The Scorpion Data DFS (distributed file system) project is our effort to create a very high performance, scalable, fault tolerant, network based file system.

Not much information can be published to the public at this moment, because the project is still going thought the collaboration phase, but here are a few key characteristics/features the dfs will offer:

• UNIX-style file access control. The filesystem should be mountable just like NFS.
• Automatic file distribution and synchronization. If one node goes down nobody has to care.
• Automatic load adaptation. Popular files will be spread over more nodes.
• Working file locking.
• No central administration node(s). The only way to kill the filesystem is to kill every single node in it.
• Fault-tolerance. The system can loose most of its nodes and still work, albeit performance could be lower.
• Cheap. Nodes are built from the cheapest off-the-shelf components. Remember, the availibility of one single node is not that important.

For more informaton about this project, please contact peter AT scorpiondata DOT com