Wednesday, October 21, 2009

New Funded Project

The FreeBSD Foundation is pleased to announce a new funded project!

Pawel Jakub Dawidek has been awarded a grant to implement storage replication software that will enable users to use the FreeBSD operating system for highly available configurations where data has to be shared across the cluster nodes. The project is partly being funded by OMCnet Internet Service GmbH and TransIP BV.

The software will allow for synchronous block-level replication of any storage media (GEOM providers, using FreeBSD nomenclature) over the TCP/IP network and for fast failure recovery. HAST will provide storage using GEOM infrastructure, which means it will be file system and application independent and could be combined with any existing GEOM class. In case of a master node failure, the cluster will be able to switch to the slave node, check and mount UFS file system or import ZFS pool and continue to work without missing a single bit of data.

"High-availability is the number one requirement for any serious use of any operating system," said Pawel Jakub Dawidek, FreeBSD Developer. "Highly available storage is one of the key components in such environments. I strongly believe there are many FreeBSD users that have been waiting a long time for this functionality. I'll do my best to deliver software that matches FreeBSD quality and that will satisfy the needs of our users."

Pawel has been an active FreeBSD committer since 2003. During this period, he has touched almost every part of the kernel. But, his main interest in FreeBSD is storage and security related topics. Pawel is the author of various GEOM classes (eli, mirror, gate, label, journal, hsec, etc.), geom(8) utility, various open crypto improvements as well as port of the ZFS file system from OpenSolaris to FreeBSD.

The project will complete by February 2010.

6 comments:

  1. This sounds like a logical extension of what some folks are already doing with ggated -- it will be nice to have something more formalized in place :)

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  2. This is awesome news! I hope Pawel will also consider leaving hooks for RDMA, so that Myrinet, InfiniBand and 10/40G Ethernet can be leveraged for lower latencies.

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  3. That is excellent news! February 2010... Does that mean we might see it working in FreeBSD 9.0-RELEASE?

    If that is of any interest for Pawel, I am more than happy to help testing his work on a virtualised environment (Xen).

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  4. This comment has been removed by the author.

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  5. Does anyone know the status of this project, Feb 2010 is coming up soon.

    Thanks,
    Cody
    Ticket Vault

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  6. Work is progressing well and according to Pawel's last update in the FreeBSD Status Report, the project should be complete by end of month and ready for testing in February.

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