Today Versity Software announced that it has open sourced ScoutFS, a new scale out archiving filesystem.
ScoutFS is the first GPL archiving file system ever released, creating an inherently safer and more user-friendly option for storing archival data where accessibility over very large time scales and the removal of vendor-specific risk is a key consideration.
The ScoutFS project was started in 2016 to address the rapidly growing demand for larger POSIX namespaces and faster metadata processing. The design goal for ScoutFS includes the ability to store up to one trillion files in a single namespace by efficiently distributing metadata handling across a scale out cluster of commodity compute nodes.
The archival storage, data recovery and data protection field takes an important step forward today with the release of the ScoutFS file system. The ability to store and manage exabyte scale data collections at a low cost is essential for the advancement of science and industry. We are pleased to contribute ScoutFS to the open source community,” said Bruce Gilpin, CEO of Versity.
ScoutFS is a POSIX compliant clustered filesystem implemented in the Linux kernel and has been released under the GPLv2 open source license.
With the amount of metadata growing exponentially, a filesystem that can scale to ultra-large file counts and index metadata is very important to the open source storage ecosystem,” said Zach Brown, the lead filesystems engineer at Versity. “The ScoutFS architecture keeps things simple while maintaining POSIX compliance, handles small files well and maximizes performance for bandwidth – all features that are needed with challenging exascale workloads.”
