Cloud Storage File System

Cloud Storage File System

Accessing Cloud Storage outside your web browser or a third party tool has always been a big challenge. Up to this point there has not been a cost-effective yet comprehensive solution with native NFS or Windows (CIFS or SMB), SFTP, iSCSI or other storage protocols that allow native connectivity to Cloud Storage Providers. BridgeSTOR remedies this with their own file system called CSFS (Cloud Storage File System). CSFS is a file system that runs in the Linux kernel and converts files to Cloud Objects when transferring them to the cloud. Numerous sophisticated features were developed to allow for efficient transfer of files into the cloud. Windows and Linux ACL’s are transferred as well allowing files to have global secuirty.

CSFS is a Linux File system available on Centos 7 translates POSIX file system calls to REST object-based calls for Cloud Storage. REST was originally developed for Amazon S3 Cloud Storage and has become a de-facto standard by both Cloud Storage and Object Storage Vendors. CSFS back-end technology communicates to Cloud Storage Providers over this REST interface. For example, standard file system calls to create, read, write, delete files are translated to GET and PUT REST API calls.

CSFS is built on FUSE. Most FUSE applications today suffer performance issues as data is transferred between the kernel and user space with small packets. CSFS is different. It only requires User Space for metadata calls which are small to begin with and all eads and writes reside in the Linux kernel which allows CSFS to transfer data at much higher data rates accelerated the I/O path. Most file systems today still use single threaded I/O, which limits access to and from the disk. CSFS solves this issue by communicating directly with the FUSE kernel forcing all reads and writes to be transferred to the BridgeSTOR CSFS Kernel module. CSFS also uses much larger blocks by consolidating your files into large blocks. As these large blocks are completed, they will be sent off to a local disk cache.. When the file is closed, threads in the background will convert the file to an object and send the file into the cloud. This caching uses the local Linux buffer cache and greatly enhances access speeds. When link speeds permit, single file writes can easily be done at 500 MB/sec or more over Windows and NFS.

A Global Name Space has been on many IT Professionals wish list for a number of years. CSFS now allows customers to create a Global File View for all of their Cloud Storage Objects. This is done by CSFS separating file system metadata from the physical data while combining the two as a single object. Global view caching is typically maintained in separate local clustered VM environments, BridgeSTOR using the resiliency of Cloud Storage to maintain it’s metadata. In this way, CSFS exposes all files and directories locally for a quick view of the files without accessing the actual Objects.

Data compression re-encodes data so that it occupies less physical storage space. Data compression algorithms search for repeatable patterns of binary 0s and 1s within data structures and replace them with patterns that are shorter in length. The more repeatable patterns found by the compression algorithm, the more the data is compressed.

Encryption takes the bits and then scrambles them up so that it may not be recovered when stored in the cloud. Both of these technologies are native but optional to CSFS which allows for advanced storage functionality in the cloud