIF0), mirroring (RAIF1), parity (RAIF5 and RAIF6), and other modes. RAIF allows redundancy and performance increases on many types of file systems, including NFS. The RAIF logic is at the VFS layer, so file-level knowledge is used to decide on the right level of redundancy that best matches the value of the file in question. Moreover, recovery from failures can be done on a per file basis instead of the whole disk drive; this means that if a recovery failed mid-way, it can be resumed without having to restart the entire disk device's recovery.

Miscellaneous:

If you find a problem, please describe it in detail and submit a bug report.

Download software.

Journal Articles:

# Title (click for html version) Formats Published In Date Comments
1 On Incremental File System Development PS PDF BibTeX ACM Transactions on Storage (TOS) May 2006  

Conference and Workshop Papers:
# Title (click for html version) Formats Published In Date Comments
1 RAIF: Redundant Array of Independent Filesystems PS PDF BibTeX IEEE Conference on Mass Storage Systems and Technologies (MSST 2007) Sep 2007  
2 Increasing Distributed Storage Survivability with a Stackable RAID-like File System PS PDF BibTeX First IEEE/ACM Workshop on Cluster Security, in conjunction with the Fifth IEEE/ACM International Symposium on Cluster Computing and the Grid (CCGrid 2005) May 2005 Won Best Paper Award

Technical Reports:
# Title (click for html version) Formats Published In Date Comments
1 Storage Virtualization with a Stackable File System PDF BibTeX Stony Brook U. CS TechReport FSL-05-03 Dec 2005 M.S. Thesis

Past Students:

# Name (click for home page) Program Period Current Location
1 Nikolai Joukov PhD Jan 2004 - Dec 2006 Research Staff Member, Storage and Data Services Research group, IBM T. J. Watson Research Center (Hawthorne, NY)
2 Arun Krishnakumar MS Jan 2005 - Dec 2005 Computer Scientist, Acrobat team, Adobe Systems (India)
3 Chaitanya Patti MS Dec 2005 - Dec 2007 Software Engineer, Google Inc. (Mountain View, CA)
4 Sunil Satnur MS Sep 2004 - Dec 2005 Staff Engineer, Storage and Avaliability Group, VMware Inc. (Palo Alto, CA)
5 Adam David Alan Martin BS Jan 2004 - Dec 2007 Senior Software Engineer, Plaforms Team at MongoDB (New York, NY)

Sponsors:

# Sponsor Amount Period Type Title (click for award abstract)
1 NSF Trusted Computing (TC) $400,000 2003-2006 Sole PI A Layered Approach to Securing Network File Systems