Infinit (storage platform)
 | |
| Original author(s) | Julien Quintard |
|---|---|
| Developer(s) | Infinit International Inc. |
| Stable release |
0.7 [1]
/ 23 September 2016 |
| Written in | C++, Python |
| Operating system | Linux, Windows, OS X 10.7+ |
| Type | Distributed storage platform |
| License | Proprietary, BSD, others |
| Website |
infinit |
Infinit is a software-based storage platform that has been designed to be scalable and resilient under extreme conditions.[2] Unlike most distributed systems that rely on a master/slave model, Infinit relies on a decentralized (a.k.a. peer-to-peer) architecture which, although more complicated, does away with bottlenecks and single points of failures. In addition, Infinit promises to allow developers and operators to customize the underlying storage with a set of policies from encryption, redundancy, compression, deduplication, data placement and more. However, as of October 2016, only a few of those policies have been made available.[3] Likewise, only a single interface has been made public so far, a POSIX-compliant API that relies on FUSE on Linux/macOS and Dokan on Windows.
The Infinit storage platform has been welcomed by the community in the container space[4] thanks to its multiple interfaces (block, object and file) along with the possibility to customize the platform so as to meet the needs of a containerized application.
Design
Infinit works by aggregating storage capacity from a collection of servers, creating a virtual storage pool,[5] also known as a distributed key/value store. The layer relies on an overlay network and a distributed hash table for storing and accessing data items in a decentralized way while ensuring scalability and resilience (i.e. through redundancy and fault tolerance).
Noteworthy is that the source of the storage capacity can be local through a disk but also remote: SAN, NAS etc.[6] or even in the cloud (through a cloud storage API).
Along with relying on a peer-to-peer model (contrary to a master/slave model), Infinit makes use of multiple quorums, one for each block in order to cope with the increase in network size without impacting performance.
History
Infinit International Inc. is the company behind the Infinit storage platform. It maintains and extends the Infinit technology originally developed by one of the company's founders, Julien Quintard, during his research as a PhD student at the University of Cambridge.[7]
References
- ↑ "Change log".
- ↑ "Infinit’s File Storage Platform Lets You Unify Cloud Storage, Servers And Local Computers". Techcrunch. February 2016.
- ↑ "Reference".
- ↑ "Docker Distributed System Summit Videos & Podcast Episodes".
- ↑ "Hey virtual SANs – say hello to a virtual filer". The Register. February 2016.
- ↑ "Legacy storage under fire from software defined startup Infinit". DataCenterDynamics. February 2016.
- ↑ Julien Quintard (12 June 2012). "Towards a worldwide storage infrastructure". Retrieved 10 August 2013.