The Kosmos distributed FS

Kosmos Files

Article from Issue 90/2008
Author(s):

Distributed filesystems effortlessly juggle enormous files in the gigabyte and terabyte ranges. The Kosmos filesystem plans to impress its competitors.

Modern computer programs handle increasingly large volumes of data. Whereas data-mining applications are content to sift through mountains of existing data, Internet search engines constantly horde new information. Users who access this data regularly encounter files of several gigabytes or more.

Legacy filesystems soon reach their limits with this kind of data and throughput. Consequently, organizations that manage huge volumes of data need an alternative solution for fast and safe access. Having redundant data storage is useful; after all, who wants to lose the valuable data gained by several days of number crunching because of a banal disk error?

Distributed filesystems fulfill these requirements. A distributed filesystem splits the data into manageable chunks and stores the chunks on a scalable cluster of computers. By virtualizing storage on the cluster, the filesystem then tricks applications into believing that they are talking to an enormous hard disk.

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