Filesystem in Userspace (FUSE) is a software interface for Unix and Unix-like computer operating systems that lets non-privileged users create their own file systems without editing kernel code. This is achieved by running file system code in user space while the FUSE module provides only a bridge to the actual kernel interfaces.
Google File System is a proprietary distributed file system developed by Google to provide efficient, reliable access to data using large clusters of commodity hardware. Google file system was replaced by Colossus in 2010.
Lustre is a type of parallel distributed file system, generally used for large-scale cluster computing. The name Lustre is a portmanteau word derived from Linux and cluster. Lustre file system software is available under the GNU General Public License and provides high performance file systems for computer clusters ranging in size from small workgroup clusters to large-scale, multi-site systems. Since June 2005, Lustre has consistently been used by at least half of the top ten, and more than 60 of the top 100 fastest supercomputers in the world, including the world's No. 1 ranked TOP500 supercomputer in November 2022, Frontier, as well as previous top supercomputers such as Fugaku, Titan and Sequoia.
GPFS is high-performance clustered file system software developed by IBM. It can be deployed in shared-disk or shared-nothing distributed parallel modes, or a combination of these. It is used by many of the world's largest commercial companies, as well as some of the supercomputers on the Top 500 List. For example, it is the filesystem of the Summit at Oak Ridge National Laboratory which was the #1 fastest supercomputer in the world in the November 2019 Top 500 List. Summit is a 200 Petaflops system composed of more than 9,000 POWER9 processors and 27,000 NVIDIA Volta GPUs. The storage filesystem is called Alpine.
The following tables compare general and technical information for a number of file systems.
The Parallel Virtual File System (PVFS) is an open-source parallel file system. A parallel file system is a type of distributed file system that distributes file data across multiple servers and provides for concurrent access by multiple tasks of a parallel application. PVFS was designed for use in large scale cluster computing. PVFS focuses on high performance access to large data sets. It consists of a server process and a client library, both of which are written entirely of user-level code. A Linux kernel module and pvfs-client process allow the file system to be mounted and used with standard utilities. The client library provides for high performance access via the message passing interface (MPI). PVFS is being jointly developed between The Parallel Architecture Research Laboratory at Clemson University and the Mathematics and Computer Science Division at Argonne National Laboratory, and the Ohio Supercomputer Center. PVFS development has been funded by NASA Goddard Space Flight Center, The DOE Office of Science Advanced Scientific Computing Research program, NSF PACI and HECURA programs, and other government and private agencies. PVFS is now known as OrangeFS in its newest development branch.
Gluster Inc. was a software company that provided an open source platform for scale-out public and private cloud storage. The company was privately funded and headquartered in Sunnyvale, California, with an engineering center in Bangalore, India. Gluster was funded by Nexus Venture Partners and Index Ventures. Gluster was acquired by Red Hat on October 7, 2011.
A clustered file system (CFS) is a file system which is shared by being simultaneously mounted on multiple servers. There are several approaches to clustering, most of which do not employ a clustered file system. Clustered file systems can provide features like location-independent addressing and redundancy which improve reliability or reduce the complexity of the other parts of the cluster. Parallel file systems are a type of clustered file system that spread data across multiple storage nodes, usually for redundancy or performance.
Ceph is a free and open-source software-defined storage platform that provides object storage, block storage, and file storage built on a common distributed cluster foundation. Ceph provides distributed operation without a single point of failure and scalability to the exabyte level. Since version 12 (Luminous), Ceph does not rely on any other conventional filesystem and directly manages HDDs and SSDs with its own storage backend BlueStore and can expose a POSIX filesystem.
An embedded database system is a database management system (DBMS) which is tightly integrated with an application software; it is embedded in the application. It is a broad technology category that includes:
XtreemFS is an object-based, distributed file system for wide area networks. XtreemFS' outstanding feature is full and real fault tolerance, while maintaining POSIX file system semantics. Fault-tolerance is achieved by using Paxos-based lease negotiation algorithms and is used to replicate files and metadata. SSL and X.509 certificates support make XtreemFS usable over public networks.
Tahoe-LAFS is a free and open, secure, decentralized, fault-tolerant, distributed data store and distributed file system. It can be used as an online backup system, or to serve as a file or Web host similar to Freenet, depending on the front-end used to insert and access files in the Tahoe system. Tahoe can also be used in a RAID-like fashion using multiple disks to make a single large Redundant Array of Inexpensive Nodes (RAIN) pool of reliable data storage.
BeeGFS is a parallel file system developed for high-performance computing. BeeGFS includes a distributed metadata architecture for scalability and flexibility reasons. It specializes in data throughput.
RozoFS is a free software distributed file system. It comes as a free software, licensed under the GNU GPL v2. RozoFS uses erasure coding for redundancy.
In computing, a distributed file system (DFS) or network file system is any file system that allows access from multiple hosts to files shared via a computer network. This makes it possible for multiple users on multiple machines to share files and storage resources.
A distributed file system for cloud is a file system that allows many clients to have access to data and supports operations on that data. Each data file may be partitioned into several parts called chunks. Each chunk may be stored on different remote machines, facilitating the parallel execution of applications. Typically, data is stored in files in a hierarchical tree, where the nodes represent directories. There are several ways to share files in a distributed architecture: each solution must be suitable for a certain type of application, depending on how complex the application is. Meanwhile, the security of the system must be ensured. Confidentiality, availability and integrity are the main keys for a secure system.
ObjectiveFS is a distributed file system developed by Objective Security Corp. It is a POSIX-compliant file system built with an object store backend. It was initially released with AWS S3 backend, and has later implemented support for Google Cloud Storage and object store devices. It was released for beta in early 2013, and the first version was officially released on August 11, 2013.
LizardFS is an open source distributed file system that is POSIX-compliant and licensed under GPLv3. It was released in 2013 as fork of MooseFS. LizardFS is also offering a paid technical support with possibility of configurating and setting up the cluster and active cluster monitoring.
The MapR File System is a clustered file system that supports both very large-scale and high-performance uses. MapR FS supports a variety of interfaces including conventional read/write file access via NFS and a FUSE interface, as well as via the HDFS interface used by many systems such as Apache Hadoop and Apache Spark. In addition to file-oriented access, MapR FS supports access to tables and message streams using the Apache HBase and Apache Kafka APIs, as well as via a document database interface.
